Passing On A Political Hot Potato

New Yorkers act like we’re bipolar when it comes to how we approach diversity.

We regularly tout Chinatown, Little Italy, Little Africa, El Barrio, Harlem, and the Hasidic enclaves in Williamsburg and Borough Park as examples of the wonderful patchwork quilt that is our city’s identity, while ignoring our shameful inability to achieve housing and school integration.

I thought our city’s progressive mayor would surely challenge this contradiction when he unveiled his housing plan.

Sixty years after Brown v. Board of Education, the mayor’s housing plan does little to address the segregation in city neighborhoods and schools, despite acknowledging “nearly half of the city’s neighborhoods remain dominated by a single racial or ethnic group.”

The 116-page plan endorses mixed-use and mixed-income development and addresses changing demographics, but stops short of outlining steps to racially desegregate city neighborhoods.

Instead, the twin goals of maintaining neighborhood stability and preserving the ethnic character of city neighborhoods are the cornerstones of his plan.

Former mayoral candidate and New York City Councilman Sal Albanese says housing segregation is ignored largely because it is a political “hot potato.”

Last March the UCLA Civil Rights Project released a study showing that the New York City Department of Education runs the most segregated school system in America. The study stated, “Segregation in city schools is largely due to housing patterns, because housing and school segregation are correlated.”

Meanwhile, the mayor’s prized universal pre-K program will ensure that racially segregated schooling continues at the earliest grades in the very neighborhoods where “access to the education, jobs and other opportunities others enjoy,” in the words of the mayor’s plan, are absent.

“Education outcomes shouldn’t be determined by zip code or housing patterns,” says Mona Davids, president of the New York City Parents Union. “It’s so clear housing patterns affect school segregation, thus education quality, yet de Blasio doesn’t get that.”

Why should he? The status quo keeps the political class in place.

Last month The New York Times ran an extraordinary story alleging that for over 40 years Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver (aided by his crooked pal William Rapfogel) thwarted residential development on a large vacant tract of land in his Lower East Side district. The Times piece pulls back the curtain on how Silver and his allies feared that development of hundreds of units of affordable housing would tip the political balance toward minorities.

Much of the city’s housing pattern is the result of de facto segregation, not any deliberate government policy or decree. But over time (and, oddly, thanks in part to the Voting Rights Act), these patterns have calcified.

Record numbers of black, Hispanic and Asian lawmakers have been elected to public offices from high segregation/low integration communities. Only gays and lesbians have succeeded in being elected outside of their Greenwich Village and Chelsea enclaves.

Should de Blasio pursue maintaining the neighborhood character of our ethnic strongholds while not reducing racial isolation in other communities?

Racially isolated neighborhoods have the worst schools, worst health outcomes and highest crime.

Political consultant Celeste Morris suggests, ”Community groups and concerned individuals will need to maintain a proactive stance to ensure the racial diversity we seek across the city.”

Morris advocates for “making good schools for all and decreasing [my emphasis] the advantages that public schoolchildren in wealthier neighborhoods enjoy over children in poorer neighborhoods where parents cannot afford to subsidize school equipment and activities.”

Perhaps desegregation as a progressive tenet has fallen out of fashion.

Mayor de Blasio, for all of his rhetoric about income inequality, affordable housing and our elite high schools not looking like the rest of the city, is hesitant to take on this real hot potato issue.

Maybe it’s politically safer to mandate paid sick days and higher minimum wages than to dismantle the city’s Bantustans.

A plan that preserves neighborhood “character” and promises to build denser and taller buildings does not address social and educational inequalities.

The best thing to do with a hot potato is to chop it up into a mulligan stew and feed it to everyone.

Former Assemblyman Michael Benjamin (@SquarePegDem on Twitter) represented the Bronx for eight years.