Finding Common Ground: Coordinating Housing and Education Policy to Promote Integration

Overview

The powerful, reciprocal connection between school and housing segregation has long been recognized. The housing¬school link was a key element in both the 1968 Kerner Commission Report1 and in the legislative history of the Fair Housing Act.2 The relation of school and housing segregation was also explored in a series of school desegregation cases beginning in the 1970s.3 Yet in spite of HUD’s duty to “affirmatively further fair housing,”4 and the parallel “compelling government in¬terest” in the reduction of school segregation,5 there have been few examples of effective coordination between housing and school policy in the intervening years.