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

Heading: The Interrelationship Between Schools and Housing

Text: 158 In an effort to refute the contention that its actions in concentrating subsidized low-income housing in Southwest Yonkers had had the effect of enhancing school segregation, the City offered a study that concluded that if none of the subsidized housing projects in Southwest Yonkers had been built and each of the project sites had remained vacant, the racial balance in Southwest Yonkers's schools would not have differed significantly from the actual 1980-81 figures. In contrast, plaintiffs' expert testified that building low-income housing to be occupied principally by minority families tends to create a school that, while not necessarily showing an immediate dramatic increase in minority students, soon becomes identified as a minority school. Such an identification encourages resident white families to move out of the neighborhood and discourages other white families from moving in. 159 The relationship between schools and housing was hardly lost on the City while it was making its various decisions as to whether and where to construct subsidized housing. One Council member testified that nearly all of the East Yonkers councilmen had indicated that their constituents objected to subsidized low-income housing partly because [i]n order to keep the schools nice, you know, you'd have to keep out the minorities. Further, as described in the previous section, a common theme of East Yonkers residents' opposition to the Yonkers Plan for school desegregation was the desire to preserve the nature of our neighborhoods. As described in Part A.II.E.3. below, Mayor Martinelli explicitly opposed desegregation of the schools by busing in part because it would diminish the stability of the residential patterns. 160 There was also evidence that City officials had requested that the Board make several school attendance zone changes that would have enhanced segregation at the schools to be affected. For example, in 1974, Martinelli urged that a small nonminority area of a neighborhood be moved from the attendance zone of an elementary school that was 60% minority to one that was 88% white. A few months later a Council member suggested that several predominantly white blocks be redistricted from a school that was 28% minority to one that was 97% white. In 1976, another City official made a similar request at the behest of a landlord who had complained that his ability to attract tenants was detrimentally affected by the location of his property within the zone of a school that had a substantial minority enrollment. The Board declined to implement any of these requested changes.