Among William Faulkner’s most quoted lines is his famous dictum, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” But it is the following sentence from that passage, elaborating on that idea that human outcomes are bound by long and broad chains of causality, which I find so riveting and germane in view of a discussion of our city’s ongoing social challenges. “All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born,” Faulkner writes , “ripples of consequence echoing down the generations.”
In Louisville, as elsewhere in America, the “webs spun long before we were born” are past public policy measures. And when it comes to the inferior conditions of our urban areas today, they are not a matter of coincidence, but rather the legacy of decisions and actions by government and private business to discriminate and underinvest in these neighborhoods decades before. It is simple: Where discrimination once accumulated, now accumulates poverty. And while there are public-private initiatives geared toward creating ostensible solutions to the challenges present in those social settings, I have to question their ability to truly transform the geography of injustice that was established by past public policy.
Affordable housing is not necessarily the answer
Take, for example, the city’s push to develop a large number of affordable housing units. Increasing the supply of affordable housing is of course an urgently necessary and morally correct response to a pressing issue here in Louisville. As the 2024 Housing Needs Assessment revealed , “[F]rom 2016 to 2021…the unmet need for housing for the city’s lowest income residents grew 15% to 36,160 units, and more than a quarter of Louisville households remain cost burdened…pay[ing] more than 30% of their income toward housing expenses. More than 11%,” the report found, “are severely cost burdened, paying more than 50% for housing expenses.”
Mayor Craig Greenberg has met this scourge of housing costs with constructive action. His administration has committed to build and preserve 15,000 units of affordable housing by 2027. It is an ambitious and noble initiative, indeed, more so because of its explicit recognition that the housing crisis of today is inseparable from the past policies that sought to socially and financially exclude Black families from the kinds of asset-building opportunities that were open to the city’s white population.
In the “My Louisville Home” plan —which details how the city can achieve its affordable housing goals—the authors write, “To address our housing needs and lack of affordability in Louisville, we must understand the current need and the path that brought us here. Lack of housing…is the direct result of redlining, and the effect of continued underinvestment in formerly D-graded areas. This cycle must be disrupted to eliminate the disparity in neighborhood opportunity that exists today.”
Affordable housing also belongs in affluent zip codes
But if the aim is to truly end the disparity in neighborhood opportunity, then I question whether the initiative will succeed on its own terms. After all, when we look at where these units are being built, we find a decidedly uneven distribution of sites throughout the city. As The Courier Journal noted last year, “When mapped, many of the subsidized units fall west of Interstate 65, with a vast majority of units located in Louisville's West End.” That area—as anyone familiar with the redlining maps used by the federal Home Owners' Loan Corporation to effectively racialize poverty would know—encompasses neighborhoods and communities that have long struggled under the financial and social burdens left by legal segregation. And while it is important to introduce pathways of opportunity in these neglected neighborhoods, it would be, in my view, a mark of authentic solicitude and genuine civic concern to reckon with both sides of the redlining coin—that is, not only how those past policies so deprived neighborhoods in west Louisville, but how they also so benefitted the surrounding suburban communities.
Time's up: Louisville is running out of time to use REVERT funds allocated for redlined communities
It is this pattern, after all, of creating resource-disadvantaged, segregated urban areas encircled by economically ascendant, middle-upper class neighborhoods, that former Secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development George Romney once described as being like “a high-income white noose” around the Black inner city. And given the city’s obvious disinclination to spread the share of affordable housing into the more affluent ZIP codes, I can’t help but feel it is doing little to actually loosen, (let alone remove), that noose. It is a classic reform-oriented approach that, while well-intentioned, is underpinned by the same basic prejudiced idea that what is good enough to have in some communities is, for other communities, simply unthinkable. Indeed, the past is never dead; It’s not even past.
Building affordable housing in an intentionally segregated area is still accepting the moral abomination and societal sickness of an intentionally segregated area. Our Black leadership—many of whom have long since moved out of these neighborhoods and now reside in wealthier communities—seem untroubled by this contradiction of values. Are they advocating for affordable housing to be built in their current neighborhoods? If not, then why? Is that solely a feature of a kind of neighborhood they’ve all but forgotten they and their families were once a part of? Why does it seem like, for so much of the Black leadership class, the exposure to better amenities leads to an onset of amnesia concerning the community they left behind? Maybe because, for them, like for so many, the ‘hood has always been thought of as a place to leave, not live; and that’s because it’s never been a place to love .
I believe that every person in Louisville deserves the very best of what the city has to offer—particularly those for whom the best was made inaccessible. Concentrating the affordable housing in amenity-scarce neighborhoods will directly undermine Louisville’s goal of becoming a place where opportunity knows no spatial boundaries. And it is up to Black leadership to speak out against this—to not simply offer disingenuous praise for housing units planned on streets that they themselves would not be proud to live on. To applaud such projects is to accept and support the city’s destructive and longstanding preference to keep poverty tightly contained in the communities it helped make so poor in the first place. Authentic Black leadership has no business abetting that pattern of deeply embedded, apartheid-like practices.
Kevin W. Cosby, Ph.D., President, Simmons College of Kentucky and Pastor, St. Stephen Church .
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This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Concentrating affordable housing in Louisville’s West End continues geography of injustice
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