Vouchers and Affordable Housing: The Limits of Choice in the Political Economy of Place

America’s housing segregation problem, and the direct role of government and private actors in creating it, is well documented.2 What to do about it is less clear. And even when consensus develops about particular strategies, they can be difficult to implement because of significant headwinds that impede change. These headwinds—including market forces, government policies, and private prejudices—continue to stymie progress, and even well-intentioned reform efforts can fail at best and lead to negative consequences at worst. This piece seeks not to provide answers, but rather to describe one such set of reforms and headwinds and to propose some modest policy changes that might lead to incremental progress. I discuss attempts to help poor minority families move to neighborhoods with less concentrated economic and racial segregation in one particularly challenging place: the St. Louis metropolitan area. In St. Louis, as in many other major metropolitan areas, low-income minority households tend to be clustered in high-poverty, racially segregated neighborhoods. In the St. Louis area, these neighborhoods are located either in St. Louis City or in North St. Louis County.3 While some families may prefer to live in these neighborhoods in order to be near social and family networks, others may wish to move to areas with lower poverty rates, better schools, and less crime. Research shows that adults and children benefit when families are able to move to these so-called “higher-opportunity”4 neighborhoods.5 In addition, the Fair Housing Act imposes a duty on the