Book Review

Residential segregation remains the most conspicuous unfinished business of the civil rights revolution. Even as racial inequality and separation were attacked (if not always defeated) in public accommodations, jobs, education, and the political process, housing and racially exclusive neighborhoods appeared to be inoculated against change. Only in the tense aftermath of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination did the nation summon the courage to pass a weak and, ultimately, poorly enforced Fair Housing Act—the denouement of the "movement's" transplantation in the urban North and its unsuccessful effort to focus remedial energies on inner city ghettos. Indeed, the central paradox of the civil rights era involved the elimination of overt, legal forms of discrimination and the simultaneous racial segmentation of metropolitan America. Two generations of explosive suburban growth after World War II provided the indispensable means through which the urbanization of some five million African Americans, majoritarian racial sensibilities, and the civil rights revolution struck an uneasy accommodation.	1
In Suburbs under Siege Charles M. Haar transports us to this outlying arena of racial contestation and confronts readers with the most compelling issue of the post–civil rights era. The emergence of a decentralized, postindustrial society at the very historical moment that the metropolitan centrifuge has surrounded an increasingly impoverished nonwhite core with an affluent ring of white suburbs has not only reinforced the traditional distinctions separating the "haves" from the "have nots" but has also rendered more difficult their elimination or, indeed, even their amelioration. Such realities, and the failure of the executive and legislative branches of government to address them, provoked this energetic and unapologetic brief for judicial activism. "[A]t the present juncture of class and race relations in the United States," Haar concludes, "an aggressive posture on the part of the third branch of government is indispensable to the achievement of economic and social equality" (xiv).	2
The focus of Suburbs under Siege is the use of exclusionary zoning by local governments to insulate themselves against the intrusion of the poor and, especially, the nonwhite. Restrictions on land use and mandates on lot and building sizes have all been used to exclude or root out existing unwanted populations. In 1969, Ethel Lawrence (given the stature here of a Rosa Parks) sued the Camden suburb of Mount Laurel, New Jersey, over its refusal to permit the affordable housing that would enable her to stay in the town of her birth. The result has been two decades of litigation and legislation that has highlighted, in the author's estimation, the court's role as a necessary agent of social change.	3
The first decision, Mount Laurel I, came in 1975 and invalidated key sections of the local zoning ordinance. Based upon the New Jersey state constitution, Justice Frederick Hall's opinion remained impervious to federal review as it propounded an expansive definition of the "general welfare" that nullified local efforts to apply the concept parochially within a single town's borders. Declaring that regulatory ordinances must allow for the presence of a "fair share" of affordable housing based on "regional" need, Mount Laurel I displayed some egalitarian vision but lacked an effective remedy. Indeed, Justice Hall "faltered" (26) here, according to Haar, when he merely instructed the locality (the very source of the problem) to redraw its regulatory ordinance. The result was eight years of foot dragging and litigation prior to the state supreme court's 1983 decision in Mount Laurel II. Here, Chief Justice Robert Wilentz attempted to harness reform to private profit by prescribing a "builder's remedy." In a move characterized by the author as "politically savvy," "courageous," and "countermajoritarian" (44 and 51), the court provided significant financial incentives to developers who would challenge exclusionary zoning laws and build at least some affordable housing in addition to their more lucrative projects. Equally important, the court established a judicial framework and procedure that relied upon "experts" and, ultimately, bore "a greater resemblance to conflict resolution than traditional adjudication" (84). If the courts erred at all, in Haar's opinion, it was not in overreaching or in pioneering novel administrative arrangements but in displaying an occasional excess of caution. The justices could have done more, the author asserts, to educate the public and aggressively pursue a public relations agenda.	4
Still, the courts did enough to provoke a strong legislative reaction. While it is too early to render a final judgment, the 1985 New Jersey Fair Housing Act acknowledged a public responsibility to provide affordable housing even as it established procedures and agencies that "diluted" (93) the Mount Laurel Doctrine in application. Most significant here were provisions for "regional contribution agreements" (RCAs) that permitted well-to-do localities to transfer, for a price, half of their calculated "fair share" obligation of affordable housing to other municipalities. Recognizing their potential to reinforce, rather than subvert, the racial and economic status quo, Haar emphasizes the political utility of the RCAs and praises them as essential "safety valve(s) to a doctrine of integration" that threatened to "sink" the low-income housing program (114). Focusing only in part on actual, tangible results and stressing a still unrealized potential, Haar characterizes the Mount Laurel decisions "as among the most significant judicial opinions of our time" and "on a par with Brown v. Board of Education" (10).	5
It can only be hoped that the author's optimism is not misplaced. After all, those who earlier had believed in the ghetto-busting impact of Shelley v. Kraemer (1948) and the preventative power of Buchanan v. Warley (1917) were quickly sobered by the legal system's clash with street-level reality. Similarly, previous attempts to transform private markets into engines of racial reform in the course of urban (re)development provide neither models to emulate nor much cause for hope. And the assumption that lay at the base of this study—that the solution to persistent discrimination and racial inequality involves the dispersal of the ghetto—is more controversial than it is made to appear (a fact hinted at by the failure of traditional civil rights forces to rally around the Mount Laurel decisions). In the end, it all seems to come down to a choice between desperately needed new housing and integration; blacks and whites can reach consensus on the former but tend to avoid the latter. We have been here before.	6
Arnold R. Hirsch University of New Orleans

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