A Response to Schill and Wachter's "The Spatial Bias of Federal Housing Law and Policy"

provide a careful, scholarly critique of palpable policy relevance.Their analysis reflects the consistent pattern that their past productive collaboration has established: a thoughtful amalgam of legal, historical, economic, and statistical expertise that yields provocative conclusions.It is thus my privilege to have the opportunity to comment upon it.The fundamental claim of Schill and Wachter's article is that past and current federal housing law and policy (especially as they relate to public housing and mortgage markets) intensify the concentration of low-income families in inner-city neighborhoods, either intentionally or unintentionally. 2 Fortunately, they argue, many of these mistakes are capable of remediation through new federal initiatives.Much of the historical evidence Schill and Wachter offer to support their claim is compelling.Although this is familiar territory to scholars, as Schill and Wachter's footnotes show, the authors present the material succinctly and powerfully.To their credit, they bring to bear econometric methods to supplement the historical analysis, and find evidence related to the geography of public housing and the rejection patterns of mortgage lenders that they claim buttress their case.My response to Schill and Wachter's analysis essentially is that important aspects of their argument are either conceptually and/or empirically inconclusive.Furthermore, their discussion of "current" federal housing policy pays insufficient attention to recent initiatives of the Clinton Administration that go a long way in the directions advocated by the authors.I will first consider Schill and Wachter's arguments that relate to public housing, then those that relate to t