These figures might not be important if they merely reflected a choice by blacks to move to more auspicious locations, but the evidence suggests that specific public policies have excluded and even driven out blacks. Primary among them are restrictive planning regulations that make it hard to expand the supply of housing. In a market with rising demand and static supply, prices go up.
As a rule, a household should spend no more than three times its annual income on a home. But in West Coast markets, housing-price levels far exceed that benchmark. According to the Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey, the median multiple, which is the median home price divided by the median household income, should average about 3.0. But the median multiple is 5.1 in Portland, 5.1 in Denver, 5.2 in Seattle, 8.1 in Los Angeles and San Diego, 9.4 in San Francisco, and 9.7 in San Jose. As the Demos/IASP report found, differences in home ownership rates between whites and blacks account for a large share of the racial wealth gap. Policies that put the price of home ownership out of reach for many black families exacerbate the problem.
Progressives - Improving the lives of the lesser peoples everywhere, but not in my backyard.
Some on the left recognize how development restrictions hurt lower- and middle-income people. Liberal commentator Matt Yglesias has called housing affordability "Blue America's greatest failing." Yglesias and others criticize zoning policies that mandate single-family homes, or approval processes, like that in San Francisco, that prohibit development.
Busting middle-class neighborhoods with government regulations; protecting neighborhoods with government regulations.
These commentators don't mention the role of environmental policy in creating high housing prices. Portland, for example, has drawn a so-called urban-growth boundary that severely restricts land development and drives up prices inside the approved perimeter. The development-stifling effects of the California Environmental Quality Act are notorious. California also imposes some of the nation's toughest energy regulations, putting a huge financial burden on lower-income (and disproportionately black) households. Nearly 1 million households in the Golden State spend 10 percent or more of their income on energy bills, according to a Manhattan Institute report.
In some cases, western cities; support for gentrification has come at the expense of long-standing black communities. In Portland, residents of the historically black Albina neighborhood complained about bike lanes (a progressive fetish) being built in their neighborhood. In Oakland, recent upscale arrivals got the government to cite Pleasant Grove Baptist Church, a fixture in the city for 65 years, for creating a public nuisance - because its gospel-choir practice was disturbing the newcomers.
When it comes to how state and local policies affect black residents, the track record of the most liberal cities in the United States is truly dismal. These results should be troubling to progressives touting blue-state planning, economic and energy policies as models for the nation. After all, if wealthy cities like San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle - where progressives have near-total political control - can't produce positive outcomes for working-class and middle-class blacks, why should we expect their approach to succeed anywhere else?Try Venezuela.