Integration management: Municipal constraints on residential mobility

The concentration of recent suburban black population growth in relatively few suburban municipalities is prompting such communities to institutionalize integration management through local ordinances. A national survey reveals four categories of municipal integration management activities: controlling real estate brokers, preventing white flight, attracting new white residents, and monitoring black concentrations. Proponents justify such programs as necessary for stable residential integration. Analysis of congressional debate, case law, and constitutional law suggests, however, that integration management as currently practiced constitutes a constraint on equal housing access rather than a guarantee of fair housing as claimed. Integration management founders on the definitional ambiguity of integration, the inadequacy of the tipping point premise, the inapplicability of an affirmative action analogy, and the implicit stigmatization of black homeseekers. The implications of institutionalized integration management suggest that suburban black growth will be most extensive where blacks have already established an independent institutional structure.