Tony Westchester locales like Scarsdale and Bedford have long been bastions of limousine liberalism, home to Ralph Lauren, Glenn Close, Martha Stewart, Bill and Hillary Clinton, George Soros, Gov. Andrew Cuomo and many others. Super-rich “entrepreneurs” like Donald Trump live here too, and it’s a haven for Wall Street bankers — from Jay Gould in the late 19th century to hedge fund pioneer Michael Steinhardt today.

Meanwhile, working-class black and Latino residents remain overwhelmingly concentrated in a handful of municipalities, most of which hug the Bronx border.

This is the case even though Westchester’s leaders signed a landmark consent decree in 2009, settling a lawsuit that accused the county of lying to the federal government about fair housing in its applications for federal funds. Officials agreed to build 750 units of affordable housing in the county’s whitest neighborhoods and to market the properties to potential black and Latino buyers. The court order also requires the county to analyze impediments to fair housing and to design an implementation plan to overcome them — with a stipulation that the county use all of its housing programs to support integration.

At the time, the agreement was celebrated as a milestone in fair housing and civil rights. But two years after the court order, Westchester had done nothing but ignore it. The county’s Republican-led government refuses to force predominantly white towns and villages to build fair housing; affordable units slated for construction are in largely nonwhite neighborhoods or commercial sites, exclusionary zoning ordinances remain in place, and the county has failed to submit a compliant plan to desegregate.

It was this record that led the Anti-Discrimination Center, which filed the original lawsuit in 2006, to return to court recently, charging that Westchester has “stubbornly and comprehensively refused to obey” the court order.

“This was a last resort,” said Craig Gurian, ADC’s executive director. “We would have much preferred that the government and monitor had enforced the decree.”

Westchester, like many other counties, receives millions of dollars in federal funds that require recipients to support fair housing. ADC sued Westchester under the False Claims Act, legislation typically used to sue for things like Medicare fraud, asserting that the county had misrepresented its performance on fair housing.

To avoid trial, Westchester signed a consent decree with the court. Wealthy and white municipalities around the country are now nervously watching to see if the court order is strictly enforced.

Gurian and other civil rights activists are looking to the Obama administration for help — but so far they aren’t getting any. Even though it was the federal government (through the Department of Housing and Urban Development) that Westchester allegedly defrauded, the Justice Department is joining the county in opposing ADC’s motions.

The federal government has always been reluctant to enforce integrated housing, and it refused to intervene in the ADC case until February 2009, when U.S. District Judge Denise Cote found that the “county’s certifications were false claims” and that it had “utterly failed to comply with the regulatory requirement.”

Integrated in name only

Westchester is building the 750 units of housing in places that will keep the poor, black and Latino where they already are, and preserve the racially divided status quo.

James Johnson, the federal monitor charged with overseeing the court order’s enforcement, says that Westchester is “making progress” under the consent decree and has proposed 175 units of fair housing, including 100 that should have financing by year’s end. Yet two of the biggest affordable-housing developments are adjacent to predominantly working-class areas with large nonwhite populations. The proposed affordable housing would actually perpetuate segregation.

Forty-six of the units are located in the exclusive village of Larchmont. According to Andrew Beveridge, a Queens College and CUNY Graduate Center professor of sociology and an expert witness for the ADC, the site currently has a low black and Latino population only because it has almost no population: It is on a census block with just seven residents. The site is also 500 feet from the city line of New Rochelle, a working-class city with large black and Latino populations.

The development is slated to go up behind a strip mall, pinned against railroad tracks and I-95. The heart of Larchmont, where the suburban dream of spacious single-family homes on ample green lawns thrives, is up a hill and around the bend, where the highway recedes and an upscale commercial strip emerges, including one store that bills itself as an “eco-forward lifestyle boutique.”

The 46 units planned for exclusive Larchmont are behind a strip mall, pinned against railroad tracks and I-95, and 500 feet from the city line of New Rochelle, a working-class city with large black and Latino populations.

The new development, says Gurian, will be Larchmont in name only.

“All this housing says, ‘This isn’t Larchmont. This is for the affordable-housing people.’”

And Larchmont, with a median home value of $869,600 and a population that is just 1 percent black, is only mildly exclusive by Westchester standards. Nearby Rye is also 1 percent black and boasts a median home value of $1,009,200.

The 18 units slated for super-wealthy Rye, however, cannot be accessed directly from the city; instead, they are located directly across the street from the largely Latino village of Port Chester. The rest of Rye — sprawling lawns, tree-lined curvilinear roads, and white people — is across the vast expanse of two highways, I-95 and I-287. The planned development’s census block is 51 percent African-American and Hispanic.

The 18 units slated for super-wealthy Rye are located directly across the street from largely Latino Port Chester. The rest of Rye — sprawling lawns, tree-lined curvilinear roads, and white people — is across the vast expanse of two highways. The planned development’s census block is 51 percent African-American and Hispanic.

Even more problematic, the units were initially conceived as senior citizen housing. The city is simply removing the age restriction in an attempt to bring the units into compliance with the court order. But the building plans haven’t changed — studios and one-bedroom apartments that are more appropriate for retirees than families.

Westchester spokesperson Donna Green disagreed, noting that a rather small family could, arguably, fit.

“No units with financing in place are designated for seniors. A one-bedroom unit can house a parent and child the same as it can house a senior.”

Beveridge also analyzed a 92-unit development in the town of Cortland next to a Veterans Administration Hospital and found that the census block had no residents outside of those living at the hospital.

Cities like fantastically rich Scarsdale (median home value of $1,030,900: Think gated landed estates with free-standing large-scale modern art) and white (again, a black population of 1 percent) have no fair housing planned, whether superficial or substantial.

The only black people this reporter encountered were working at the Balducci’s where I got a coffee. According to Beveridge, 25 Westchester municipalities have black populations of less than 3 percent.

The developments investigated by Salon all fall short of the decree’s requirement that units be built in the county’s whitest neighborhoods and that that they promote integration.

In a written statement, Donna Greene, the spokeswoman for County Executive Rob Astorino, rejected accusations that the proposed housing is segregated since “many of the eligible communities border municipalities with large non-white populations.”

Johnson was more circumspect, arguing that the sites are “within the ambit of what’s approvable under the consent decree” while conceding shortcomings. He says that he will soon announce “fairly clear standards” so “that units coming down the pike will be more advantageously located.”

Westchester failed to comply with two other core provisions of the court order, and Johnson acknowledged that he has yet to approve “several iterations of the implementation plan” and that “the Department of Housing and Urban Development has rejected the analysis of impediments.”

The county, however, claims that there are “no documents overdue” even though the implementation plan was due January 2010.

Gurian is furious, charging that the government is coddling Westchester while civil rights advocates have been shut out.

“It’s a bad sign when a civil rights defendant and the federal government are aligned against a civil rights organization. And I think it’s especially bad when the defendant, Westchester County, is head over heels in love with the federal monitor, Jim Johnson, who is supposed to force its compliance.”

The Department of Housing and Urban Development, the agency allegedly defrauded by Westchester, and the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, both referred requests for comment to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. They declined to reply to a list of questions provided by Salon.

Criticism of the consent decree was a focal point of Republican Rob Astorino’s successful campaign for county executive in 2009, when he ousted Andrew Spano, the Democrat who (under legal duress, he insisted) signed the agreement.

“Big Brother is about to descend on Westchester towns and villages, and voters deserve to know why,” Astorino warned voters.

“Lots could be sub-divided, changing the value and character of neighborhoods” thanks to Spano’s handing “power to bureaucrats in Washington.”

When he left office January 2010, Spano defended his record in an interview with a local magazine, noting that the court order largely encourages housing affordable to the middle class rather than the poor.

“The issue got totally confused,” he lamented. “People thought we were going to be building high-rises. They thought we were going to bring low-income people into their towns. None of it was true. Scarsdale was the worst. You’d think people with that education level would know better.”

Gurian says that while Spano resisted desegregation, Astorino, who has made it clear that he will not sue municipalities to enforce the decree, has been “more openly and brazenly noncompliant.”

White citadel

Westchester County was the nation’s first subdivided suburban archipelago. The arrival of commuter rail lines in the late 19th century transformed the idyll of super-rich country estates and castles (yes, castles) into a mass destination for the well-to-do or merely middle class seeking to leave the city behind.

Suburbanization intensified with the rise of the automobile and the construction of the Bronx River, Hutchinson River, Cross County and Saw Mill River Parkways in the early 20th century, and the arrival of the interstate highways during the 1950s and ’60s. The single-family whitetopia of Westchester would provide the raw material for the philandering and alcoholic suburban malaise of novelist John Cheever and AMC’s “Mad Men.”

“In the late ’50s and early ’60s, a lot of people left New York City, middle and upper-middle class, and moved to Long Island and Westchester to avoid the growing number of blacks and Hispanics,” said Jerry Levy, general counsel at Westchester’s Enhanced Section 8 Outreach Program. “If you had a little money, you went to Queens. But if you had more, you went to Westchester and Long Island. So Westchester became very entrenched as a middle-class and rich community.”

Many of the homes in many Westchester towns were bound by restrictive neighborhood covenants, which barred their sale to nonwhites. Getting away from affordable housing and minorities was why many people left New York City in the first place.

Earlier fights against segregation in Westchester were confined to working- and middle-class cities. On the heels of the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling against school segregation, for instance, the New Rochelle NAACP campaigned to integrate the city’s highly segregated schools. Black parents were arrested sitting in at a white school, and New Rochelle earned the moniker “Little Rock of the North.” But local officials resisted this push, contending that since it was de facto and not de jure, Northern segregation was acceptable.

It’s an argument that prevails to this day. In 2007, Yonkers ended a bitter 27-year legal battle over building projects on the city’s white east side, spending more than $20 million to resist the court and almost going bankrupt in the process.

Some continue to argue that black and Latino people are lucky to be able to live in Westchester at all.

“Westchester isn’t a bad place to be a member of a minority group,” according to Howard Husock of the conservative Manhattan Institute. “That’s because the taxes of the rich support a disproportionate share of the services provided by the county for all its residents, including minority households.”

“Westchester looks like South Africa,” countered Levy. “There are black townships and white neighborhoods. This is one of the most severely segregated communities.”

Indeed, Astorino last year vetoed legislation that would bar landlords from discriminating against Levy’s clients, holders of Section 8 housing vouchers — a move that seemed to contradict the consent decree’s requirement that the county use all housing programs to further fair housing.

“I don’t think they’re ever going to comply unless the government comes in and forces them to do it,” said Levy. “They’ll fight tooth and nail to resist it, and if they put the housing anywhere, they’ll put it in the least desirable areas. Politically, no government official in Westchester County is going to endorse any type of fair housing in this community because it’s a death sentence for their career.”

Given the lack of support from the county’s political leadership, Levy and his fellow activists are increasingly looking to Washington — and to the administration of America’s first black president — to enforce a decree that, if fully implemented, could make Westchester a model for integration.

“When I was a kid I remember Eisenhower sending federal troops down to Arkansas,” Levy said. “That’s where we are in Westchester County.”

(Image courtesy of Paul DeWitt of CensusScope.org and the University of Michigan’s Social Science Data Analysis Network)

1. My Region (Greater “________”) wasn’t on the list and thus (a) I think we’re really segregated, what gives? or (b) Yes, this proves we’re not segregated at all!

Just because your metro area didn’t make the list doesn’t mean you aren’t segregated. A number of metro areas have segregation rates (measured by the dissimilarity index) of above 60, which social scientists consider to be high. This includes: Boston, Houston, Washington, D.C., Memphis, Denver, Pittsburgh, New Orleans, Chattanooga, Miami, Baltimore and Birmingham.

The full list is here.

2. None of the cities on the list is in the South. Thus, the South is no longer racist/less racist than the North

Former “Cheers” producer and conservative commentator Rob Long wrote that the list of largely Northeast and Midwest Rust Belt cities is, “In other words, Obama Country! … Aside from the pungent point that, typically, the Left talks one way and lives another. And aside from the totally gratuitous low-blow that Obama was elected by racially segregated states, what’s really interesting here is that none of the top 10 Most Racially Divided Cities are in the South. None.”

Twitter was ablaze with this observation, and Time mentioned it, too. Many Southerners seemed to delight, perhaps deservedly, in the pervasive racial hypocrisy in the North and among white liberals. But this is a very misleading interpretation of the census data.

For one thing, many Southern cities are segregated: See the six cities mentioned above. Second, the history is different: Social distance ruled race relations in the Jim Crow South, making actual segregation by neighborhood less important. And black servants often lived in smaller homes near their wealthier white employers.

Beyond this, there are two main reasons that residential segregation between blacks and whites tends to be less prevalent in the South. The first is the vigorous federal enforcement of civil rights laws.

“Many opponents of civil rights argued that you have to change hearts and minds before you can change laws, but the history of the South shows that changing laws really matters,” University of Pennsylvania historian Tom Sugrue tells me. “When people of different racial backgrounds interact as equals in workplaces, in schools, in neighborhoods and in other institutions, racial distrust and hostility will weaken.”

The second factor is the lack of political fragmentation in the South, where government tends to operate at the county — and not city — level. A major source of segregation in the North is the ability of white people to live within overwhelmingly white political jurisdictions — this is less possible in much of the South.

“Whites can’t pick up and flee across municipal boundaries,” Sugrue said.

Countywide school districts also mean that schools tend to be more integrated.

“Because many Southern school systems are countywide, and because these desegregated after the 1960s, people in this part of the country are less likely to select a neighborhood based on their preferences about the racial composition of the school,” John Logan, a professor of sociology at Brown University and an expert on segregation, says. “In the Northeast and Midwest, school choice has been found to be a major contributor to segregated neighborhoods. And indeed most school segregation here is between school districts rather than within them.”

Other areas, like Virginia Beach, have lower segregation because of the large presence of the military — another institution integrated by force of law.

“The desegregation of the military did not happen voluntarily — it happened because the president ordered it and, over time, military leaders carried out that order,” according to Sugrue.

The South has come a long way since my (white) mom was growing up in Birmingham, Ala., where Police Chief Bull Connor notoriously terrorized civil rights marchers with fire hoses and police dogs, and where Gov. George Wallace pledged “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” My great-grandparents lived in the town of Cullman, where they ran a restaurant. An infamous billboard (known simply as “the sign”) read “Nigger Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on You in This Town.”

Though Jim Crow was defeated, clear signs of racial inequality persist. Racial and economic inequality are truly nationwide problems, even if their specific manifestations vary by region.

“The implication or suggestion that the South has overcome its racial problems because you don’t find as much urban segregation in the South is a very simplistic and incorrect conclusion to draw from census material,” cautions Glenn Feldman, an expert on race and class in the south at the University of Alabama, Birmingham.

“Voting patterns would probably be the most telling indicator of racial issues in the South. The fact of the matter is the South continues to move rightward politically due in no small measure to race. And that’s just a fact of the development of the modern Republican Party in the South. It’s not a comfortable truth, it’s not something that a lot of Republicans and conservatives want to deal with or admit. But it’s the way it is.”

In many parts of the South, 9 out of 10 whites supported John McCain — rare pockets of America where McCain actually fared better in 2008 than George W. Bush did in 2004. Uniformly conservative white politics are the culmination of a century of divide-and-conquer strategies by wealthy whites — efforts that have constantly frustrated efforts by poor blacks and whites to make common cause. In Alabama, this coalition of industrial and plantation interests is infamously known as the Big Mules.

“Race is still an incredibly important part of southern politics. And unfortunately, it’s an increasingly important part of national politics. In that sense, the South has served as a pioneer in exporting its politics nationwide,” says Feldman. “Nationwide, people are being distracted from their common class and economic interests, whether race is the flavor of the day, or prayer in public schools, or abortion, or the tax rage associated with the Tea Party. What you have is a kind of disconnect where working-class and middle-class people are having a difficulty understanding that their support of conservative politicians is not in their economic interest. That is the story of the South in a nutshell.”

In fact, even though aggressive federal and judicial implementation of school desegregation led to more integrated schools in the South, there are actually signs of resegregation today. The most notable case is in Wake County, N.C., where Raleigh-area Tea Partiers took over the school board and overturned a successful and widely-admired school busing program. 

3. The Southwest: Equal opportunity paradise?

Not so fast, Southwest. First, the corporate decisions and federal policies that helped shift economic growth from the Northeast and Midwest to the Sun Belt proved to be devastating to Rust Belt workers in general and blacks in particular.

Second, the Southwest is no post-racial utopia where retirees and construction workers of different races mingle over backyard grills. There are fewer black people in the region, and metro Phoenix is the kind of place where individuals move without the collective racial baggage of working-class white ethnic neighborhoods facing off against the black ghetto. And the population as a whole is more spread out and car-dependent: It really doesn’t matter so much if you live “next to” black people because you don’t really live next to anyone.

4. New York, Chicago, Los Angeles are segregated; therefore, liberals are the real racists

It’s hard to take Long’s argument that my article shows that “the Left talks one way and lives another” seriously. Though it’s worth pointing out the role that hypocritical wealthy white liberals play in perpetuating segregation, it is actually conservatives in these “blue states” who have actually taken the lead — the right’s prized “Reagan Democrats,” defending their suburban homestead against the incursion of low-income housing.

The exclusive exurbs, built from white flight, are one important foundation of today’s right — from Reagan’s Orange County to Scott Walker’s Milwaukee edge cities. Also key to the right, of course, are the white southerners who fled the Democratic Party after its mid-’60s embrace of civil rights. Race played an undeniably important role in the Democratic Party’s loss of the “solid South” and the effective deployment of Nixon’s Southern Strategy.

5. People just want to live among their own kind

Survey data consistently finds that blacks are far more willing to live in integrated neighborhoods than whites, motivated by a desire for more opportunities and improved race relations.

“Blacks are much more willing to live with white neighbors than whites are willing to live with African Americans,” wrote Maria Krysan and Reynolds Farley, professors at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of Michigan, concluding a detailed quantitative and qualitative analysis of the role of preferences in segregation. “And African Americans, in great numbers, are willing to live in a neighborhood where they are one of a handful of black residents.”

On top of that, much of what reticence blacks do have about moving into a white neighborhood is attributable to fears of white hostility.

We may think of segregation as a matter of ancient Southern history: lunch counter sit-ins, bus boycotts and Ku Klux Klan terrorism. But as the census numbers remind us, Northern cities have long had higher rates of segregation than in the South, where strict Jim Crow laws kept blacks closer to whites, but separate from them. Where you live has a big impact on the education you receive, the safety on your streets, and the social networks you can leverage.

The following is a list of the nation’s most segregated metropolitan areas of over 500,000 people. The rankings are based on a dissimilarity index, a measure used by social scientists to gauge residential segregation. It reflects the number of people from one race — in this case black or white — who would have to move for races to be evenly distributed across a certain area. A score of 1 indicates perfect integration while 100 signals complete segregation. The rankings were compiled by John Paul DeWitt of CensusScope.org and the University of Michigan’s Social Science Data Analysis Network.

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“It’s going to be difficult,” says Camden County prosecutor Warren Faulk, “but I think the plan that Chief [John] Thomson has in place is going to provide the necessary police on the streets to protect the public.”

But the prosecutor’s office is also facing potential layoffs this spring amounting to a quarter of its staff, including 18 assistant prosecutors and 26 investigators. They are negotiating with the county in an attempt to find a solution.

“It’s going to be a hard lift,” says Faulk. “We’re going to prepare for the worst.”

 The hard-luck city, whose population has shrunk from over 120,000 to just 79,000 in recent decades, lies just across the Delaware River from Philadelphia and was once home to Campbell Soup factories and RCA Victor. Walt Whitman is buried here, where he spent his last two decades of life revising “Leaves of Grass.” “I dreamed I saw a city invincible,” a line paraphrased from that poem, is engraved on the city hall’s facade. Deindustrialization has remade Camden into a regional hub for narcotics trafficking, prostitution, corruption and joblessness, plagued by violent battles over drug corners. Three mayors over a two-decade period have ended up behind bars.

According to Faulk, the police department is planning to shift resources to ensure that there is no reduction in street patrols. While the move could prevent the crime rate from going up, it will eviscerate the department’s detective unit, weakening its ability to investigate cases before turning them over for prosecution. Investigators in the prosecutor’s office had been planning to pick up the slack. Layoffs in the prosecutor’s office would make that nearly impossible.

The Fraternal Order of Police recently took out a full-page ad in the Courier-Post warning that Camden will become a “living hell” after the layoffs. And Camden County’s Board of Freeholders (essentially the county legislature) is exploring the idea of creating regional police and fire departments, which could lower costs. But such a solution is far off and could prove controversial.

Camden has struggled with budget shortfalls for years and is heavily dependent on state aid. Just $21,000,000 of the $138,803,887 budget comes from local tax revenue. Republican Gov. Chris Christie sharply cut funding to municipalities after vetoing legislation to raise taxes on the state’s millionaires. The recession has led to lower tax revenue nationwide. With stimulus funds running out and governors from both parties lining up against tax increases, state shortfalls are hitting cash-strapped municipalities hard. In a deindustrialized city like Camden, the recession has only compounded deep social and economic problems decades in the making.

“The city has massive problems that go beyond its crime rate,” says Faulk. “That’s for sure.”

Camden was the second most dangerous city in America in 2009, according to an annual study by CQ Press, and its median income of $26,752 puts it within the margin of error of being the country’s poorest.

In 2010, the city emerged from a failed seven-year state takeover, transferring executive power from a chief operating officer appointed by the governor back to the mayor. The aquarium had been rebuilt on the waterfront, and emergency rooms and university campuses were expanded. The result was nowhere near the transformation promised in 2002, and left the city’s neighborhoods largely untouched.

“Camden residents are just as poor today and just as likely to be murdered,” according to a 2010 Philadelphia Inquirer investigation of the takeover. “Not one leader of the recovery takes responsibility for its failings.”

The Camden County Democratic Party machine funneled much of the $175 million in bonds, loans and appropriations to big-ticket downtown and waterfront projects managed by allies in organized labor. The program did little to deal with the city’s abandoned buildings or repair the decrepit sewer system, two glaring needs.

The effect is a sort of Green Zone: a small bubble where the white and middle class, tens of thousands of whom moved away over the past half-century, walk the streets. An unprecedented inter-agency law enforcement task force with representatives from the state and local police, county and state prosecutors, FBI, DEA, ATF and U.S. attorney operates out of the downtown office building of military contractor L-3 Communications.

Many downtown properties are tax-exempt government and educational buildings or developments that benefit from tax abatements, further undermining the city’s revenue base. Most manufacturing and industry has left a city that once employed thousands making soup or building ships. In 2010, the entire city library system was set to close before the county agreed to a takeover.

In November, Camden lost the title of America’s Most Dangerous City, bumped down to No. 2 by St. Louis. It’s a hard victory to celebrate. Camden’s open-air drug markets persist, in large part serving suburban customers. According to the Courier-Post, drug stings last November led to the arrest of 48 buyers, 34 of whom were from outside the city, including suburbs like Cherry Hill and Collingswood.

“All of the drug buyers come into Camden because the suburban communities don’t allow it,” says Colandus “Kelly” Francis, president of the Camden NAACP.

Like many failed cities, Camden’s problems have regional roots. Camden is literally the dumping ground for neighboring South Jersey communities. It is home to an incinerator and sewage treatment plant that takes care of the dirty work for most of the county’s 37 municipalities. Camden absorbs the bulk of the county’s low-income housing, while neighboring suburbs do their best to keep the poor out. The city is almost entirely black, Puerto Rican and Mexican.

Francis is cynical about local police, pointing to the five officers indicted in 2010 for robbing drug dealers to resell the narcotics. He says that when it comes to police, Camden needs quality rather than quantity.

“There’s nobody in Camden who believe there are only five. You don’t stop drug dealing with that kind of police force.”

Francis also faults the city for hiring officers that it would not be able to afford in the long-term, including dozens initially paid for by the federal COPS program. And he says most city police live, shop and pay taxes elsewhere.

“Historically, people get wary of Camden,” says Howard Gillette, a professor of history at Rutgers-Camden and author of “Camden After the Fall.” They either try to put some distance by staying out of Camden, or are critical, blaming Camden for its own problems. I think in the 21st century there’s a growing realization that our chief economic unit is a region. If you have something really dragging down the region, either economically or socially at the core, if they became burdens on the region, the region suffers as a whole. There’s wonderful evidence that if you strengthen the core, you strengthen the whole. Camden needs to be restitched into its region. It was once its heart.”

Though New Jersyeans are fragmented among 605 school districts and 566 municipalities, their problems are regional. Some of the older suburbs around Camden already grapple with a declining tax base and white flight. If the region doesn’t take responsibility for shared problems, the city line won’t offer much protection.

The reason for Arizona’s weak census showing is now the subject of some debate. The housing bubble collapse clearly slowed population growth, in part by stemming the flood of native and immigrant workers migrating to the state for jobs in the construction industry — a phenomenon that seems to have played out in several other burgeoning states. But unlike other boom states, Arizona’s final census count came in far under estimates, which were adjusted to account for the recession’s weak growth.

This has led some to point to a more specific cause: the anti-immigration law that Arizona enacted last year, which requires local police officers to determine the immigration status of a person “where reasonable suspicion exists.” Attacked as unconstitutional by some, the law, known as S.B. 1070, set off a fierce national debate and prompted boycott threats. In the state, many undocumented immigrants feared that a routine interaction with local law enforcement could lead to deportation. According to political demographer Kimball Brace, the president of the nonpartisan political data analysis firm Election Data Services, many residents without legal status moved out or simply refused to answer the door when census enumerators knocked.

A second seat for Arizona was “iffy” but long considered a possibility, said Brace. “That possibility clearly went out the window with the immigration crackdown.”

Arizona needed 325,139 more people in the 2010 census count to win a second seat. As recently as September, an Election Data Services projection showed the state coming up just 30,157 short.

“What we see in final numbers is that the margin for the second seat was much larger than the estimates were saying,” said Brace. “I think the reason they were further away is because of the illegal immigrant controversy that was taking place at the time. That vote on illegal immigrants not being wanted in Arizona was taking place right as the census was being taken.”

Anti-immigrant sentiment runs deep in Arizona. S.B. 1070 follows on the heels of a 2008 law that punishes employers for hiring undocumented workers. In Maricopa County, Sheriff Joe Arapio leads posses of deputized civilians on aggressive immigration sweeps through Latino neighborhoods, a tactic that has also drawn Justice Department scrutiny. Ironically, the state’s new House seat will likely be located in Maricopa and neighboring Pinal County, thanks to their fast growth.

Some disagree with Brace’s analysis, arguing that the collapse of the housing market had a far greater impact.

“Rapid increases followed by rapid declines in the rate of growth in Arizona’s population between 2000 and 2010 were driven by the real estate boom followed by the Great Recession,” Brian Gratto, a professor of history at Arizona State University, said in an e-mail message. “It is possible that the controversy over S.B. 1070 led to some outmigration, but that highlights a minor factor instead of the major one.”

Tom Rex, an economist at Arizona State, says that while Arizona’s anti-immigrant climate did not cost the state a second seat, it was still a major factor in slowing population growth.

“The long and deep recession has had a very substantial impact on Arizona’s population growth,” he wrote. “But this was captured in the population estimates, which showed much less population growth in recent years than at the mid-2000s peak. The economic conditions do not explain why Arizona’s census count was further below its population estimate than in [almost] any state, or why its census count was far below the estimate while neighboring Nevada, which has experienced an even more extreme economic cycle, has a census count higher than the estimate.

“The only way I can explain this is that Arizona’s unique anti-immigration laws — first the employer sanctions law that went into effect at the beginning of 2008, then S.B. 1070 that was debated and passed quite near the April 1 census date — had the effect of either causing undocumented immigrants to leave the state or causing those that remained to not participate in the census in a greater proportion than the national average.”

The housing collapse also had a major impact in states like California, Nevada and Florida, where the boom and bust were similarly turbulent. Nevada, the decade’s fastest growing state, now has an unemployment rate of 14.3 percent, compared to 9.4 percent in Arizona, which experienced the second highest growth rate.

Also, only 69 percent of Arizonans responded to the census’ mailed questionnaire, significantly below the national average of 74 percent and below the rates in other centers of the housing bust like Nevada, Florida and California. That could indicate a higher undercount of undocumented immigrants.

“You can’t say it was only one and not the other factor,” says Brace. “But, of course, the immigrant crackdown was mainly a factor in just Arizona. It really didn’t play much a part in other states.”

Last May, Latino leaders and local census officials expressed concern that Latino residents of Arizona would be afraid to answer the census or meet with a federal-employed census employee. They cited plummeting Latino attendance at events ranging from parent-teacher conferences to Cinco de Mayo parades. The Census Bureau and local governments mounted an intensive campaign to encourage all residents — legal or otherwise — to participate in the 2010 count. The Constitution requires the federal government to count the entire resident population every 10 years.

“There are many anecdotal accounts of families, many immigrant, many mixed among immigrant and U.S. born, who have decided to leave Arizona because of the overall hostile and discriminatory policies toward immigrants and toward Latinos,” according to Arturo Vargos, executive director of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials. “Arizona’s policymakers may yet again have cut off their nose in spite of their face.”

Also in May, a group of prominent Latino evangelicals called for undocumented immigrants to boycott the census. Most Latino leaders countered that such a boycott would undermine the power of the community’s own congressional representatives, who tend to support immigration reform. But the debate over whether to participate in the census count highlighted immigrants’ long-simmering anger over being discounted in Washington.

Nationwide, the impact of undocumented immigrants on reapportionment is undeniable. In Texas, California and New York — all states with large immigrant communities and outspoken anti-immigrant politicians — non-citizens, who cannot vote, protected existing House seats and added new ones. According to the nonpartisan political data analysis firm Polidata, Texans can thank non-citizens for two of their four new House seats. The state earned their fourth seat by a margin of 99,000 people. Without non-citizen immigrants, Florida would have gained just one seat instead of two (with a 113,000-person margin), New York would have lost three rather than two, and California, which had a cushion of 118,000 people, would have lost a staggering five seats instead of none. Polidata’s statistics combine non-citizen immigrants with and without legal status. Undocumented immigrants make up about half of that total nationwide. The figure also does not include estimates of the number of citizen children born to undocumented immigrants who would have also been counted. Latina immigrants have a fertility rate of 3.1, one point higher than the average. Polidata arrived at its estimate for citizen population by subtracting a projected number of non-citizens derived from the 2009 American Community Survey.

“The irony is that Latino immigration had its biggest impact in improving political representation of those states where anti-immigration sentiment appears to be highest and where Republicans are strongest,” said Angelo Falcón, president of the National Institute for Latino Policy. “This means that we can expect a much more complicated political situation on the issue of immigration and general Latino issues.”

With Republican legislatures controlling redistricting in many of the states with surging immigrant populations, the GOP could have an opportunity to draw many of the new districts to its own partisan benefit. (In Arizona, though, an independent redistricting commission will redraw the district lines.) The Civil Rights Act of 1964 may forestall the worst attempts at race-based gerrymandering: Arizona and Texas are among the states required to “preclear” new district boundaries with the Department of Justice. The entire state of Arizona was required to submit to preclearance in 1975, thanks to a long history of discrimination against Spanish-speaking and Native American residents, including an English-language literacy test. DOJ has objected to four statewide redistricting plans since 1982, though objections plummeted under the Bush administration. This time around, any attempts at gerrymandering will have to pass muster with Attorney General Eric Holder.

November’s GOP sweep rewrote the country’s political balance of power. But December’s census data shows that the new conventional wisdom might require a second look. After all, anti-immigrant politics may fire up today’s Republican base — but they also alienate Latino voters and voters-to-be. In this sense, the 2010 census count may benefit Republicans in the short-term, even as it points to trouble down the road.