African-Americans and liberal suburbanites are key Democratic constituencies, and affordable housing touches on matters of core importance to each group.

For low-income African-Americans in particular, the stakes are high.

There is a strong body of evidence that poor minority children under the age of 13 have improved life chances if they move from high-poverty into lower-poverty neighborhoods. Research supporting this view has been conducted by Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren and Lawrence F. Katz, all economists at Harvard, in their May 2015 report, “The Effects of Exposure to Better Neighborhoods on Children.” Chetty et al. report, for example, that

Children assigned to the experimental voucher group before they turned 13 have incomes that are $1,624 higher on average relative to the control group in their mid-twenties

and

We find that the experimental voucher treatment increases the share of births in which the father is present [meaning that a father is listed on the birth certificate] by 6.8 percent for younger children.

While conservatives have long railed against federal enforcement of fair housing legislation, some liberal analysts cite problems they attribute to the difficulty of racial and ethnic integration.

Perhaps most famously, Robert Putnam, a professor of public policy at Harvard, reported in his 2007 essay “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century,” that in the short run:

immigration and ethnic diversity tend to reduce social solidarity and social capital. New evidence from the U.S. suggests that in ethnically diverse neighborhoods residents of all races tend to “hunker down.” Trust, even of one’s own race, is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friends fewer.

Diverse communities, Putnam wrote, “tend to be larger, more mobile, less egalitarian, more crime-ridden.”

A 2009 study conducted for the federal Department of Health and Human Services by the liberal Urban Institute, “Vulnerable Youth and the Transition to Adulthood,” serves to further document the perceived hazards of having low-income neighbors.

The study compared “risk behaviors” among low-, middle- and high-income adolescents. The percentage of those who attack others or get into fights was 33 percent for low-income youth, 26 percent for middle income and 22 percent for high income. The same pattern was found for gang membership: 12 percent, 7 percent, and 5 percent; for stealing something worth more than $50, 18 percent, 13 percent, 11 percent; for carrying a gun, 19, 16, and 11 percent; and for births before the age of 18: 7 percent, 2 percent, and 1 percent.

The issue of enforced integration via federal housing policy poses additional problems for racial and ethnic minorities, who currently make up 30 percent of the population — and made up 23 percent of voters in the last presidential election. Black and Hispanic turnout on Election Day can be decisive, and the response to Democratic housing initiatives is of substantial concern to party strategists.

Elijah Anderson, a sociologist at Yale, describes the situation from a black vantage point in his essay “The White Space”:

Blacks perceive such settings as “the white space,” which they often consider to be informally “off limits” for people like them. Meanwhile, despite the growth of an enormous black middle class, many whites assume that the natural black space is that destitute and fearsome locality so commonly featured in the public media, including popular books, music and videos, and the TV news — the iconic ghetto. White people typically avoid black space, but black people are required to navigate the white space as a condition of their existence.

Anderson notes that stereotyping, prejudice and fear are damaging to African-Americans. He continued in a phone interview:

The ghetto has become a very powerful icon in American society. Because you have black skin, it’s always hovering over you. You have to work on the idea that you are not some kind of a threat to be accepted. Even then you only have provisional status.

The complexities of affordable housing raise a further political question: Can Republicans turn the Supreme Court and HUD decisions and the renewed drive to integrate residential housing into a wedge issue to weaken Democratic allegiance?