Why are the Twin Cities so segregated? The Minneapolis-Saint Paul metropolitan area is known for its progressive politics and forward-thinking approach to regional planning, but these features have not prevented the formation of some of the nation’s widest racial disparities and the nation’s worst segregation in a predominantly white area. On measures of educational and residential integration, the Twin Cities region has rapidly diverged from other regions with similar demographics, such as Portland or Seattle. Since the start of the twenty-first century, the number of severely segregated schools in the Twin Cities area has increased more than seven-fold; the population of segregated, high-poverty neighborhoods has tripled. The concentration of black families in low-income areas has grown for over a decade; in Portland and Seattle, it has declined. In 2010, the Minneapolis-Saint Paul region had eighty-three schools made up of ninety percent nonwhite students; Portland had two.
The following article explains this paradox. In doing so, it broadly describes the history and structure of two growing industry pressure groups within the Twin Cities political scene: the poverty housing industry (PHI) and the poverty education complex (PEC). It shows how these powerful special interests have worked with local, regional, and state government to preserve the segregated status quo and in the process have undermined school integration and sabotaged the nation’s most effective regional housing integration program. Finally, in what should serve as a call to action on civil rights, this article demonstrates how even moderate efforts to achieve racial integration could dramatically reduce regional segregation and the associated racial disparities.
Although the Twin Cities were committed to civil rights and racial integration through much of the 1970s, this commitment began to collapse in the mid-1980s. Political apathy about racial equality was accompanied by exclusionary housing practices in the suburbs. Increasing concern over the availability of affordable housing accelerated the growth of the subsidized housing industry within the central cities—the PHI. The cities themselves participated in this process, creating the Family Housing Fund, a “quasipublic” intermediary, which produced thousands of housing units in Minneapolis and Saint Paul. As a result of segregation, city schools declined, which gave momentum to a “school choice” movement that sought to implement free-market ideas in the education system. These so-called “education reformers” would become the PEC. Its policies have increased and preserved the growth of educational segregation.
The PHI and PEC are both complex networks of affiliated organizations and professionals, stretching through the public, private, and nonprofit worlds. The PHI centers around nonprofit housing developers but also includes funding intermediaries, for- profit tax credit “syndicators,” attorneys, and lobbyists. The PEC includes well-funded political advocacy groups, consultants, and, of course, many charter schools and charter school networks. Both the PHI and PEC are industries in their own right, employing thousands and receiving hundreds of millions of dollars from the government and charitable foundations.
Unfortunately, the PHI and PEC depend heavily on the segregated status quo. The PHI’s network of professional connections is densest in the low-income central-city neighborhoods where segregation is greatest, and the majority of affordable housing is consequently sited in these areas, which offer minimal resistance to affordable development. The PHI frequently dominates both politics and the local economy in these neighborhoods. The raison d’être of education reform is correcting the perceived failings of central-city schools—failures that arise from the massive concentration of low-income, nonwhite students in these schools. Regional school integration is not on the agenda of the PEC, and thus such policy initiatives would threaten the influx of charitable funding into PEC organizations.