Prejudice Called Main Cause of Housing Segregation

Racial prejudice, particularly against blacks, remains the greatest cause of housing segregation in Los Angeles County--more powerful than costs or the desire to live among similar people, a newly published academic study declares.

Yet Angelenos appear to be more open to living in ethnically diverse neighborhoods than they were a generation ago, the report in the Social Science Research quarterly concluded. That seemed to be particularly true of varying mixtures of whites, Asians and Latinos.

Blacks, however, are more likely to experience discrimination in the search for housing than Latinos, while Latinos face more prejudice than Asians, according to the study. African Americans in the survey showed the greatest willingness to live in integrated areas, significantly more than foreign-born Asians and Latinos.

“We find evidence of a relatively clear-cut racial preference order or hierarchy with whites at the top or most-preferred neighbors and blacks and Latinos at the bottom or least-preferred neighbors with reactions to Asian Americans falling in between,” wrote the study’s authors, sociology professors Camille Zubrinsky of Ohio State University and Lawrence Bobo of UCLA.

In surveys and interviews of 4,025 Los Angeles County residents, all ethnic groups showed some willingness to live in mixed neighborhoods. The comfort level dropped sharply for Asians and Latinos if hypothetically more than a third of their neighbors were to be black. White respondents expressed somewhat more tolerance for ethnic diversity but also found neighborhoods with black majorities to be much less desirable.

“Actually we found much more openness than we had expected to find, given the events in Los Angeles,” Zubrinsky said in an interview, referring to the 1992 riots. The study’s surveys were conducted in 1993 and 1994, usually by a person of the same race as the volunteer subject to encourage candor. It was part of a national project, funded by the Ford and Russell Sage foundations, that also looked at housing patterns in Detroit, Boston and Atlanta.

Only the results of Los Angeles and Detroit have been published so far, and Detroit’s includes data just on blacks and whites. Los Angeles County presents a more complicated scene that increasingly will be the pattern for the rest of the nation, Zubrinsky said. “In Los Angeles, you can look at all different kinds of combinations that suggest other types of racial relationships,” she said.

In the Los Angeles County survey, about 28% of black respondents said they had experienced housing discrimination, compared to 9% of Latinos and 5.8% of Asians. Those include complaints about so-called steering by real estate agents to minority areas, overly stringent credit policies and being told--falsely--that desirable houses or apartments had suddenly become unavailable.

Yet overwhelming majorities of all groups said that housing discrimination appeared to be the same or less than it was 10 years ago. And about a third of blacks, Latinos and Asians reported that their own situations had improved in that time.

The study sought to test other causes of segregation, such as cost of housing, accurate knowledge of other neighborhoods’ costs and ethnic makeup, and the desire to live in an area with shops and churches that cater to a certain ethnic group.

Some experts said they think that the new study may have dismissed such influences too easily.

Tom Honore, director of the fair housing division at the Los Angeles office of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, agreed that discrimination remains strongest against blacks. He referred to a 1991 national study showing that 55% of African Americans experienced discrimination when applying for housing. But Honore added that it is difficult to explain segregation without also citing economics, cultural preferences and “people who don’t know what their choices are.”

Honore, who had not read the new report, said the causes of segregation are “myriad.”

Yet Zubrinsky and Bobo said their data points to lingering prejudice as the main factor.

To be sure, whites and Asians in the study reported higher median annual incomes, $44,740 and $35,973, than blacks, $28,732, and Latinos, $22,352. Yet the range of monthly rents was not dramatic. Asian renters reported paying an average of $742 a month; whites, $724; blacks, $675; and Latinos, $582.

Black homeowners in Los Angeles County average the lowest monthly mortgage payments ($572) and Asians the highest ($1,569). But there is enough income in black and Latino families to suggest that they could afford to live in many white neighborhoods, the study said.

“We reject the hypothesis that residential segregation is the result of objective differences in socioeconomic status that leave blacks and Latinos unable to afford desirable housing,” the study stated.

The survey asked respondents about housing prices and ethnic makeup of seven communities: Alhambra, Baldwin Hills, Canoga Park, Culver City, Glendale, Palmdale and Pico Rivera. Overall, respondents of all four race groups generally had accurate statistical information.

True or not, there were also widely shared perceptions about which communities were hospitable to various minorities. Glendale was seen as the most hostile to blacks and Latinos, the survey said. The predominantly black area of Baldwin Hills and the mainly Latino city of Pico Rivera were seen as the least inviting to Asians.

Latinos and then Asians expressed the strongest preferences for living in neighborhoods where their own groups were in the overwhelming majorities. But that tendency may reflect the language barrier faced by new immigrants and the initial reliance on churches, grocery stores and community groups that cater to their needs, the sociologists said. Native-born Latinos and Asians seem to have less desire for such ethnic neighborhoods than the foreign-born, the study found.

Kevin Reed, an attorney who handles discrimination cases for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s Western regional office, said that the study’s general hierarchy of bias sounded accurate. But he added that the somewhat better treatment of Latinos compared to blacks in the housing market may have exploitative causes.

Recent Latino immigrants, legal and not, are viewed by some landlords as less likely to understand tenants’ rights and are fearful about any contacts with government officials, Reed said. “So rather than bring attention to themselves, they will let things slide, even if they are overpaying or living in substandard conditions,” he said.

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Housing Bias

A study on housing segregation in Los Angeles County asked people to compare the level of discrimination their ethnic group faces with the amount of bias 10 years ago. A large majority of blacks, Asians and Latinos reported that housing discrimination was the same or less.

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GROUP MORE SAME LESS Blacks 28.6% 35.6% 35.8% Asians 11.0% 56.6% 32.4% Latinos 11.3% 56.1% 32.6%

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Source: 1993-94 Los Angeles Survey of Urban Inequality