Page 79 - Impact: Collected Essays on the Threat of Economic Inequality

V. Housing
Texas enacted a statewide zoning statute in 1927 in order to facilitate local housing segregation, and official segregation persisted into the last decade (the 2000s) through local zoning, restrictive covenants, and policies of municipal housing authorities . The establishment of these segregated communities yielded present housing segregation throughout Texas, as measured by several academic studies concerning Anglo/Black segregation and Anglo/Latino segregation in cities as recently as 2010 .36
Persistent housing segregation greatly contributes to the lack of access for Latino and Black Texans to get to state Department of Public Safety (“DPS”) offices in Texas where photo IDs are issued .37 Many neighborhoods with concentrated minority communities have no DPS office, such as Dallas’s southeast quadrant . Often these minority population concentrations are the legacy of housing segregation . Public transit from Dallas’s southeast quadrant to the DPS office in downtown Dallas takes two to four hours, round trip .38 The more distance that persons have to travel from their home to a polling place, the less likely they are to vote . Similarly, because minority voters must travel longer distances to obtain the photo ID necessary to vote, and minority households are less likely than Anglos to own a vehicle, SB 14’s travel-related costs bear more heavily on minorities and are more difficult to overcome .39
Conclusion
We do not know at this time the ultimate result of the Texas photo ID litigation . But, what we do know is that the overwhelming evidence in the case detailing the inequality among Texas’s population, measured by all of the standard socioeconomic indicators, pointed to the same conclusion—low- income minorities in Texas are disproportionately likely to face some combination of the following impediments to obtaining photo identification: loss of wages, lack of access to transportation, lower educational attainment levels, adverse housing conditions, more significant health problems, and lack of accurate underlying documents needed to obtain a photo ID .
Stark economic disparities persist in Texas between Anglos, on the one hand, and Latinos and Blacks, on the other . These disparities are the direct result of a continuous and long-standing pattern of racial discrimination by Texas authorities against Latino and Black residents in all areas of public life, particularly education, employment, housing, and transportation . Because racial discrimination produces cycles of socioeconomic disadvantage, the effects of which are slow to fade from minority communities, these ongoing socioeconomic disparities have a profound effect on the ability of low-income Texans and racial minorities to participate effectively in the political process .
America is the world leader in promoting democracy . If we are going to show the way for democracy around the globe, we should first correct the imperfections in our own democracy here at home . Ensuring that all persons have full and free access to voting in our country would seemingly be one democratic policy and American value with which we should all be able to agree . •
36 Id. ¶ 479.
37 Id. ¶ 479.
38 Id. ¶ 189.
39 Id. ¶ 480.
Political Participation
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