Opinion ID: 500653
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Segregative Effect of the City's Actions

Text: 226 The district court found that by 1980 an extreme condition of segregation ... exist[ed] in Yonkers. 624 F.Supp. at 1364. The evidence amply supports this finding. 227 The 1980 Census figures showed that 81% of Yonkers's minority residents lived in one quadrant of the City. Minorities constituted 19% of Yonkers's total population; yet the minority population of Southwest Yonkers exceeded 40%. Of the 10 census tracts within Southwest Yonkers itself, five had minority populations exceeding 50%. In contrast, outside of Southwest Yonkers, only 6% of the residents were minorities; and these minority residents were largely confined to two areas, one having a minority population of 29% and the other having a minority population of 80%. In light of these facts, we have no difficulty in upholding the district court's finding that housing in Yonkers was segregated. 228 Nor do we see a basis for upsetting the finding that the City's decisions to locate low-income housing only in or adjacent to areas already having high concentrations of minority residents was a contributing cause of the extreme condition of residential segregation that existed by 1980. From 1948 to 1980, some 144 sites were formally proposed to the City for subsidized housing, most of them in East or Northwest Yonkers or predominantly white neighborhoods of Southwest. More than 100 other sites, the vast majority of them in East or Northwest Yonkers, were also given official consideration. In all, 23 family housing sites were approved; of these, 21 were in Southwest Yonkers; one was in Northwest, abutting a heavily minority neighborhood of Southwest; and one--the only family project approved for an area that was neither within nor abutting Southwest Yonkers--was in the predominantly black Runyon Heights. See Appendix B. Of the 21 family housing sites approved for Southwest, 18 were in or adjacent to neighborhoods already having high minority concentrations, one was a half-block away from such a concentration, and the other two were but five blocks away. 229 Only one subsidized housing project was approved for a nonminority area outside of Southwest Yonkers: it was not a family project but a senior citizen project which, as expected, was occupied predominantly by white persons. Thus, over a period of more than three decades, the City approved no housing for minorities in any area that was not in or close to an already heavily minority area. 230 The demographic effect of concentrating minority-intended housing in the already concentrated minority areas was predictable. From 1960 to 1970, while the minority population of East and Northwest Yonkers increased by 1,879 persons, or 61%, the minority population of Southwest Yonkers increased by 10,333, or 5.5 times as many, persons. In percentage terms, the minority population of Southwest increased by 186%, from a starting base that was nearly twice as large as that in East and Northwest Yonkers combined. From 1970 to 1980, when the minority population of East and Northwest Yonkers increased by 43%, the minority population in Southwest Yonkers increased by 87%; in raw numbers, the net increase of minority residents in Southwest Yonkers outpaced the minority increase in other parts of Yonkers by 13,783 to 2,119. In all, during the period 1960 to 1980, when virtually all of the low-income minority housing at issue here became available for occupancy, all of it confined to areas that already had high minority concentrations, the minority population of Southwest Yonkers increased by 24,116 persons, or 434%, while elsewhere in Yonkers the minority population grew by only 3,998 persons, or 130%. 231 There was expert testimony that by concentrating subsidized low-income housing in the minority areas of Yonkers, the City had stigmatized those neighborhoods and thereby made them both less likely to attract new white families and less likely to retain the white families already there. This is consistent with evidence of denigrating comments made by white residents of other parts of Yonkers about the Southwest Yonkers neighborhoods, and with the demographic statistics. As the minority population in Southwest Yonkers increased from 5,559 in 1960 to 29,675 in 1980, the white population in Southwest declined steeply from 75,952 in 1960, to 66,523 in 1970, and to 41,124 in 1980, a net decrease of nearly 35,000 white residents. Elsewhere in Yonkers, the number of white residents increased from 1960 to 1980 by some 6,000 persons. 232 Other City acts also served to confine minority residents to predominantly minority areas. For example, in the period 1968 to 1974, when CDA sought out private developers, it focused efforts solely on sites in Southwest Yonkers. In 1975, when a private developer, who had planned a housing project on an East Yonkers site described by City planners as well suited for Housing for the Elderly, revealed that he hoped to rent 20% of the space to minorities, the City prevented the project. In the late 1970's, the Council obstructed the potential movement of minority families to existing buildings in East Yonkers by curtailing the use of Section 8 Certificates by families and by steering minority families to buildings in Southwest. 233 From all the evidence, the court could reasonably infer that the City's actions accelerated and enhanced the process of concentrating minority housing in Southwest Yonkers.