Abstract
In the landmark 1971 case of James v. Valtierra, the Supreme Court ruled that municipalities could block housing for the poor, bolstering a trend toward exclusionary zoning and economic segregation in suburban America. Scholarship on this trend has focused on the racial impacts of putatively nonracial policies, echoing activists at the time who saw economic exclusion as a disguised means of forestalling racial desegregation. This article, however, argues that a focus on racial desegregation misinterprets the campaign of affordable housing in the suburbs and obscures key claims made by affordable housing activists. It examines the history of James v. Valtierra, showing that the plaintiffs were a racially diverse group of women who already lived in the suburbs; they sought not desegregation but better housing conditions for single mothers and their families. The article suggests the importance of analyzing suburban diversity, gender, and economic discrimination in struggles for affordable housing.
In 1968, Anita Valtierra lived with her seven children in a one-bedroom apartment in San Jose, California. It was cramped living—without room for dressers, she and her children kept their clothing in stacked cardboard boxes; the kitchen was so small that the children ate in shifts—but as a seasonal cannery worker, the tiny apartment was the only place Valtierra could afford to rent. 1 During the summer months, when the canneries were still busy, Valtierra earned almost enough to support herself and her seven children, assisted by a small welfare supplement. During the months when the canneries stopped, her family relied on welfare assistance. 2
The canneries where Valtierra worked had once been the mainstay of the regional economy, but they were now a dwindling remnant of the past. In their place stood the semiconductor factories and office parks of the emerging Silicon Valley. Housing subdivisions stretched across the Valley floor, uprooting the orchards that had supplied the canneries with plums, apricots, peaches, and pears. 3 Valtierra was just one of many people who had long worked in the agricultural economy but who now constituted a group of suburban poor, struggling to hang on in the face of the Valley’s rapid growth. The rise of Silicon Valley generated unprecedented wealth for some, but for single mothers like Valtierra, it posed daunting challenges: the decline of traditional occupations, a sprawling automobile-dependent landscape with limited public transportation, and above all soaring housing prices.
In her search for decent housing for her family, Valtierra initiated a lawsuit that became one of the most important housing cases of the era—James v. Valtierra. The case dealt specifically with a California law that allowed voters to block housing for the poor in their communities. Yet, because of the legal principles at stake, the case affected every city and suburb in the nation. Ultimately, the Supreme Court rejected Valtierra’s claims. The court’s 1971 decision marked a turning point in housing law when the civil rights push to break down barriers to housing opportunity in the 1960s came up against a formidable constitutional obstacle. 4 Despite this loss, the history of the case, from its origins in the diverse suburbs of Silicon Valley to its impact on national politics and constitutional law, illuminates issues of critical importance for urban and political history: the long history of suburban poverty, the political and legal activism of multiracial poor people’s movements, the role of gender and family in affordable housing, and the relationship between cities and civil rights in American constitutional law.
Valtierra brought the lawsuit with six other women, all of whom were single mothers who received welfare assistance. A racially diverse group, two of the plaintiffs were Mexican American, two were white, and three were black. They lived in the suburbs, but mostly in racially and economically segregated neighborhoods, decisively separated from the wealth generated by the booming high-tech industry. Working with local legal aid attorneys, these women challenged the policies that marginalized them, and in the process threatened to undermine the legal frameworks that maintained sharp metropolitan economic inequalities. They developed a class-based strategy that both built on and moved beyond the civil rights litigation of the 1960s, arguing that economically discriminatory laws were unconstitutional and that poor people had a right to housing—propositions that might have transformed the economic, social, and political geography of metropolitan America. 5 These women were part of a surge of welfare activism during the War on Poverty, but their experiences and concerns show that the grassroots struggles of this era were not confined to cities. 6 Like urban women at the same time, they fought for economic justice, but their problems had a distinctly suburban character. In this fight, poor women of color became some of the most radical activists in suburban America. 7
The origin of James v. Valtierra in suburban mothers’ struggle against economic displacement compels a rethinking of the history of affordable housing in the suburbs. Most scholarship on struggles for affordable housing in the suburbs has focused on issues of race and class, connecting affordable housing to the larger effort to racially desegregate the suburbs. 8 But the scholarship has missed the centrality of gender and family structure to the movement. 9 In Valtierra, poor women initiated the lawsuit, working with female legal aid attorneys, precisely because the gendered inequalities in local labor and housing markets contrasted with domestic ideologies and family practices of single-mother parenting. The landscape of postwar suburbia, from domestic architecture to transportation infrastructure, was premised on male breadwinners who supported female homemakers and their children. 10 State policies that ordered the metropolis on the basis of family and marital status restricted the residential options of single-parent families. In Valtierra, poor single mothers of color tried to make a place for themselves and their families in suburbia. For them, the case was as much about the gendered geography of suburban America as it was about racial and economic discrimination. They were drawn together across racial lines by shared hardships arising from the economics of motherhood. 11
The suburban geography of James v. Valtierra, furthermore, challenges conventional narratives of housing desegregation. A large body of scholarship has demonstrated that a host of public policies produced metropolitan inequality in postwar America. 12 Yet as it has emphasized the creation of affluent suburbs inhabited by white Americans and impoverished inner cities inhabited by African Americans, the scholarship has simultaneously reified city/suburb binaries. Recent work on suburban diversity has shown that American suburbs were more racially and economically diverse than has often been presumed. 13 In the developing suburbs of Silicon Valley, diverse communities grappled with the destabilizing consequences of rapid residential and industrial development. With its roots in a racially and economically diverse suburban region, James v. Valtierra arose from political struggles within suburbs. “Desegregation,” as an analytical concept, fails to represent a fight for affordable housing that had less to do with urban residents’ campaigns for housing in the suburbs and more to do with suburban residents’ resistance against economic displacement.
The Supreme Court’s decision in James v. Valtierra advanced a colorblind defense of class privilege in suburban America, reinforcing the belief that racial discrimination was wrong while class discrimination was not merely constitutionally acceptable but undoubtedly right. As the doctrine of colorblindness established itself in the judiciary and in political culture, legal scholars subjected it to devastating scrutiny, showing that colorblind legal principles have in fact maintained racial inequalities and that the judiciary’s unwillingness to see the racial impacts of ostensibly race-neutral economic policies has stymied broad claims of racial justice. 14 Yet in the process, scholars have tended to cast class as a secondary concern, often considered only in its effect on race. The scholarship has missed, therefore, one of the central claims of the Valtierra plaintiffs: economic discrimination was unjust regardless of its racial impact. As Valtierra demonstrates, colorblind legal principles have also reinforced class discrimination, sustained gendered inequalities, and thwarted claims for economic justice.
The scholarship on housing law has been constrained in part by the legal structure itself. The housing opportunities of Valtierra and the other plaintiffs were shaped by numerous factors, including their race, class, gender, family structure, and welfare use. The law, however, typically takes only one of those dimensions into account. Antidiscrimination law has operated on what Kimberlé Crenshaw has called a “single-axis framework,” limiting its capacity to address legal problems in which multiple social categories intersect. 15 Anita Valtierra and her coplaintiffs pressed their claims in terms of motherhood, class, welfare use, and more, but in its decision, the Supreme Court fixated on the question of racial discrimination, a narrow focus that made it easier to dismiss Valtierra’s contentions. The case illuminates how the legal system grappled with—and ignored—complex discrimination claims at a pivotal moment when the civil rights revolution had transformed constitutional law, when feminist lawyers were laying the foundations for a sustained push for women’s equality, and when activist attorneys saw an opportunity to use the law to secure welfare rights and economic justice. 16
The Housing Crisis in the South Bay Area
Valtierra originated in the 1960s in the suburban South Bay Area of California, a region in the midst of a legendary economic transformation. After World War II, the South Bay Area underwent rapid industrialization as Cold War defense spending funneled billions of dollars into high-tech research and production in the area. Federal contractors located facilities near the NASA Ames Research Center, in northern Santa Clara County near the border with San Mateo County. The largest such contractor was Lockheed Missiles and Space Company; by the mid-1960s, Lockheed employed more than 30,000 workers at a massive plant in Sunnyvale, financed by government contracts totaling more than 600 million dollars per year. 17 As the federal government invested heavily in high-tech research for national defense, it forged close relationships with educational institutions, above all Stanford University, creating a Cold War science complex. 18 Universities, in turn, cultivated relationships with private companies, and spin-offs from this research complex clustered nearby. By the mid-1960s, it was the top area for high-tech research and production in the world. 19
As the high-tech industry developed, housing prices skyrocketed. An area that had once been known for low-priced ranch homes quickly became one of the most expensive housing markets in the nation. By 1966, most homes in San Jose sold for $25,000 to $30,000, well above the national average. 20 According to a 1968 study, an annual income of $14,000 per year was necessary to buy a new home. Meanwhile, most residents earned far less than that, and 40,000 households earned less than $4,000 per year. 21 The prices of rentals had also risen. Between 1964 and 1969, rents for studio apartments increased by 78 % for one-bedroom apartments, they increased by 52 % for two-bedrooms by 41 % and for three-bedrooms by 27 percent. 22 Prices outside of San Jose were even higher. In Palo Alto, the average home sold for nearly $36,000 and in Los Altos Hills nearly $50,000—two and a half times the national average. Watching the rapidly widening gap between housing prices and household incomes, locals lamented the region’s escalating “housing crisis.” 23 In a 1969 report, Don Edwards, the area’s congressional representative, declared that the lack of adequate low-income housing was the area’s “most vicious social ill.” 24 “People in my Congressional District,” said Edwards, “literally cannot find a roof to put over their heads. Some are forced to live in shacks, cars, and even creekbeds.” 25
Many observers saw high housing prices as an inevitable result of this economic boom, but the boom by itself did not cause the housing crisis. While high-tech growth put upward pressure on the housing market, local government actions limited the availability of affordable housing. In the postwar decades, most cities in the region created general plans that specifically aimed to increase housing prices. In a process known as “fiscal zoning,” local governments structured land use policies to increase property values and capture tax revenue. At the same time, a burst of annexations and municipal incorporations took over county land, which had been governed loosely, and subjected it to stricter regulation. Between 1952 and 1957, seven new cities incorporated in Santa Clara County, nearly doubling the county’s number of municipalities. Almost all of the Valley’s new cities were affluent suburbs that immediately adopted stringent land use regulations within their boundaries, from one-acre minimum lot sizes to single-family dwelling rules. 26
As land use policies prevented the construction of affordable housing throughout the South Bay, government actions also destroyed affordable housing that already existed. Freeway construction, urban renewal, and strict housing code enforcement destroyed thousands of homes inhabited by low-income households. These programs particularly displaced communities of color. County officials directed three interstate highways and an expressway through barrios on the eastside of San Jose. 27 “These plans,” stated a Mexican American legal aid group, “involved the bulldozing of entire neighborhoods with high concentrations of Spanish-speaking people.” 28 Although required by law to replace units that were demolished by freeway construction, local authorities had by the late 1960s built only one unit for every ten destroyed. 29
Housing shortages were compounded by a history of residential racial segregation. For decades, real estate and financial institutions, backed by the government, had restricted new subdivisions to white occupancy. Although recently outlawed, these practices left the region with distinct racial boundaries. The Bayshore Freeway divided Palo Alto and Menlo Park, both of which were largely white and affluent, from East Palo Alto and East Menlo Park, unincorporated areas where almost all African Americans in the area lived. Nearly 75 percent of the residents of East Menlo Park were African American, the highest concentration of black residents in San Mateo and Santa Clara counties 30 (see Figure 1). Mexican Americans also lived east of the Bayshore Freeway, but the largest barrios were on the eastside of San Jose (see Figure 2). Confined to certain neighborhoods, Mexican Americans and African Americans paid high prices even for dilapidated housing with inadequate plumbing. As the head of the Santa Clara County Council of Churches noted, Mexican American families in the Valley were “living in abominable structures yet paying premium rent.” 31 With such high rents, the county’s low-income households spent a large share of their income on housing.
Black population by census tract, South Bay Area, 1970.
Spanish origin population by census tract, South Bay Area, 1970.
High housing prices posed the greatest difficulties for single mothers, particularly women of color. Compared with the agribusiness that had until recently dominated the Valley’s economy, high-tech firms hired few women of color. Most new jobs went to highly educated white men, many of them from out of state. Within firms, women tended to be confined to low-paying positions, and they faced simple discrimination in wages. At Lockheed, for example, most women of color worked in low-wage clerical positions. Of Lockheed’s 14,467 professional workers—primarily engineers and scientists—only ten were Mexican American women and five were African American women; of 1,968 technicians, there were three Mexican American women and a single African American woman. 32 Women were also most likely to be responsible for child care, which increased household costs while restricting work opportunities. Even in the midst of the high-tech boom, the numbers of women living in poverty increased. In the mid-1960s, when the regional unemployment rate dropped below 3%, unemployment for Mexican American women surpassed 20%. 33 Exacerbating the difficulties finding affordable housing for families, housing codes often limited occupancy numbers or discouraged room sharing, and apartment tenancy rules frequently prohibited children entirely.
Like women in cities around the country, Anita Valtierra and her coplaintiffs claimed public benefits to support their families. 34 Yet utilizing government services was particularly difficult in the emerging Silicon Valley. Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), the main program providing financial assistance to families like Valtierra’s, had not kept pace with the rising cost of living, and the assistance it provided was glaringly inadequate in the Valley’s suburban environment. The San Jose Mercury called Santa Clara County’s AFDC program “a failure” that did not address “the practical, concrete, everyday problems and motives of aid recipients—lack of child care facilities, lack of transportation, lack of skills, and lack of housing.” A five-year study by county officials established that “AFDC recipients are required to live on grant amounts that are clearly insufficient by the most meager standards.” 35
Even accessing public institutions was challenging in the suburban landscape of the South Bay. From Valtierra’s neighborhood, the county hospital was seven miles away by freeway; the unemployment office five miles away; the county welfare and city health departments, four miles away. Private transportation was necessary for most jobs, especially as the distances between homes and workplaces increased with the Valley’s growth. Local bus systems were limited, buses were infrequent, and routes did not connect most neighborhoods to job hubs in the sprawling metropolitan region. “The residents are almost totally dependent on private transportation,” noted San Jose’s city manager in 1967. “To get to the several major employment centers, medical facilities or even comparison-shopping areas, a private automobile is virtually required.” 36
Without private transportation or health insurance provided by employers, families like Valtierra’s lacked health care services. There was no public medical facility on the eastside of San Jose and a shortage even of private doctors, particularly for children. As the head of the county medical society noted, “40% of the people on the Eastside are children—and there is only one pediatrician.” 37 Without an effective program for public immunization, and without adequate sanitation infrastructure, the area experienced far higher rates of preventable diseases and nearly double the rates of infant mortality. 38 Despite years of demands from eastside residents, the County Board of Supervisors refused to place a clinic in the area. “Doctors apparently don’t want to go there,” stated Supervisor Sam Della Maggiore. “The county can’t order them.” 39
Accessing basic medical care, therefore, required navigating a complex system of bureaucracies embedded in a low-density suburban landscape. Sofia Mendoza, a community organizer on the eastside, once helped a friend take her children to a medical appointment. They walked two miles on a street with no sidewalks to catch a bus; they waited an hour, and when the bus arrived, they took it three miles, then transferred to another bus, which took them another three miles to the county hospital, Valley Medical Center, on the west side of the city. Then they waited. “You would sit there for hours to be seen at Valley Medical,” said Mendoza. There was no place to feed the children, which compounded the wait. Eventually, said Mendoza, “they called her name, and she went up and they asked her if she had a referral from the welfare department, and she said no.” It turned out she needed a referral before her child could be seen.
We had to jump on the bus. We had to go out to the welfare department. We had to transfer buses. We got a referral and we had to sit out there and wait again, and [there was] no place to feed these kids either. Jump back on the bus, transfer again, got to Valley Medical again, and sit there and wait and wait again.
After finally seeing the doctor, they made the return trip—buses, transfers, and the two-mile walk. “We got home and it was nighttime . . . It was an all day trip.” 40 For single mothers who were trying to work, take care of their families, and access social resources and public institutions, surviving in a metropolitan landscape designed for single families with a gendered division of labor took skill, determination, and patience.
The housing crisis, therefore, was much more than a rise in real estate and rental prices, however dramatic. It compounded the housing shortages facing people of color, particularly African Americans near Palo Alto and Mexican Americans tied to the agricultural economy, due both to the legacies of residential racial segregation as well as patterns of occupational discrimination. For women and children who relied on welfare assistance, the crisis put most housing out of reach, while making it more difficult to navigate an already complex social service bureaucracy. This not only affected women’s abilities to care for their families, it also hindered access to the benefits of their citizenship. For women like Anita Valtierra, the housing crisis was multifaceted, shaped by race, class, gender, family, and welfare status, involving everything from their responsibilities as parents to their rights as citizens.
Article 34 and the Local Politics of Affordable Housing
The South Bay’s housing crisis came at a pivotal moment in the movement for economic justice. Around the country, numerous groups pushed for expansive antipoverty programs, from the National Welfare Rights Organization’s demand for increased aid to welfare recipients to the Poor People’s Campaign’s call for an “economic bill of rights” including full employment and low-income housing. 41 Part of this national current, local grassroots organizations campaigned for affordable housing in the South Bay. In 1968, the Tropicana-Hillview Organization United protested the shortage of affordable housing by holding an all-night prayer vigil in front of the home of San Jose’s mayor, Ron James, and threatened to erect a tent village on the lawn of San Jose City Hall unless something was done. 42 The following year, San Jose residents formed La Confederacion de la Raza Unida, which grew into a coalition of nearly sixty of the Valley’s political, civic, religious, and educational organizations, representing more than 200,000 Mexican Americans. It was an unprecedented coalition, whose main goal was the construction of affordable housing throughout the county, from San Jose to the exclusive suburbs of the western hills, particularly Los Gatos, Saratoga, Monte Sereno, Los Altos, and Los Altos Hills. The grassroots organizations put pressure on local officials. In a letter to George Romney, the secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Don Edwards warned, “The housing situation in San Jose is explosive.” 43
Facing mounting pressure from grassroots organizations, city and county officials responded with proposals for public housing. A dream of social reformers since the early twentieth century, public housing aspired to replace congested slums with spacious, modern dwellings filled with sunlight and surrounded by grass and open space. 44 To make that dream a reality, the Housing Act of 1949 promised “a decent home and a suitable living environment for every American family,” aiming to build 810,000 units within six years. While that was not achieved, the federal government did finance the construction of hundreds of thousands of units in cities across the country. 45
Yet a state law hindered the construction of public housing in California: Article 34 of the state constitution. Instituted in 1950 in an antipublic housing initiative led by the California Real Estate Association, Article 34 required that all publicly funded low-income housing projects be subject to automatic prior referendum, a vote of the people within the municipality where public housing would be built. 46 Suburban voters, who were concerned with property values and the impact of low-income populations on schools and taxes, generally did not approve low-income housing in their jurisdictions. The mandatory referendum required by Article 34 impeded public housing construction, and in the late 1960s, there was no public housing in Santa Clara or San Mateo counties.
Thanks to a new program, however, there were some affordable housing units leased by the local government. Under the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1965, local housing authorities leased units from property owners and made them available to low-income families at rents normally charged for public housing. The housing authority paid the landlord a market-rate rent and absorbed the difference between what it paid and what it received from the renter. After California courts found that Article 34 did not apply to this kind of housing, local housing authorities took advantage of the program. 47 Leased units were invaluable for the families that received them. A mother with nine children, for example, who had been living under a bridge near downtown San Jose, was able to move into leased housing thanks to the program. 48 Yet the program was temporary, and the small numbers of leased units did not meet local needs. In San Jose, 729 families had recently applied for the leased housing program, but no apartments could be found. 49 The situation was no better elsewhere in the county. Sunnyvale, home of the massive Lockheed research and production complex, subsidized only 77 units of leased housing. 50 In Santa Clara County, half of the leased units were restricted to elderly occupancy, leaving few subsidized units available for families. 51 The county housing authority was no longer taking applications; it had an official waiting list of 500 families, plus the names of an additional 3,000 families that would apply for public housing if it were taking applications. 52 Altogether, the county planning department estimated that nearly 50,000 households were eligible for affordable housing subsidies. 53
To address the shortage, the San Jose Housing Authority proposed the construction of low-income public housing and, in 1968, subjected the proposal to the mandatory referendum. 54 To avoid the stigma of high-rise housing projects, which had brought public housing such ill repute, the San Jose Housing Authority proposed small duplexes or apartments, no more than four units per building, scattered throughout the city so that no spatial concentration of poverty was possible, designed to resemble “regular” modern suburban development. 55 This was, according to San Jose housing authority planners, an enlightened approach to designing and providing affordable housing, and the city housing authority, planning department, and many local politicians threw their support behind the proposal. In the voters’ guide, county planners cast the proposal as a program for voters’ low-income neighbors who could not afford housing as home prices escalated with the growth of high-tech. “The inflation we have learned to live with and call ‘prosperity,’” they contended, “has literally lifted the roof from their heads.” 56
The specter of “projects” in suburban neighborhoods generated considerable opposition from homeowners. The most vocal opponent was San Jose city councilmember Virginia Shaffer, who had been elected in a homeowner rebellion against the city’s political machine. As the primary spokesperson for homeowner interests in local government, Shaffer adamantly opposed the construction of public housing, contending that the scattered projects threatened the quality of life in suburban neighborhoods. She appealed to taxpayers, portraying affordable housing as a giveaway to the indolent; the projects, she said to her constituents, would be built with “your Federal tax money.” 57 Critics charged that Shaffer and other opponents of suburban affordable housing opposed it because of racial prejudices, a charge Shaffer denied. “This has nothing to do with color,” she insisted. “People oppose public housing because too often it means there will be piles of garbage, trash, knee-high grass and undisciplined children in a neighborhood where other people are trying to meet their payments.” This would “drag the whole neighborhood down.” But suburban public housing, she said, would also be bad for the poor themselves: “If they [poor people] moved into an area where they can’t compete and see that other families have color television and bikes for their kids, it just makes it more uncomfortable for them.” 58 If poor people remained in poor neighborhoods, she contended, everyone would be happier.
With opposition from Shaffer and real estate interests, the referendum failed, with San Jose voters rejecting the proposal 54 to 46 percent. 59 In San Mateo County, likewise, voters rejected two referenda on public housing. Recognizing that referenda were likely to fail, local housing authorities rarely submitted proposals for voter approval. As William Weman, the executive director of the county housing authority, bemoaned, “In this very affluent county the possibility of referendum passage is highly remote.” 60
Legal Aid and Welfare Mothers
Because of the obstacles to securing affordable housing through conventional political means, activists increasingly turned to the legal system. Indeed, Valtierra was just one of many cases in the South Bay that challenged public policies that maintained metropolitan inequalities. 61 The legal system provided unique opportunities. As both activists and lawyers understood, a lawsuit did not require the mobilization of thousands of community members to achieve its goals; a handful of people could bring about momentous change. This enabled individuals to make claims that were not popular, even among social movement activists. In the case of Valtierra, most mainstream civil rights groups did not campaign for public housing in the suburbs or the rights of welfare mothers. Yet seven women with little or no affiliation with any social movement organizations provoked a radical constitutional challenge to metropolitan inequality.
The lead plaintiff in the case was Anita Valtierra. Although Valtierra qualified for publicly funded low-income housing, there was none available. She had been on the city’s waiting list for more than a year. Struggling to find adequate housing, Valtierra sought help from a local legal aid society, California Rural Legal Assistance (CRLA), an organization founded in 1966 as part of the War on Poverty. Originally intended to provide free legal services for Spanish-speaking farmworkers, CRLA quickly became involved in cases far from the fields. With a mission to empower poor people to fight for economic justice, CRLA endeavored to help not only individual clients but also the poor as a class, bringing the organization into struggles over voting rights, welfare, industrial employment, school lunches, consumer fraud, health programs, and environmental protection. 62 That a farmworkers’ legal service took on a case about affordable housing in the suburbs indicates the degree to which suburban affordable housing struggles were shaped by their origins in racially and economic diverse communities on the semirural fringe of the metropolis.
The CRLA attorney was Diane Delevett, a 27-year-old graduate of Stanford Law School. Delevett perceived that Valtierra’s case could be used to attack the governmental structure that proscribed the rights of the poor. She connected Valtierra’s case with two other women, Angie Duarte and Dorether Anderson, who were frustrated by the lack of affordable housing, and she filed a lawsuit against Article 34—Valtierra v. San Jose—in August 1969. 63 The following month, a nearly identical case was filed in neighboring San Mateo County. Gussie Hayes, an African American mother of six, went to the Legal Aid Society of San Mateo County to complain about the terrible conditions in the house she rented. Her attorney, Lois P. Sheinfeld, channeled her frustration with housing conditions into a lawsuit against Article 34. Since Hayes v. San Mateo and Valtierra v. San Jose both targeted Article 34, the district court consolidated them. 64
Despite their varying racial backgrounds, the plaintiffs made similar complaints. For them, public housing meant, above all, being able to provide for their children. Anita Valtierra began her affidavit with her status as a mother. Before she moved into her one-bedroom apartment, she was on the emergency housing waiting list. “At that time,” she testified, “I had all my children living in various homes of friends and relatives. The only way that I could reunite my family was to accept this tiny apartment.” 65 Because she spent such a high percentage of her income on housing, she was often unable to buy her children clothing and other necessary items. 66 For Valtierra, public housing promised not just a place to live but also the opportunity to unite her family and provide for her children.
Other plaintiffs noted similar experiences. “I have always had a hard time finding a home for my family that I could afford,” stated Angie Duarte. As a cashier and waitress, Duarte did not earn enough to rent an apartment for a family of five. But when she tried to rent smaller apartments, landlords refused to rent to a family with four children. Distraught, she sent two of her children to live with their grandmother in Arizona while she located an apartment. After she moved into a two-bedroom apartment, she brought back her children, but it was a reunion fraught with tension. “I live in fear,” said Duarte, “that I will be evicted when the landlord finds out that there are actually four children living in the apartment.” With public housing, Duarte imagined being able to provide better for her family. “With lower rent I would have enough to buy my children more clothing and other necessities that I cannot now afford.” 67 Dorether Anderson lived in a three-bedroom apartment with her eight children. 68 It was, she testified, “infested with cockroaches.” 69 She had been looking for other housing for eight years, but, as a maid, she made only $50 to $75 each month, plus a welfare supplement, which did not enable her to afford a suitable apartment. When the local housing authority was created, she applied immediately, but had never been referred to a home. She spent the next three years on the waiting list for a leased apartment from the housing authority. 70
The San Mateo County plaintiffs likewise grounded their complaints in terms of family. Gussie Hayes, JoAnne Brown, and Shirley Mae Luke, African American women who lived in Menlo Park, were single mothers striving to keep their families together; Iota Weatherwax, a white woman living with her five minor children at the home of her adult daughter and son-in-law and their four children, feared breaking up her daughter’s marriage with the strain of crowding twelve people into a three-bedroom house. Hayes lived with five of her six children in a three-bedroom house that lacked working sewage and that had been cited by inspectors for twelve distinct code violations, from illegal electrical wiring to an infestation of rodents. 71 Her sixth child lived with an aunt, a decision that Hayes made reluctantly, parting with her daughter “in order to get at least one of the children out of the house” and all of its problems. “If I had public housing,” said Hayes, “I would be able to have my daughter back and be able to live with my family in a clean and safe house.” 72 The affidavits by Valtierra, Duarte, Anderson, Hayes, Brown, Luke, and Weatherwax testified to the challenges faced by these seven families. But together they also reveal broader patterns in the South Bay, including not only the racial and economic diversity of the suburbs but also the dearth of affordable housing. Above all, they indicate the resourcefulness required of single mothers raising families in a sprawling metropolitan landscape in the midst of a rapid economic transformation.
The legal aid attorneys translated the women’s concerns into a constitutional claim. While Valtierra, Hayes, and the other plaintiffs discussed their need for housing in terms of motherhood and dignity, the attorneys downplayed those issues. At that point, housing law did not prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex or familial status—those categories would not be protected until amendments to the Fair Housing Act in 1974 and 1988—so the legal aid attorneys targeted what they saw as Article 34’s greatest vulnerability: its blatant discrimination on the basis of class. Article 34, the attorneys argued, discriminated against poor people. 73 The federal government, they noted, funded numerous housing programs. Indeed, the largest programs—mortgage insurance through the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and mortgage securitization by the Federal National Mortgage Association—overwhelmingly benefited the middle class. But there was no referendum every time a middle-class homebuyer applied for an FHA loan. California law required a referendum only for housing for “low-income persons,” thus singling out the poor to bear a burden not faced by other classes. 74 The law, furthermore, did not merely allow local voters to decide whether to construct low-income housing; it required them to make this decision. “Article 34,” declared attorney Archibald Cox, who argued the case at the Supreme Court, “builds its unique bias against the poor into the very structure of the political system.” 75 As legal scholars Frank Michelman and Fred Bosselman put it, “A more explicit purpose to discriminate against the poor can hardly be conceived.” 76
Because Article 34 discriminated against the poor, the attorneys argued, it violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. According to the jurisprudence at the time, laws that discriminated on the basis of a “suspect classification,” such as race, demanded strict scrutiny, the most exacting investigation of whether the government had a compelling interest in achieving a certain end and whether it had used narrowly tailored means to do so. In addition, laws that impacted fundamental rights required strict scrutiny. 77 Yet whether strict scrutiny applied to the Valtierra case was an open question, for neither the classifications that were suspect nor the rights that were fundamental were well defined. Recent cases indicated that the Supreme Court took an expansive view of fundamental rights and increasingly saw class as a suspect classification. 78 The Supreme Court had recently overturned dozens of laws that targeted the poor, ruling that a citizen’s most fundamental rights—the right to vote, to travel and move about freely, to defend oneself in criminal trials, and more—could not be deprived on the basis of poverty. 79 So far, the court had not identified housing as one of these fundamental rights, but, as Frank Michelman noted, “there are signs that the Court is becoming imbued with (and it is demonstrably accumulating precedents which support) the idea of housing as a need of outstanding importance, capable of generating unconventional legal claims.” 80 Based on the court’s recent decisions, Michelman claimed that he could “detect movement in the general direction” of a constitutional right to housing. 81 In the absence of an established precedent on the issue, Valtierra’s attorneys refrained from claiming a specific right to housing, yet they emphasized that housing was a “fundamental interest”—a legally ambiguous category that sometimes implied a fundamental right and other times did not—both because it was a basic need and because access to housing underlay other fundamental rights. 82 Clearly, the attorneys hoped that this case might push the court to address this unresolved question. If the court found Article 34 unconstitutional, it would be a constitutional watershed, meaning one of two things: either class was a suspect classification, or housing was a fundamental right.
Such a ruling would have a profound impact on metropolitan geography. Because each city’s voters could prevent the development of federally financed housing for the poor, Article 34 effectively excluded the poor from entire counties. 83 If Article 34 were found unconstitutional, whether because the poor had a right to housing or because class was a suspect classification, it would mean that municipalities could not exclude housing for the poor. That would apply to cities not only in California but also around the nation. By translating the concerns of Valtierra and her coplaintiffs into a constitutional challenge to economic discrimination, the legal aid attorneys crafted an unprecedented assault on the unequal geography of the metropolis.
As the case came before the district court, local fair housing groups pledged their support. The region had a strong history of fair housing activism, much of which arose in opposition to Proposition 14, the 1964 initiative that overturned California’s fair housing act. Passed in a landslide popular vote, Proposition 14 repealed antidiscrimination laws and amended the state constitution to allow racial discrimination in the sale or rental of housing. Although the policy impact of Proposition 14 was short-lived—the Supreme Court found the initiative unconstitutional in 1967—it precipitated a vigorous debate over racial discrimination in the housing market. 84 Dozens of local organizations fought Proposition 14, including the Mid-Peninsula Citizens for Fair Housing, the Fair Housing Council of San Mateo, the Palo Alto Area Committee for Open Housing, and the Human Relations Commissions of San Mateo County, Santa Clara County, and San Jose. Residents from the Palo Alto area had contributed $65,000 to oppose Proposition 14, and more than 2,000 residents had volunteered to go door-to-door to persuade neighbors to vote no. 85 As a result of this organizing, Palo Alto and Menlo Park joined Berkeley and Compton as the only larger cities in California in which a majority of citizens opposed Proposition 14. 86 In the aftermath of Proposition 14, fair housing groups continued to press for an end to housing discrimination, and they saw the Valtierra case as an important opportunity.
Yet even while they pledged their support, fair housing groups articulated a position on the case that diverged from the legal aid attorneys’ claims. Although Valtierra’s attorneys made an argument based on class, fair housing advocates rarely addressed class as the primary issue, seeing it as simply a subterfuge for racial discrimination. In an affidavit on behalf of the plaintiffs, Palo Alto fair housing activist Andrew H. Field, for example, asserted that the main obstacle to public housing was disguised racial bigotry. Exclusionary practices, said Field, that were “ostensibly based on economic or other grounds are, upon investigation, actually based upon racial discrimination.” 87 Unlike the legal aid attorneys—who argued that economic discrimination was wrong not because it was a subterfuge for racial discrimination but because it was wrong in and of itself—Field’s approach depended on proving that racial discrimination was at the heart of exclusion. If, in his investigations, he found that an exclusionary decision was made on economic grounds, it was acceptable. Fair housing liberals thus ignored the gendered and economic concerns that were at the heart of the case. They focused almost exclusively on anti-black racism, informed largely by the experiences of black professionals and disregarding the racially diverse group of women bringing the case. Fair housing activists asserted that economic restrictions were merely a smokescreen for hiding racial prejudice, a more “subtle” way to discriminate. 88 But Valtierra’s attorneys made no such claim. Their argument was not that the burden of a nominally class-based law happened to fall on racial minorities; their point was that class exclusion itself was unconstitutional.
In its 1970 decision, the district court drew on the arguments of the legal aid attorneys as well as the fair housing organizations. In an opinion deeply critical of economic discrimination, the district court ruled that Article 34 was unconstitutional. The court declared, “It is no longer a permissible legislative objective to contain or exclude persons simply because they are poor.” Yet the court also adopted the position of fair housing groups, noting that the impact of the law fell upon the people most likely to be poor: Mexican Americans and African Americans, especially those heading single-parent households like Valtierra and her coplaintiffs. 89
With the win at district court, Valtierra became a cause celebre. The Wall Street Journal proclaimed that the decision was the era’s “most important breakthrough on suburban zoning.” 90 Without support from any major civil rights organizations, the legal aid attorneys won the case at the district court. After the local attorneys’ victory—and widespread publicity—armies of liberal attorneys, civil rights groups, law professors, and others came to contribute. More than 30 national civil rights, labor, and housing industry groups filed amici curiae briefs in support of Valtierra, including the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the National Association of Home Builders, the National Committee against Discrimination in Housing, the National Tenants Organization, and the National Urban League. 91 Although the case was ostensibly about a narrow referendum clause, it was perceived broadly to be about whether or not suburbs could exclude the poor and people of color. Most observers expected the Supreme Court to rule that citizens enjoyed a right to housing, including a right to affordable housing in the suburbs. “Housing experts,” noted Time, “believe that the court eventually will rule that all communities must provide living space for the poor.” 92 By standing up for their dignity, a small group of poor women had pushed a right to housing in the suburbs onto the national civil rights agenda.
Taxpayer and Homeowner Rights
James v. Valtierra forced city officials to justify the legal principles that maintained metropolitan inequalities. Moses Lasky, the strident attorney for San Jose city councilmember Virginia Shaffer, conceded that Article 34 disfavored the poor, but, he contended, there was nothing constitutionally wrong with that. “The Fourteenth Amendment,” insisted Lasky, “directs its thrust against racial discrimination,” not economic discrimination. 93 Yet Lasky even rejected the idea that the poor constituted an identifiable class of people. “To talk about discrimination of the poor as if the poor was a group is, to my respectful submission, nonsense.” Furthermore, the defendants argued, housing was not a fundamental right. The Supreme Court had found economic distinctions suspect only when they concerned fundamental rights, such as the right to vote. “And unless the court here,” cautioned San Jose city attorney Donald Atkinson, “is willing to extend its test of fundamentally guaranteed rights to low-rent housing, I think it would be extremely dangerous to uphold the district court in this area.” 94
Rejecting the plaintiffs’ argument that Article 34 was unconstitutional, city attorneys contended that Article 34 was an expression of democracy, enabling homeowners and taxpayers to determine the economic geography of their cities. “What really is involved here,” claimed Atkinson, “is the voting rights of the majority.” 95 Article 34, said city attorney Richard Marston, made public housing “a political question for the electorate to decide. Such is the very essence of democratic government.” 96 Taxpayers had to pay for low-income housing projects and deserved a say in their construction. For the court to decide otherwise would be “taking away from the people their right to suffrage.” 97 In this understanding of democracy, rights were derived through paying taxes and owning property. The scale of democracy was also distinctly local, prioritizing local over federal power. Claiming municipal sovereignty, San Jose attorneys argued that local governments could participate in federal programs on whatever terms they chose. 98 They even argued that referendum procedures should not be subject to constitutional scrutiny. “By definition,” claimed attorney Robert S. Sturges, “any law or legislative act which depends upon a favorable vote of a majority of the electorate for its validity cannot be invalid.” 99 Sturges implied that minorities enjoyed no rights, only privileges bestowed upon them by the majority.
In its decision, the Supreme Court adopted this position of homeowner and taxpayer rights, finding that Article 34 was not unconstitutional. 100 The opinion, written by Hugo Black, ignored the plaintiffs’ challenge to economic discrimination, responding instead to the issue, raised primarily by the amicus briefs, of racial discrimination. And on that issue, the Court found that there was no evidence that votes against public housing were racially motivated. Instead, a vote on whether to exclude public housing reflected, according to Black, a “devotion to democracy, not to bias, discrimination, or prejudice.” 101 Article 34, therefore, did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment. The decision tacitly signaled that wealth, unlike race, was not a suspect classification, nor was housing a fundamental right. Black did not explain how the court arrived at that position, but the justices’ personal records illuminate the issue. At the justices’ private conference, Chief Justice Warren Burger scoffed at the plaintiff’s claims; they were suggesting, he said, that “too much democracy violates the Equal Protection Clause.” Article 34, insisted Burger, was a vibrant part of California’s populist tradition. 102 A vote was necessary to protect the rights of homeowners who paid taxes. As Burger asked during oral arguments, didn’t the residents of a community have a right to vote on a low-income housing project because it “will not pay its fair share of tax in the minds and eyes of the small homeowner?” 103
The decision constituted a stunning disregard of civil rights for a Supreme Court that had over the previous decades overturned dozens of laws that enabled majorities to infringe upon the rights of minorities through the democratic process. 104 In 1943, the court had famously declared, “One’s right to life, liberty, and property, to free speech, a free press, freedom of worship and assembly, and other fundamental rights may not be submitted to vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections.” 105 Housing, however, was not a fundamental right and therefore could be subject to the will of the electorate. The court denied that a law that explicitly treated the poor unequally violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection, flippantly remarking that all laws disadvantage somebody some of the time.
In a dissent, Justice Thurgood Marshall, joined by justices William Brennan and Harry Blackmun, rejected the majority opinion’s narrow reading of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. “It is far too late in the day,” wrote Marshall, to contend that the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits only racial discrimination; and to me, singling out the poor to bear a burden not placed on any other class of citizens tramples the values that the Fourteenth Amendment was designed to protect.
106
Marshall insisted that economic discrimination was the real issue at stake. Yet even as he rebuked the majority for ignoring the plaintiffs’ central claim, Marshall was, like the majority, constrained by a jurisprudence that was apparently incapable of addressing intersectionality. The Supreme Court focused on single categories of discrimination: for the majority, the operative category was race; for Marshall, it was class; for none was it the intersection of multiple identities of gender, family status, and welfare use, in addition to race and class, that Anita Valtierra and the other plaintiffs experienced and introduced in their original affidavits.
The ruling bolstered a populist defense of suburban privilege that moved to the forefront of American political culture in the 1970s. After the case, citizens from around the country wrote letters to Justice Black, praising him for his decision. The ruling in Valtierra, according to several letters, suggested that the court was backtracking from its decisions during the Warren Court, whose insistence on minority rights had coddled African Americans, poor people, and criminals. A man from Pittsburgh wrote, “It seems, to me at least, a good thing that The Supreme Court is aware that others besides, ‘The poor, and the black,’ have some rights too.” 107 A writer from Texas, who had praised all-white primaries and vigilante violence to disfranchise African Americans, said, “The good people of this country also need recognition and above all protection.” 108
While such letters reveal a sense of white victimization, they articulated a class-based argument for neighborhood protection. As one homeowner wrote to Justice Black, “I compliment you on your stand against people forced to have slums in well-kept neighborhoods . . . People spend life-savings to have nice homes, only be too crowded out by trashy shanties and persons willfully disregarding all dignity.” 109 The poor, wrote another homeowner, “don’t have a right to destroy our living standard.” 110 They insisted there was nothing racist in opposition to public housing; as one letter put it, the “Black middle class don’t want these [poor people] next door to them” either. 111 The underlying belief was that the metropolitan landscape reflected a meritocracy—that suburban homeowners had earned, through their hard work, the right to live in a neighborhood that excluded the poor. This meritocratic sensibility ignored the public policies that produced these neighborhoods.
This colorblind defense of residential privilege also appeared, more or less simultaneously, in suburban resistance to school desegregation. 112 The week before it issued its decision in Valtierra, the Supreme Court had endorsed busing as a means of desegregating public schools in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg. 113 The cases at first appeared contradictory—in Swann, the court scrutinized the public policies that produced residential patterns, while in Valtierra, the court ignored them—but both assumed the sanctity of middle-class neighborhoods. Perhaps children could be bused from their neighborhoods to advance integration, but those neighborhoods themselves were inviolable. Public support for the Valtierra decision indicates the degree to which an insistence on economic segregation had become a bedrock belief among suburban homeowners.
President Richard Nixon embraced this colorblind defense of metropolitan economic geography. After the Supreme Court decision, Nixon released a major policy statement on civil rights and housing in suburban America, the centerpiece of which was a discussion of the Valtierra case. Nixon said that Valtierra distinguished between illegal racial discrimination and legal economic segregation. He insisted that the issues of race and class, regardless of how much they overlapped, must be considered separately. Valtierra established that while racial discrimination was unconstitutional, class discrimination was constitutional. On the contrary, the recent decision of Kennedy Park Homes Association v. City of Lackawanna showed that cities could not use zoning as a subterfuge for racial discrimination. 114 “In short,” said Nixon, comparing Valtierra with Lackawanna, “the one case did not present evidence of racially discriminatory intent; the other did.” Nixon’s interpretation insisted that there be a smoking gun of bigotry; without that, there was no discrimination. 115
Nixon used the example of Valtierra to make a broader argument about housing desegregation nationwide. In the statement, Nixon distinguished fair housing from economic integration. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 committed the government to promote “fair housing” but left the term “undefined,” “vague,” and “rather imprecise.” With imprecision, the public had “become confused,” and some people had come to intertwine fair housing with economic integration. To clarify matters, Nixon offered his own definition of the terms: “By ‘equal housing opportunity,’” said Nixon, “I mean the achievement of a condition in which individuals of similar income levels in the same housing market area have a like range of housing choices available to them regardless of their race, color, religion, or national origin.” 116 This definition assumed economic stratification as a given, naturalizing economically segregated housing markets as well as the gender- and race-based income differences. It plainly rejected the proposition that poor people deserved equal housing choices.
While Nixon’s position on housing desegregation has been seen as a conservative reaction to civil rights gains, it was simply the logical conclusion of liberal fair housing discourse. Indeed, Nixon’s opposition to suburban economic desegregation was not essentially different from Democrat Walter Mondale’s arguments for fair housing less than three years previously. When Mondale led the Fair Housing Act through the Senate in 1968, he assured his colleagues that the act would not generate “a deluge of Negroes into white neighborhoods . . . The number of Negroes in previously all-white areas of the city is regulated strictly by their ability pay.” 117 The fundamental purpose of the legislation, he insisted, was to enable middle-class people of color to purchase homes. Mondale stated that “fair housing by itself will not move a single Negro into the suburbs—the laws of economics will determine that.” 118 Yet nonwhite Americans would know “that they are free—if they have the money and the desire—to move where they will.” 119 When Nixon became president, he echoed Mondale’s fair housing speeches, saying, “We are going to open up opportunities for all Americans to move into housing—any housing that they’re able to afford.” Nixon insisted that he supported desegregation but the “forced integration of the suburbs” would be “counterproductive, and not in the interest of better race relations.” 120 His goal, rather, was “stable and orderly community development.” He would not destabilize suburban neighborhoods, he pledged, again echoing Mondale, “with a flood of low-income families.” 121
As Nixon held up Valtierra as a national example, he simultaneously obscured the issues that prompted the case in the first place. He denied the grassroots activism of poor people that inspired the case, instead attributed the case to misguided social engineers who endeavored “to scatter the poor among the more affluent,” to use suburban low-income housing as “a means of moving poor people out of the inner city.” He framed it as a case about housing desegregation in which minority citizens were “locked . . . in deteriorating central cities” where they were “ill-housed and crowded,” as they struggled to get to the suburbs. Yet the case existed because poor women already lived in the suburbs and were being pushed out by high prices, restrictive land use regulations, and the political power of opponents of public housing.
Scholars have argued that the election of Nixon as president in 1968—and his subsequent appointment of conservative judges—stopped short the burgeoning movement for economic rights. 122 The Warren Court, which had expanded civil rights through a liberal interpretation of the Constitution, gave way to the Burger Court, which limited them, dooming the struggle for affordable housing in the suburbs. 123 Evidence from the Valtierra case, however, suggests a different narrative. The failure of the legal strategy cannot be adequately explained by a conservative backlash. Most obviously, Hugo Black, appointed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, wrote the majority opinion in James v. Valtierra, while Harry Blackmun, a new Nixon appointee, dissented, contending that economic discrimination was unconstitutional. But more importantly, the case showcased not a conservative backlash but rather a bipartisan defense of suburban privilege that, in its support for racial inclusion and its defense of economic exclusion, transcended the liberal/conservative divide. Nixon himself articulated a position on Valtierra that was consistent with the fair housing liberalism of Walter Mondale, the Democratic Party, and even Martin Luther King, Jr.
Conclusion
As much as the case has been seen as a turning point in housing desegregation, “desegregation” does not adequately describe the agenda of Anita Valtierra, her coplaintiffs, her legal aid attorneys, and the Valley’s grassroots activists. The case had its origins in local women’s struggles for dignity in the rapidly changing suburbs of the emerging Silicon Valley. Valtierra and the other plaintiffs insisted that there was something illegitimate in a system that limited poor mothers’ housing options so much that they had to split up their families. They perceived the requirement of voter approval of public housing projects as an unjust exercise of public power. There must be a remedy, they claimed, to these injuries; their legal aid attorneys identified the Constitution as the guarantor of that remedy, aspiring to make Valtierra and her coplaintiffs’ grievances into a constitutional claim. By doing so, Valtierra’s attorneys translated personal, specific experiences into a universal assertion of economic rights. 124
As a case expressed in the language of individual constitutional rights, Valtierra spoke to citizens, activists, and politicians around the country. Yet the more the case embodied abstract principles, the less it reflected its origins in political struggles over metropolitan inequalities. The case was ultimately not about desegregation but about political power, particularly the exercise of power at the local level, where diverse community organizations struggled to determine the economic geography of the metropolis. After Valtierra, the spatially fragmented and politically exclusive nature of local governance left the housing rights of the poor subordinate to the voting rights of a reluctant, and increasingly vocal, majority.
The political conflicts surrounding Valtierra underscore the emergence of a bipartisan consensus about race, class, and the role of government in the housing market. 125 With few political allies, poor women and their legal aid attorneys pushed the issue of suburban affordable housing into the national spotlight. As Valtierra rose in prominence, fair housing organizations and mainstream civil rights groups pledged their support, but this was an ambivalent alliance. Around the nation, fair housing activists advanced an agenda that provided new housing opportunities to some middle-class people of color but did little to undo larger structures of residential inequality. 126 In fact, opponents of affordable housing drew much of their political language from fair housing discourse, disavowing bigotry and embracing colorblindness while insisting on economic exclusivity. Opponents of affordable housing propagated a meritocratic ideology that naturalized metropolitan inequalities and justified the deployment of expansive governmental powers to maintain suburban privilege.
James v. Valtierra established constitutional principles that shaped metropolitan geography for the rest of the century. One of HUD’s legal counsel wrote approvingly that the ruling affirmed that “not all classifications based on wealth can be made suspect without surrendering our aspirations for consumer sovereignty and social mobility.” 127 As legal scholar Stephen Loffredo argued, “Valtierra guaranteed that money could continue to buy a residence in a neighborhood that excludes the poor.” 128 Valtierra became a crucial precedent to support suburban governments in excluding low-income housing in suburbs around the country. 129 “In the absence of racial motivation,” explained legal scholar Richard Briffault, “there was no basis for challenging the local land use policy.” 130 It was a novel constitutional development that the voting rights of taxpayers and homeowners could insulate vast metropolitan areas from Fourteenth Amendment challenges. The Supreme Court took the defensive, localist, meritocratic, and colorblind sensibility that infused American political culture and transmuted it into a precedent that shielded suburbs from further critiques, and in this sense, Valtierra not only justified but also constitutionalized suburban economic exclusion.
In the decades after Valtierra, metropolitan America has undergone economic segregation on a monumental scale, as wealth and poverty have become more spatially concentrated and as income segregation has doubled. 131 With sanction from the nation’s highest court, vast expanses of suburban America entrenched themselves behind economically discriminatory land use policies designed to keep out poor residents. 132 Denounced by critics as “exclusionary zoning,” these practices limited construction to single-family homes on large lots, set back from streets, and designed to meet high architectural standards. 133 Many scholars have identified these plans as disguised means of racial exclusion, tracing a chronological shift from race-based to class-based mechanisms of spatial control as suburbs attempted to maintain segregation in the wake of the civil rights movement. 134 This echoes the approach of 1960s’ fair housing activists, who characterized opposition to affordable housing as a manifestation of hidden racial bias. But in their hunt for disguised racism, fair housing activists ignored Valtierra’s most radical proposition: that economic discrimination itself was unconstitutional.
In Silicon Valley, after the ruling, affordable housing became even rarer, especially for women like Valtierra. Five years after the Supreme Court decision, a local television station addressed the persistent housing crisis, stating, “You’re a single, minority woman, head of household, and on welfare. I’ve just given you five reasons why there’s practically no housing for you in Santa Clara County.”
135
While it was especially pronounced in Silicon Valley, the lack of affordable housing affected women nationwide. A HUD study prepared by the National Council of Negro Women in 1975 reported that sex discrimination was pervasive in metropolitan America, curbing women’s home ownership, restricting access to mortgage financing, and impeding apartment rentals. The intersection of sex discrimination with discrimination based on other factors—race, class, age, family structure, welfare use, and so on—created, according to the report, “a virtually impenetrable wall to equal housing opportunity.”
136
As Edith Witt testified at a San Francisco hearing in 1975, The woman alone with the child or children really has the worst time of all because of the entanglement of all kinds of discrimination, the layers of discrimination. And if the women is of a minority group it adds another layer . . . and if she’s “on welfare,” it adds another layer, if she’s got a large family, it adds another; it becomes impossible.
137
Another woman testified at a hearing in New York, “the most serious sex discrimination in housing results from the lack of adequate low-income housing.” 138 The report captured the ways in which identities intersected to limit housing opportunities, an intersection that was so difficult for the legal system to address.
Without judicial mandates, suburbs have had few incentives to provide housing for poor people, and suburban affordable housing remains scarce, even as suburban poverty has increased. By the early 2000s, most poor people lived not in cities nor in rural areas but in suburbs. 139 The suburbanization of poverty was especially visible in the wake of the mortgage crisis, but the Great Recession merely accelerated a trend long underway. The reality of suburban poverty, however, has been unable to dislodge the image of suburbia as a place defined by poverty’s absence. The persistent challenges of being poor in the suburbs—an automobile-dependent landscape, a lack of social services, and unaffordable housing prices, among others—now beset millions. 140 The lack of affordable housing has even reached the middle class, particularly in Silicon Valley, where the surge in housing prices that began in the 1960s has continued relentlessly. The 2010 Census confirmed that the San Jose–Sunnyvale–Santa Clara metropolitan area had the highest rental prices and the most expensive housing market in the nation. 141 In Palo Alto, the median home price reached $2.5 million, prompting Palo Alto city council to propose subsidizing housing for families earning up to $250,000 year, an effort thought necessary to retain teachers, firefighters, and other public employees. 142 That families with six-figure incomes might require housing subsidies to live in the Silicon Valley is simply the most recent manifestation of the region’s half-century housing crisis.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.