Sign directly opposite the Sojourner Truth, a federal housing project, in Detroit, Michigan. A riot was caused by white neighbors’ attempt to prevent African American tenants from moving in, February 1942Adam Ruins Everything – The Disturbing History of the Suburbs
Table of Contents
Impact of Housing Discrimination
History of Housing Discrimination
Sub History Subjects
Racial Biased Zoning Ordinances – Sundown Towns – New Deal and GI Bill Discrimination – Redlining – GI Bill Housing Discrimination – Disinvestment of Public Housing – Urban Renewal/Urban Removal – Predatory Housing Discrimination – Intimidation and Violence – IRS tax Exemptions – Wealth Suppression Housing Discrimination – Richard Rothstein Color of Law List of De Jure Discrimination
Racist Banking, Subprime Loans, and Reverse Redlining
The Historic Fog of Housing Discrimination
Impact of Housing Discrimination
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Gene Demby – Why Are Cities Still So Segregated? | Let’s Talk | NPR
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OSPIHM: Resources on Spacial Racism
“Today, we live with the legacies of a deliberately segregated past. Where you live usually determines the school your children attend, your degree of neighborhood safety, your access to public transportation or highways, the availability and quality of finance and credit, your employment opportunities, and your social network.
This deliberate segregation is called spatial racism. It affects mainly African Americans, Hispanics, and some newly arrived immigrants, isolating them in deteriorating areas of the cities and older suburbs.”
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This Town Needs a Better Class of Racist
“If you sought to advantage one group of Americans and disadvantage another, you could scarcely choose a more graceful method than housing discrimination. Housing determines access to transportation, green spaces, decent schools, decent food, decent jobs, and decent services. Housing affects your chances of being robbed and shot as well as your chances of being stopped and frisked. And housing discrimination is as quiet as it is deadly. It can be pursued through violence and terrorism, but it doesn’t need it. Housing discrimination is hard to detect, hard to prove, and hard to prosecute.”” Ta-Nehisi Coates – The Atlantic
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Affects of Housing Discrimination
“In 1973, the US Commission on Civil Rights concluded that the “housing industry, aided and abetted by Government, must bear the primary responsibility for the legacy of segregated housing…. Government and private industry came together to create a system of residential segregation.” Richard Rothstein, Color of Law
- Home Ownership
- 1934-1968 – 98% of home loans were given to white people
- Current home ownership rates:
- White Americans is 73%
- Black Americans is 43%
- Before the 1968 Black Homeownership was around 42%
- Advantages of homeownership over last century helped white families:
- Accrue wealth faster
- Pay for higher education
- Avoid debt
- Better health statistics
- Live in neighborhoods that have more opportunities, more employment, safer, better schools, etc
“Today African-American incomes on average are about 60% of average white incomes. But African-American wealth is about 5% of white wealth. Most middle-class families in this country gain their wealth from the equity they have in their homes. So this enormous difference between a 60% income ratio and a 5% wealth ratio is almost entirely attributable to federal housing policy implemented through the 20th century.” Richard Rothstein – Color of Law
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Wealth: America’s Other Racial Divide
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Think Progress: Discriminatory housing practices linked to higher pollution and asthma rates, new report finds
“Communities subjected to discriminatory lending and mortgage practices decades ago now have higher rates of asthma, according to new research out Wednesday. These predominately low-income communities and communities of color also suffer from increased exposure to pollutants.
Redlining — the practice of denying loans or insurance to certain groups or neighborhoods over concerns that they might be at higher risk of default — has been banned for more than half a century. But the discriminatory practice played a major role in shaping modern neighborhoods, with a disproportionate impact on low-income people of color. And it may also be having a profound affect on contemporary health issues.
An analysis of eight California cities indicates that redlining left vulnerable groups at disproportionate risk of asthma and air pollution exposure. The new research from the University of California, Berkeley and the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) shows that residents in historically redlined communities are more than twice as likely as residents in other communities to make emergency room trips due to asthma.
Those same neighborhoods also have significantly higher levels of diesel particulate matter in their air, a component of diesel exhaust, which causes lung cancer and has been linked to bladder cancer. Decreased mental function and heart damage are also associated with the carcinogen, which effects ecology as well as people — diesel exhaust has been found to degrade the environment needed for honeybees.”
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Elizabeth Warren On Banking’s Racist Past
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Washington Post: Report: No progress for African Americans on homeownership, unemployment and incarceration in 50 years
“Convened to examine the causes of civil unrest in black communities, the presidential commission issued a 1968 report with a stark conclusion: America was moving toward two societies, “one black, one white — separate and unequal.”
Fifty years after the historic Kerner Commission identified “white racism” as the key cause of “pervasive discrimination in employment, education and housing,” there has been no progress in how African Americans fare in comparison to whites when it comes to homeownership, unemployment and incarceration, according to a report released Monday by the Economic Policy Institute.
In some cases, African Americans are worse off today than they were before the civil rights movement culminated in laws barring housing and voter discrimination, as well as racial segregation.
- 7.5 percent of African Americans were unemployed in 2017, compared with 6.7 percent in 1968 — still roughly twice the white unemployment rate.
- The rate of homeownership, one of the most important ways for working- and middle-class families to build wealth, has remained virtually unchanged for African Americans in the past 50 years. Black homeownership remains just over 40 percent, trailing 30 points behind the rate for whites, who have seen modest gains during that time.
- The share of incarcerated African Americans has nearly tripled between 1968 and 2016 — one of the largest and most depressing developments in the past 50 years, especially for black men, researchers said. African Americans are 6.4 times as likely than whites to be jailed or imprisoned, compared with 5.4 times as likely in 1968.
“We have not seen progress because we still have not addressed the issue of racial inequality in this country,” said John Schmitt, an economist and vice president of the Economic Policy Institute, citing the racial wealth gap and continuing racial discrimination in the labor and housing markets. “One of the key issues is the disadvantages so many African Americans face, right from the very beginning as children.”
The wealth gap between white and black Americans has more than tripled in the past 50 years, according to Federal Reserve data. The typical black family had zero wealth in 1968. Today the median net worth of white families — $171,000 — is 10 times that of black families.
The wealth black families have accumulated is negligible when it comes to the amount of money needed to meet basic needs during retirement, pay for children’s college education, put a down payment on a house, or cope with a job loss or medical crisis, Schmitt said.
The lack of economic progress is especially startling, given that black educational attainment has improved significantly in the past five decades, Schmitt said. African Americans are almost as likely as whites to have completed high school. In 1968, 54 percent of blacks graduated from high school, compared with 75 percent of whites. Today, more than 90 percent of African Americans have a high school diploma, 3.3 percentage points shy of the high school completion rate for whites.
The share of young African Americans with a college degree has more than doubled, to 23 percent, since 1968, although blacks are still half as likely as whites to have completed college.
Yet the hourly wage of a typical black worker grew by just 0.6 percent a year since 1968. African Americans make 82.5 cents of every dollar earned by the typical white worker, the report said. And the typical black household earns 61.6 percent of the annual income of white households, with black college graduates continuing to make less than white college graduates.
Despite the poverty rate dropping from more than a third of black households in 1968 to about a fifth of black households, African Americans are 2½ times as likely to be in poverty than whites.
“We would have expected to see much more of a narrowing of the gap, given the big increase in educational attainment among African Americans,” Schmitt said.
A book, “Healing Our Divided Society,” to be released Tuesday at a D.C. forum, also examines how little progress has been made in the past 50 years.
Housing and schools have become resegregated, “locking too many African Americans into slums and their children into inferior schools.” White supremacists have become emboldened. And there is too much excessive use of force — often deadly — by police, especially against African Americans, notes the book, co-edited by Fred Harris, a former U.S. senator and sole surviving member of the Kerner Commission.
“Whereas the Kerner Commission called for ‘massive and sustained’ investment in economic, employment and education initiatives, over the last 50 years America has pursued ‘massive and sustained’ incarceration framed as ‘law and order,’ ” the book says. “Mass incarceration has become a kind of housing policy for the poor.”
The 1968 Kerner Commission report ended on a note of deja vu, citing a witness who recalled similar analyses, recommendations and, ultimately, inaction following a government investigation nearly 50 years earlier after the 1919 Chicago riot.
“The destruction and the bitterness of racial disorder, the harsh polemics of black revolt and white repression have been seen and heard before in this country,” the report concluded.”
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What Is Systemic Racism? – Housing Discrimination
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Further Reading
City Paper: Doctors Blame D.C.’s High Asthma Rates in Part on Poor Housing
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History of Housing Discrimination
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“Racial discrimination was once an explicit part of housing laws, regulations, and practices, which created unequal access to opportunity and wealth through intentional community and housing segregation by race. While the laws have changed, the impact of decades of institutionalized discrimination continues to have a profound effect today.” The Fair Housing Center of Greater Boston
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Sub Table of Contents
Racial Zoning Ordinances
Sundown Towns
New Deal and GI Bill Discrimination
Redlining
GI Bill Housing Discrimination
Disinvestment of Public Housing
Urban Renewal/Urban Removal
Predatory Housing Discrimination
Intimidation and Violence
IRS tax Exemptions
Wealth Suppression Housing Discrimination
Richard Rothstein Color of Wall List of De Jure Discrimination
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Segregated by Design
(17 min short film by Mark lopez, Richard Rothstein, and Youtoocanwoo)
‘Segregated By Design’ examines the forgotten history of how our federal, state and local governments unconstitutionally segregated every major metropolitan area in America through law and policy.
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Nikole Hannah-Jones: Living Apart: How the Government Betrayed a Landmark Civil Rights Law
Hopes of the Great Migration Quickly Fade
In the first decades of the 20th century, African Americans began to resist the brutally oppressive post-Civil War South the only way they could — with their feet. Sneaking onto trains, they traded the tobacco and cotton fields of steamy Southern towns for the cold winters and cramped tenements of the North.
When the Great Migration began in 1910, just 10 percent of black Americans lived outside the South. Six decades later, nearly half of the country’s 22.5 million African Americans called other states home. In all, 6 million African Americans left the South, a flow of humanity that redrew the nation’s racial map.
The migrants sought jobs in booming Northern cities such as New York, Chicago, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Detroit and Philadelphia. In the early years, they moved into white neighborhoods, rarely living in places that were more than 30 percent black, according to sociologists Douglas Massey of Princeton University and Nancy Denton of the State University of New York at Albany.
It didn’t last.
Cities and towns began adopting zoning codes that designated neighborhoods as all-white and all-black. When the U.S. Supreme Court struck down those laws as unconstitutional, real estate agents wrote “codes of ethics” that included bans on selling homes to African Americans outside of black areas. In some cities, white residents responded to the arrival of black families with riots, home bombings, and cross burnings. They formed associations dedicated to blocking even a single black family from moving in.
White communities also embraced racial covenants — legal language in deeds that barred any subsequent purchaser from selling to African Americans.
Still, African Americans kept moving north. By 1930, the black population in Northern cities had grown by 40 percent as another 1 million left the South.
Around this time the federal government began promoting the racial division of Northern cities, primarily through New Deal loan programs.
The Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, created in 1933, introduced the practice of redlining, marking in red ink swaths of cities in which it would not lend. It rated white neighborhoods as the least risky and black neighborhoods as the most. It would not lend to a black person seeking to buy in a white neighborhood, or vice versa.
When the Federal Housing Administration opened its doors a year later, it adopted the same practices. As a result, 98 percent of the loans the FHA insured between 1934 and 1962 went to white borrowers. The policies encouraged white flight as even neighborhoods with small numbers of African Americans were rated as “hazardous.” White residents who didn’t mind black neighbors found their home values decreasing as the government refused to insure mortgages for new buyers.
A 1938 manual for the FHA encouraged officials to avoid mixing “inharmonious racial or nationality groups” and “the occupancy of properties except by the race for which they are intended.”
With the end of World War II, a grateful nation made available vast amounts of credit to returning soldiers, who could borrow money through the GI Bill to buy their dream homes in the suburbs.
But banks often refused to approve loans for black soldiers attempting to use the GI Bill to buy homes. The Veterans Administration and the FHA officially supported racial covenants banning African Americans in new suburban developments until 1950, refusing to underwrite loans that would bring “incompatible” racial groups into newly created white areas.
Federal housing and development programs worked alongside state and local governments to bulldoze black and integrated neighborhoods for redevelopment and relocate African Americans to designated city corridors.
In their place, the government built public housing towers, home to thousands and thousands of people, nearly all of whom were black.
“As the new century wore on, areas of acceptable black residence became more and more narrowly circumscribed. The era of the ghetto had begun,” Massey and Denton wrote in their book “American Apartheid.”
As the boundaries of black neighborhoods expanded, white residents began to abandon cities altogether. Once again, federal policies accelerated segregation.
The government built highways and mass transit systems that made it possible for millions of white Americans to work in the inner city yet live in the suburbs.
It took just 60 years — not even a lifetime — to divide communities in nearly every metropolitan area along racial lines. Northern cities had become the most segregated in the country, analysis of census data shows.”
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The Racist History Of Chicago’s Housing Policies
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Economic Policy Institute: The Making of Ferguson
Public Policies at the Root of its Troubles
In August 2014, a Ferguson, Missouri, policeman shot and killed an unarmed black teenager. Michael Brown’s death and the resulting protests and racial tension brought considerable attention to that town. Observers who had not been looking closely at our evolving demographic patterns were surprised to see ghetto conditions we had come to associate with inner cities now duplicated in a formerly white suburban community: racially segregated neighborhoods with high poverty and unemployment, poor student achievement in overwhelmingly black schools, oppressive policing, abandoned homes, and community powerlessness.
Media accounts of how Ferguson became Ferguson have typically explained that when African Americans moved to this suburb (and others like it), “white flight” followed, abandoning the town to African Americans who were trying to escape poor schools in the city. The conventional explanation adds that African Americans moved to a few places like Ferguson, not the suburbs generally, because prejudiced real estate agents steered black homebuyers away from other white suburbs. And in any event, those other suburbs were able to preserve their almost entirely white, upper-middle-class environments by enacting zoning rules that required only expensive single family homes, the thinking goes.
No doubt, private prejudice and suburbanites’ desire for homogenous affluent environments contributed to segregation in St. Louis and other metropolitan areas. But these explanations are too partial, and too conveniently excuse public policy from responsibility. A more powerful cause of metropolitan segregation in St. Louis and nationwide has been the explicit intents of federal, state, and local governments to create racially segregated metropolises.
Many of these explicitly segregationist governmental actions ended in the late 20th century but continue to determine today’s racial segregation patterns. In St. Louis these governmental policies included zoning rules that classified white neighborhoods as residential and black neighborhoods as commercial or industrial; segregated public housing projects that replaced integrated low-income areas; federal subsidies for suburban development conditioned on African American exclusion; federal and local requirements for, and enforcement of, property deeds and neighborhood agreements that prohibited resale of white-owned property to, or occupancy by, African Americans; tax favoritism for private institutions that practiced segregation; municipal boundary lines designed to separate black neighborhoods from white ones and to deny necessary services to the former; real estate, insurance, and banking regulators who tolerated and sometimes required racial segregation; and urban renewal plans whose purpose was to shift black populations from central cities like St. Louis to inner-ring suburbs like Ferguson.
Governmental actions in support of a segregated labor market supplemented these racial housing policies and prevented most African Americans from acquiring the economic strength to move to middle-class communities, even if they had been permitted to do so.
White flight certainly existed, and racial prejudice was certainly behind it, but not racial prejudice alone. Government policies turned black neighborhoods into overcrowded slums and white families came to associate African Americans with slum characteristics. White homeowners then fled when African Americans moved nearby, fearing their new neighbors would bring slum conditions with them.
That government, not mere private prejudice, was responsible for segregating greater St. Louis was once conventional informed opinion. A federal appeals court declared 40 years ago that “segregated housing in the St. Louis metropolitan area was … in large measure the result of deliberate racial discrimination in the housing market by the real estate industry and by agencies of the federal, state, and local governments.” Similar observations accurately describe every other large metropolitan area. This history, however, has now largely been forgotten.
When we blame private prejudice, suburban snobbishness, and black poverty for contemporary segregation, we not only whitewash our own history but avoid considering whether new policies might instead promote an integrated community. The federal government’s response to the Ferguson “Troubles” has been to treat the town as an isolated embarrassment, not a reflection of the nation in which it is embedded. The Department of Justice is investigating the killing of teenager Michael Brown and the practices of the Ferguson police department, but aside from the president’s concern that perhaps we have militarized all police forces too much, no broader inferences from the events of August 2014 are being drawn by policymakers.
The conditions that created Ferguson cannot be addressed without remedying a century of public policies that segregated our metropolitan landscape. Remedies are unlikely if we fail to recognize these policies and how their effects have endured…
Federal, state, and local policy segregated Ferguson and St. Louis
Efforts of the public to understand the Troubles in Ferguson after the shooting of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown have also been limited. Media reports have explained that suburbs once barred African Americans with private agreements among white homeowners (restrictive covenants), with discriminatory practices of private real estate agents, and with racially neutral zoning rules that restricted outer-ring suburbs to the affluent. Inner-ring suburbs, according to these reports, have flipped from white to black because of “white flight.” Modern segregation, in other words, is attributable to private prejudices of white homeowners who abandoned neighborhoods when blacks arrived, and to the inability of African Americans to afford communities restricted to single-family homes on large lots.8
No doubt, private prejudice and suburbanites’ desire for homogenous middle-class environments contributed to segregation in St. Louis and other metropolitan areas. But these explanations are too partial, and too conveniently excuse public policy from responsibility. A more powerful cause of metropolitan segregation nationwide was the explicit intents of federal, state, and local governments to create racially segregated metropolises. In the case of St. Louis, these intents were expressed in mutually reinforcing federal, state, and local policies that included:
- Racially explicit zoning decisions that designated specific ghetto boundaries within the city of St. Louis, turning black neighborhoods into slums;
- Segregated public housing projects that separated blacks and whites who had previously lived in more integrated urban areas;
- Restrictive covenants, excluding African Americans from white areas, that began as private agreements but then were adopted as explicit public policy;
- Government subsidies for white suburban developments that excluded blacks, depriving African Americans of the 20th century home-equity driven wealth gains reaped by whites;
- Denial of adequate municipal services in ghettos, leading to slum conditions in black neighborhoods that reinforced whites’ conviction that “blacks” and “slums” were synonymous;
- Boundary, annexation, spot zoning, and municipal incorporation policies designed to remove African Americans from residence near white neighborhoods, or to prevent them from establishing residence near white neighborhoods;
- Urban renewal and redevelopment programs to shift ghetto locations, in the guise of cleaning up those slums;
- Government regulators’ tacit (and sometimes open) support for real estate and financial sector policies and practices that explicitly promoted residential segregation;
- A government-sponsored dual labor market that made suburban housing less affordable for African Americans by preventing them from accumulating wealth needed to participate in homeownership.
That governmental action, not mere private prejudice, was responsible for segregating greater St. Louis was once conventional informed opinion. In 1974, a three-judge panel of the federal Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals concluded that “segregated housing in the St. Louis metropolitan area was … in large measure the result of deliberate racial discrimination in the housing market by the real estate industry and by agencies of the federal, state, and local governments.” Similar observations accurately describe every other large metropolitan area; in St. Louis, the Department of Justice stipulated to this truth but took no action in response. In 1980, a federal court order included an instruction for the state, county, and city governments to devise plans to integrate schools by integrating housing. Public officials ignored this aspect of the order, devising only a voluntary busing plan to integrate schools, but no programs to combat housing segregation.9
Although policies to impose segregation are no longer explicit, their effects endure in neighborhoods segregated by race in the North, South, East, and West. When we blame private prejudice and snobbishness for contemporary segregation, we not only whitewash our own history, but avoid considering whether new policies might instead promote an integrated community.
Examining the distinct public policies that have enforced segregation
From the Civil War to the early 20th century, the black population of St. Louis was small, but somewhat integrated with white low-wage workers and their families, including European immigrants. There were blocks with greater or lesser concentrations of African American families, but neighborhoods as a whole were integrated; blocks with greater concentrations of African Americans were interspersed with other blocks concentrating various white immigrant and ethnic groups.10
But then, as elsewhere in the nation, segregationist sentiment and activity increased nationwide, reflected by the presidential election of the Virginia native, New Jersey Governor Woodrow Wilson, who succeeded the more moderate (on racial matters) William Howard Taft. Wilson not only took steps to segregate the federal civil service, but set a tone that encouraged anti-black activities across the land.
Racial zoning
In 1916, the St. Louis Real Estate Exchange, the city’s Realtors’ association, sponsored an organization to draft and campaign for a ballot referendum to prohibit blacks from moving onto blocks where at least 75 percent of existing residents were white (and whites from moving onto blocks where at least 75 percent were black). The referendum passed, but before it could have much effect, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a similar ordinance in Louisville, Kentucky. The court’s 1917 decision didn’t rely primarily on a claim that a racial zoning ordinance violated equal protection principles, but rather that it infringed on property owners’ rights to sell to whomever they wished.11
Some other cities, mostly in the South, ignored the court’s ruling and continued to enforce racial zoning ordinances, but St. Louis, like many others, took a different approach. Before the court’s ruling, it had begun to develop zoning rules that defined boundaries of industrial, commercial, multifamily residential, and single-family residential property. It developed these new rules with racial purposes unhidden, although race was not written into the text of the zoning rules themselves.
St. Louis appointed its first City Plan Commission in 1911 and hired Harland Bartholomew as its full-time planning engineer in 1916. His assignment was to supervise a survey of every building in the city to determine into which of the property types it fell and then to propose rules and maps to prevent future multifamily, industrial, or commercial development from impinging on single-family neighborhoods. A neighborhood filled with single-family homes whose deeds prohibited black residence or prohibited resale to blacks was almost certain to receive a “first residential” zoning designation that prohibited future construction of multifamily, commercial, or industrial buildings.
According to Bartholomew, a St. Louis zoning goal was to “preserv[e] the more desirable residential neighborhoods,” and to prevent movement into “finer residential districts … by colored people.” He noted that without a previous zoning ordinance, such neighborhoods have become run down, “where values have depreciated, homes are either vacant or occupied by colored people.” The survey Bartholomew supervised prior to drafting the new zoning rules collected, among other information, the race of occupants of each residential building in the city, and Bartholomew estimated the future direction of African American population expansion so that the zoning ordinance could attempt to direct and circumscribe it. The Bartholomew Commission’s first zoning ordinance was adopted in 1919, two years after the Supreme Court banned explicit racial zoning, but the St. Louis ordinance, with no explicit mention of race, was apparently in compliance. The new ordinance designated zones for future industrial development if they were in or adjacent to neighborhoods with substantial black populations.
Once the first zoning ordinance was adopted, City Plan Commission meetings were consumed with requests for variances. Race was an important consideration. One meeting in 1919 was devoted to a proposal to reclassify a single-family property from first residential to commercial, because the area to the south had been “invaded by negroes.” Bartholomew persuaded the commission to deny the variance because, he said, keeping the first residential designation would preserve homes in the area as unaffordable to blacks, and thus stop the encroachment. On other occasions the commission changed an area’s zoning from residential to industrial if black families began to move into it. In 1927, violating its normal policy, the commission placed a park and playground in an industrial, not residential area, in hopes that this placement would draw black families to seek housing nearby.
Similar policy continued through the middle of the 20th century. In a 1942 City Plan Commission meeting, commissioners explained that they were zoning an area in a commercial strip as second residential (multifamily) because it could then “develop into a favorable dwelling district for Colored people.” In 1948, commissioners explained that they were designating a U-shaped industrial zone to create a buffer between black residences inside the U and white residences outside it.12
In addition to promoting segregation, zoning decisions contributed to degrading St. Louis’s African American neighborhoods into slums. Not only were these neighborhoods zoned to permit industry, even polluting industry, but taverns, liquor stores, nightclubs, and houses of prostitution were permitted to locate in African American neighborhoods, but prohibited as violations of the zoning ordinance in residential districts elsewhere. Houses in residential districts could not legally be subdivided, but those in industrial districts could be, and with African Americans restricted from all but a few neighborhoods, rooming houses sprung up to accommodate the overcrowded black population. Once the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) was established during the New Deal, these zoning practices rendered African American homes ineligible for mortgage guarantees, because FHA underwriting principles considered “inharmonious uses” of neighboring properties to threaten the security of property value. But such homes were eligible a quarter century later for slum clearance with urban renewal funds, zoning practices having made them unfit for habitation.13
Urban zoning set patterns for subsequent zoning in the suburbs. Jurisdictions farthest from the city of St. Louis typically zoned for single-family homes with large lots only. Communities closer to the city were more likely to have zones for multifamily residences. Some inner-ring suburbs, like Ferguson, were initially zoned only for single-family homes, though without requirements for large minimum lot sizes that would make them unaffordable to working and lower-middle-class families. During the World War II housing shortage, Ferguson and towns like it allowed some multifamily construction, although when Ferguson revised its zoning ordinance a decade after the war, it eliminated any provision for multifamily units. Other inner-ring suburbs, however, increasingly permitted apartment development because of the increased tax revenue the higher assessment on such properties would bring.14
Suburban zoning rules were on their face race-neutral, and the communities using them did not have nationally prominent planners like Harland Bartholomew to boast about their racial implications. In a few cases, scholars have unearthed suburban planning documents with similarities to Bartholomew’s public pronouncements about race. In 1940, for example, officials in Kirkwood (the town to which Adel Allen later moved) prepared a document referring to “several scattered Negro developments” and recommending that this be “corrected” in the city plan. Urging that ways be found to shift black families back to the city of St. Louis, the planning document stated it was “much more desirable for all of the colored families to be grouped in one major section where they could be provided with their own school and recreational facilities, churches, and stores.”15
A 1963 planning document in Webster Groves, a suburb between the city of St. Louis and Kirkwood, identified commercial and multifamily zones as “100% Negro or very close” and took steps to prevent enlargement of a “developing ghetto” across a rail bed it termed the “Great Divide.”16 Such documents were exceptions to suburban zoning plans that were apparently racially innocuous. But it is difficult to consider St. Louis County’s exclusive suburban zoning as merely an expression of economic snobbishness if we keep in mind the racial motivation behind the earliest urban zoning policies, both in St. Louis and elsewhere.
Segregated public housing
Zoning rules in St. Louis could affect future development, but had little impact on previously integrated neighborhoods. To eliminate these, federal and city officials employed early public housing development to increase and solidify the city’s segregation.
At the beginning of the New Deal, Congress adopted a public housing program to simultaneously put Americans back to work and address a national housing shortage. Part of the National Industrial Recovery Act, the Public Works Administration (PWA) housing efforts were headed by a confidante of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harold Ickes, who specified a “neighborhood composition rule”: Public housing projects could not alter the racial composition of neighborhoods in which they were located. Projects located in white areas could house only white tenants, those in black areas could house only black tenants, and projects in integrated neighborhoods could be integrated. Going further, the PWA segregated projects even in neighborhoods where there was no such previous pattern. As Roosevelt’s biographer James MacGregor Burns concluded, cities “in which prewar segregation was virtually unknown … received segregated housing, starting a new ‘local custom’ still in force many years later.” In its segregation policy, the PWA was consistent with other New Deal agencies. The Works Progress Administration, for example, segregated its work crews in St. Louis and elsewhere in the nation.17
At first, the PWA attempted to enlist private developers to build federally subsidized but privately owned nonprofit housing. It was not successful because few builders could be induced to provide housing for low-income families, even with subsidies. Only seven of these “limited dividend” projects were built nationwide, one of which, Neighborhood Gardens, was placed in St. Louis. Each of the seven was reserved for whites only, and Neighborhood Gardens was no exception, designed to provide housing for white workers who could walk from the project to jobs in the downtown garment district.18
Following the failure of nonprofit subsidies to spur a housing boom, the PWA changed its approach to publicly financed and publicly owned housing. In 1934, the city of St. Louis proposed to raze the DeSoto-Carr area, a racially integrated low-income tenement neighborhood on the near-north side whose population was about 55 percent white and 45 percent black. The city said it would construct in DeSoto-Carr a whites-only low-rise project for two-parent families with steady employment. When the PWA objected to the city’s failure to accommodate African Americans, St. Louis proposed an additional blacks-only project removed from the white one, but also in the previously integrated area. This met the federal government’s conditions, insisted upon by liberals and civil rights leaders, for nondiscriminatory funding.19
Bureaucratic obstacles delayed construction until 1940. During the interim, public housing needs grew as thousands of rural black and white workers flocked from the Ozarks to take jobs in St. Louis’s rapidly growing armaments industry. War workers packed themselves into already crowded tenements in central St. Louis, subdividing apartments, converting them to rooming houses, or simply taking in boarders. In some cases, the federal government placed segregated Quonset huts near defense plants as dormitories for workers. The apartment vacancy rate in St. Louis during World War II fell below one percent.20
The city revised its public housing plans and designated the DeSoto-Carr project (renamed Carr Square Village) for African Americans only, with the separate project designated for whites (called Clinton-Peabody) moved south of downtown. The area cleared for Clinton-Peabody was also integrated, but with fewer African Americans than the DeSoto-Carr area had contained. The segregated projects were opened in 1942 with initial preferences for war workers and then, later, for veterans.21
With a continuing critical nationwide civilian housing shortage after World War II, newly elected President Harry Truman proposed a massive public housing effort. Republican opponents of the bill proposed a “poison pill” amendment to prohibit racial discrimination in public housing. They knew that if their amendment were adopted, southern Democrats who otherwise supported public housing would kill the legislation. Liberal proponents, led by Illinois Senator Paul Douglas, had to choose between enacting a segregated public housing program or no program at all. On the Senate floor, Douglas said: “I should like to point out to my Negro friends what a large amount of housing they will get under this act.… I am ready to appeal to history and to time that it is in the best interests of the Negro race that we carry through the housing program as planned, rather than put in the bill an amendment which will inevitably defeat it.”
The Senate and House each then considered and defeated the poison pills and the 1949 Housing Act, with its provisions for federal finance of public housing, was adopted. It permitted local authorities to design separate projects for blacks and whites, or to segregate blacks and whites within projects. The federal government did not require segregation, but neither did it require integrated projects. It financed each, respecting local policy.22
St. Louis then applied for and received federal funds for segregated public housing under the new program. In 1952, a second project for whites only, the John J. Cochran Garden Apartments, was opened on land that, like Carr Square and Peabody-Clinton, had been cleared of both black and white residences.23
As Joseph Heathcott, a scholar of the St. Louis urban landscape, has observed (referring to Carr Square Village and Clinton-Peabody), “The City Plan Commission, the St. Louis Housing Authority, the mayor’s office, and the Board of Aldermen conspired to transform two multiethnic mixed-race neighborhoods – one on the north side and one on the south side – into racially homogenous projects.”24
Several African American World War II veterans (with other low-wage workers) sued the St. Louis Housing Authority when they were denied placements solely because of their race in the more desirable whites-only Clinton-Peabody and Cochran Garden apartments. In 1955, a federal judge concluded that the conspiracy to segregate public housing extended beyond these local officials: “The limitation of the Clinton-Peabody Terrace Project and the John J. Cochran Project to white occupancy was approved by the [federal government’s] Public Housing Administration, conditioned upon the provision of [separate] facilities for non-white occupancy.” The judge ordered the St. Louis Housing Authority to cease segregating its projects by race and to admit qualified black families to the two white projects.25 But the ruling came too late. By the 1950s, federal policy to move working-class whites to homeownership in the suburbs was in full swing. Clinton-Peabody and Cochran Gardens gradually increased their share of African Americans as white residents departed, many with mortgages guaranteed by the FHA or Veterans Administration (VA), for suburbs from which blacks were excluded.
In the early 1950s, St. Louis began construction of the Pruitt-Igoe towers and other high-rises to house the African American poor. Pruitt had been intended for blacks and Igoe for whites, but by the time the projects opened in 1955–56, few whites were still interested in urban public housing; there were so many inexpensive options for them in south St. Louis and in the suburbs. Igoe then filled with black families as well.26
By the 1960s, Pruitt-Igoe became a national symbol of dysfunctional public housing, high-rise towers packed with welfare-dependent families, frequently headed by single mothers. Youth gang activity was pervasive. The Housing Authority’s neglect of maintenance and facilities exacerbated matters. The Pruitt-Igoe vertical ghettos discredited the entire national public housing program, giving the lie to Senator Douglas’s promise that it would be in the “best interests of the Negro race that we carry through” with a segregated housing program. The combination of deteriorating social conditions and public disinvestment made life in the projects so untenable that the federal government evicted all residents and dynamited the 33 towers, beginning in 1972.27
Restrictive covenants
When St. Louis leaders developed zoning rules to control black population movement in the second decade of the 20th century, private real estate agents and individual white homeowners began to attach clauses to property deeds and adopt neighborhood contracts to prevent African Americans from moving into their environs. Called “restrictive covenants,” the first in St. Louis was recorded in 1910.28 Later, covenants were promoted nationwide by the National Association of Real Estate Boards, which provided model language. In St. Louis, the Real Estate Exchange provided a “Uniform Restriction Agreement” for neighborhood associations to use. By 1945, about 300 neighborhood covenants were in force.29
The legal instruments took two forms. In one, homebuilders attached clauses to property deeds committing the first and subsequent buyers of a house never to sell that property to an African American or permit the property to be occupied by one. Exceptions were typically made for live-in domestic servants. In the other, associations of homeowners in particular neighborhoods signed mutual agreements that no member of the association would sell to, or permit occupancy by, an African American – again, with a similar exception. The second form was easier to enforce, because any signatory had standing to compel compliance. The Real Estate Exchange itself was typically a signatory, and it frequently initiated litigation to prevent a breach.
Courts in Missouri and elsewhere supported this segregation by consistently ordering the cancellation of sales made in violation of such agreements. But if initial sales in an all-white neighborhood proceeded without challenge, courts frequently refused to prohibit subsequent sales because the all-white character of the neighborhood had already been lost, and the intent of an association to preserve segregation could no longer be fulfilled by enforcing the covenant. This legal theory required the Real Estate Exchange and other white activists to be perfectly vigilant, something rarely achieved. Once sales to African Americans proceeded without challenge, neighborhoods bordering overcrowded ghetto areas quickly flipped from white to black.
Public policy was deeply entangled in restrictive covenants, and not only because Harland Bartholomew’s City Plan Commission considered their existence to be a factor supporting a neighborhood’s first-residential classification.30 The federal government also became entangled in racial covenants because so many of them were promoted by institutions subsidized by the government with tax exemptions and tax deductibility.
As the U.S. Supreme Court found in an unrelated case in 1983, the Internal Revenue Service has the power to revoke the tax favoritism of institutions practicing racial discrimination. Although that case involved a seemingly tangential aspect of the institution’s mission and practice (Bob Jones University banned interracial dating by its students), the court found this sufficient to justify the IRS revocation. The court did not reach the question of whether the IRS is compelled by the Constitution and law to withhold tax exemption from institutions that are heavily involved in promoting racial discrimination, but such an interpretation seems to follow. The court observed that the Internal Revenue Code intends that “an institution seeking tax-exempt status must serve a public purpose and not be contrary to established public policy.”31 IRS regulations specifically authorize charitable deductions for organizations that “eliminate prejudice and discrimination” and “defend human and civil rights secured by law.”32
In as much as the right of African Americans to purchase residential property without discrimination had been secured by law since 1866,33 it follows that granting tax-exempt status to churches or other institutions promoting restrictive covenants constituted improper federal support, as it violated established public policy. The government, however, never questioned the prominent involvement of tax-exempt churches, hospitals, and universities in enforcing segregation. If church leaders had to choose between their tax-exemptions and racial exclusion, there might have been many fewer covenants blanketing white St. Louis and other cities.
Although the Supreme Court had upheld the legality of covenants themselves in 1926, it found in 1948 that state courts could not enforce them without violating the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. The decision came in Detroit and St. Louis cases (although many similar cases had been pursued elsewhere, in Los Angeles with the greatest frequency) and the decision has come to be known by the St. Louis case, Shelley v. Kraemer.34 And this case was particularly interesting because of the role played by tax-exempt institutions.
The case arose from the objections of a white St. Louis homeowner, Fern Kraemer, to the purchase of a home near hers by the African American Shelley family. The area had been covered by a restrictive covenant organized by a neighborhood group, the Marcus Avenue Improvement Association. The association, including 2,000 property owners, was sponsored by the Cote Brilliante Presbyterian Church, whose trustees provided funds from the church treasury to finance Ms. Kraemer’s lawsuit to enforce the covenant. Another church, the Waggoner Place Methodist Episcopal Church South, was also a signatory to the covenant; its pastor had defended the covenant in court in an earlier (1942) case.35
Restrictive covenants also became an expression of public policy when, in the early New Deal, the Federal Housing Administration subsidized suburbanization and made the existence of racial covenants an important condition of mortgage insurance. Beginning in 1934, and continuing thereafter, FHA underwriting manuals stated that “protection against some adverse influences is obtained by the proper zoning and deed restrictions that prevail in a neighborhood” and elaborated that “the more important among the adverse influential factors are the ingress of undesirable racial or nationality groups.”36 As public housing helped define the north side of St. Louis as black, and the south side as white, this FHA policy began a half-century of federal government effort to move St. Louis’s white families to newly growing exclusively white suburbs.
Subsidization of suburban development for whites only
The FHA not only insured individual mortgages of white homeowners. Perhaps even more important, it effectively financed the construction of entire segregated subdivisions by making advance commitments to builders who met FHA construction standards for materials used, lot size, setback from street, and location in a properly zoned neighborhood that prohibited industry or commercial development threatening home values. Aware that the Supreme Court had prohibited explicit racial zoning, the FHA took the position that the presence of African Americans in nearby neighborhoods was nonetheless a consideration that could threaten FHA insurability and that racial exclusion in the insured subdivision itself could be accomplished if deeds in the subdivision included mutually obligatory clauses prohibiting African Americans from residence.37
Subdivision developers who obtained such commitments could use them to persuade bankers to issue low-interest construction loans. Developers could then also assure potential (white) buyers that their homes were FHA-approved and that FHA (and later VA) mortgages would be available at low interest rates and with no or limited down payments. The FHA’s policy was to prefer homebuilding priced for lower-middle- to middle-class buyers.38
At its peak in 1943 when civilian construction was limited, the FHA financed 80 percent of all private home construction nationwide. During the postwar period, it dropped to one-third.39 But even when subdivisions were not built with advance FHA commitments, individual homebuyers needed access to FHA or VA insured mortgages, so similar standards for new construction pertained. Subdivisions throughout St. Louis County were developed in this way, with FHA advance commitments for the builders and a resulting whites-only sale policy.
The FHA’s suburban whites-only policy continued through the postwar housing boom that lasted through the mid-1960s. In 1947, the FHA sanitized its manual, removing literal race references but still demanding “compatibility among neighborhood occupants” for mortgage guarantees. “Neighborhoods constituted of families that are congenial,” the FHA manual explained, “…generally exhibit strong appeal and stability.”40 This very slightly sanitized language suggested no change in policy, and the FHA continued to finance builders with open policies of racial exclusion for another 15 years.
These practices of the FHA were once well known, but have now mostly been forgotten, although their effects persist. In 1959, the United States Commission on Civil Rights’ annual report summarized how the suburban landscape, by then firmly established, was created:
Nonwhite home buyers and renters have not, however enjoyed the benefits of FHA mortgage insurance to the same extent as whites. According to testimony given before this Commission, less than 2 percent of the total number of new homes insured by FHA since 1946 have been available to minorities. Most of this housing has been all-Negro developments in the South.…
Although the relatively low participation [of] nonwhites has in part been due to their lower incomes, FHA bears some responsibility. Of great significance in this respect are FHA’s policies with regard to the discriminatory practices toward Negroes of real estate boards, home builders and lending institutions.
For the first 16 years of its life, FHA itself actually encouraged the use of racially restrictive covenants. It not only acquiesced in their use but in fact contributed to perfecting them. The 1938 FHA Underwriting Manual, which contained the criteria used in determining eligibility for receipt of FHA benefits, warned against insuring property that would be used by “inharmonious racial groups,” and declared that for stability of a neighborhood, “properties shall continue to be occupied by the same social and racial classes.” The Manual contained a model restrictive covenant which FHA strongly recommended for inclusion in all sales contracts. Furthermore, FHA instructed land valuators that among their considerations should be a determination as to whether “effective restrictive covenants are recorded against the entire tract, since these provide the surest protection against undesirable encroachment and inharmonious use. To be most effective, deed restrictions should be imposed upon all land in the immediate environment of the subject location.” [Footnote: …Many housing experts believe that while FHA did not invent the restrictive covenant its official sanction played a large role in the spread of racial restrictions, particularly in newly developed areas.]
FHA continued this practice of encouraging racially restricted housing developments until 1950, despite mounting pressure from civic organizations, State and local antidiscrimination commissions and other groups to abandon the practice. The only change made by FHA during this period was a softening of the wording in the Underwriting Manual in 1947. This change in language amounted to no real change in policy, however….
While the unenforceability of racial restrictive covenants [following the Supreme Court’s 1948 Shelley ruling] has undoubtedly increased Negro participation in FHA’s insurance programs by making available to them additional existing housing, it has done little in the way of new housing or of apartment units in suburban and outlying areas. There the discriminatory practices of the real estate business, home building industry, and financial institutions continue for the most part unabated. FHA insurance remains available to builders with known policies of discrimination. With the help of FHA financing, all-white suburbs have been constructed in recent years around almost every large city. Huge FHA-insured projects that become whole new residential towns have been built with an acknowledged policy of excluding Negroes.41
In the St. Louis metropolitan area as well as elsewhere, the FHA and VA continued to promote racial restrictions in their loan insurance programs until the 1960s.42
The FHA seal of approval guaranteed that a subdivision was for whites only. Advertisements for suburban subdivisions like those from 1952 featured here were commonplace in St. Louis (and nationwide). The two advertisements were among those collected in a booklet for home seekers, published and distributed by the Home Builders Association of Greater St. Louis. By marketing an “FHA Financed” subdivision in Ferguson, and an “FHA approved” Peaseway subdivision in Kirkwood, these ads signal the development’s whites-only character. Other advertisements in the booklet tout a “Veterans’ Preference” subdivision called Woodson, located in Overland (a few towns south of Ferguson); and “FHA terms” for houses in Webster Groves.43
In that era, the St. Louis-area builder with the most liberal attitudes on racial matters was Charles Vatterott, a devout Catholic (and brother of the Ferguson subdivision builder in the advertisement reproduced here). Charles Vatterott obtained FHA guarantees for St. Ann, a subdivision (later an incorporated town) he started building in 1943. Vatterott intended for St. Ann to be a community for lower-middle-class Catholics, particularly returning war veterans, although he did not prohibit sales to non-Catholic whites, but only to blacks, as the FHA expected. As was conventional for FHA-financed subdivisions in St. Louis County, deeds on St. Ann homes stated that “no lot or portion of a lot or building erected thereon shall be sold, leased, rented or occupied by any other than those of the Caucasian race.”
Vatterott’s limited liberalism was expressed in an insistence, over residents’ opposition, that the golf course he built as part of the St. Ann development be open to nonresident African Americans. And he built a separate, lower-quality subdivision for African Americans – De Porres in the town of Breckenridge Hills, a few miles away (but not adjacent to) St. Ann. The buyers had incomes and occupations – from truck drivers to chemists – similar to those of St. Ann buyers. Had they been permitted to do so by the FHA and its merchant builders, they could have purchased homes in St. Ann or in any of the many other subdivisions that were built for whites in St. Louis County in the postwar period.
Vatterott could not get FHA financing for De Porres because it was intended for African Americans. As a result, many of the homes were rented, and Vatterott set up a special savings plan by which residents could put aside money towards a purchase of their homes without an FHA or VA mortgage. The De Porres development for African Americans also lacked the full community facilities – parks and playgrounds – that Vatterott had built into the St. Ann subdivision.44
As noted earlier, the federal and local governments in 1952 were still operating public housing projects restricted to lower-middle-class white families. The option of these families to remain in public housing was an impediment to suburban home sales. The Home Builders Association booklet denounced public housing (because it “shackles private builders who can’t compete with the government’s half-price product”) and included a barely disguised racial appeal: “IN YOUR OWN HOME you can pick your own neighbors, IN PUBLIC HOUSING … the government picks them for you.”45 On its face, the claim was clearly false – homeowners could not pick their own neighbors because they had no control over the identities of those buying homes nearby. The only way in which they could pick their neighbors was to purchase their homes in subdivisions that, with government approval, excluded a class of buyers, specifically, African Americans.
The Home Builders’ 1952 warning was accurate that the government picks one’s neighbors in public housing, so there was always the threat that the St. Louis Housing Authority would end its segregation policy and assign African Americans to white projects. In fact, as noted earlier, only three years later, a federal court ordered the authority to do so. The only plausible explanation for the Home Builders’ warning about the government picking neighbors is that if families remained in public housing, they might experience racial integration.
Each of the subdivisions in the advertisements described here is in St. Louis County. The farther south and west in the county a suburb is, the more distant it is from the north St. Louis black ghetto. The suburban developments in the advertisements were all-white, with FHA approval, when constructed; by the 2010 census, Ferguson was only 29 percent white, and then, going south and west, Overland was 73 percent white, Webster Groves was still 90 percent white, and Kirkwood was 89 percent white.
This governmental policy of segregation, though now more than a half-century distant, has had enduring consequences. It contributed mightily not only to our present-day residential segregation, but to all aspects of black-white economic inequality. For example, as shown in the Kirkwood subdivision advertisement, homes were marketed as selling to white FHA buyers for “$8,100 up” in 1952. In that year, such home prices were about twice the national median family income of $3,890, and easily affordable to lower-middle or middle-class African Americans, especially to veterans if they could have benefitted from VA mortgage guarantees. A decade later, when assistant principal Larman Williams and engineer Adel Allen were looking for homes in integrated middle-class suburban neighborhoods, those homes were still affordable. Today, however, houses in Kirkwood sell for about $400,000, more than six times national median family income, and mostly unaffordable to working- and middle-class families.46 But for whites permitted to buy in Kirkwood 50 years ago, the advantages they’ve been able to bequeath to their children have been considerable, relative to those of blacks who were denied similar opportunities.
Even accounting for home improvement investments that owners of these homes have made since 1952, the capital gain for white homeowners, and their heirs, endures. The federal government’s support for residential segregation in the mid-20th century is largely responsible for the fact that while the median family income of African Americans is now about 60 percent of whites’ income, the median household wealth of African Americans is only about 5 percent of whites’ wealth.47 This enormous difference translates into differences between blacks and whites in the security and comfort of retirement (and in the obligations of adult children to divert their incomes to support elderly parents), in the ability of young people to attend college, and in the selectivity of the colleges they can afford to attend.
In small ways, local government also worked closely with private agencies to encourage whites to leave the city and move to suburbs to escape proximity to African Americans. A 1947 pamphlet of the Social Planning Council of St. Louis and St. Louis County, a federation of public and private social welfare agencies, rated every neighborhood by, among other characteristics, the “presence of negroes” and concluded, “People Who Can, Move Away.”48 Of 70,000 housing units built in the city of St. Louis and in St. Louis County between 1947 and 1952, fewer than 35 were available to African Americans, whether because of FHA policy, restrictive covenants, or the policy of the real estate industry.49
Denial of adequate municipal services in ghettos
As restrictive covenants and zoning rules barred the growing African American population from most areas of the city and county in the early and mid-20th century, black ghettos formed on the north and northwest sides of the city, becoming increasingly hemmed in, overcrowded, and run down. City services like trash collection, street lighting, and emergency response were less adequate than in white neighborhoods. African Americans paid higher rents than whites for similar space – about 25 percent more, according to one postwar estimate – because their demand for apartments, relative to supply, was greater and because less adequate city fire protection led to higher insurance rates for landlords. With FHA mortgages mostly unavailable, families bought homes with mortgages having very short repayment periods, or with contracts that permitted no accumulation of equity. Late installment payments could trigger repossession.50 To make the higher rent or contract payments, black families took in boarders, or subdivided and sublet their homes or apartments, exacerbating the overcrowding. With higher housing costs, African Americans with good jobs were less able to save than were whites with similar incomes – reduced savings made leaving the ghetto for better surroundings more difficult.
Whites observed the black ghetto and concluded that slum conditions were characteristic of black families, not a result of housing discrimination. This conclusion reinforced whites’ resistance to racial integration, lest black residents bring slum conditions to white communities.51 Thus, to the extent we attribute segregation of the contemporary St. Louis metropolitan area to white flight, government policy bears some responsibility for creating conditions that supported the racial stereotypes fueling such flight.
Annexation, spot zoning, expulsive zoning, incorporation, and redevelopment
White jurisdictions deterred the possible integration of their neighborhoods in myriad ways. This can be seen in the fate of several isolated clusters of black residents in suburban St. Louis County in the early and mid-20th century.
In some cases, white communities surrounding black neighborhoods devised methods to expel their black populations, sometimes with barely disguised racial motivation. In other cases, white towns adopted new zoning rules, brazenly designed to prevent African Americans from settling. And in yet other cases, towns annexed unincorporated land or incorporated it independently to maintain segregated housing patterns.
One tool used nationwide by suburbs pursuing segregation was invoking eminent domain – the power to condemn and seize land for public purposes. In 1959, Howard and Katie Venable, an African American couple, purchased a residential lot in the mostly white St. Louis suburb of Creve Coeur. The Venables applied for, and the town approved, the necessary permits to build a home, and construction had begun when town residents discovered that the purchasers were black. A hastily organized citizens committee raised contributions to purchase the property, but could not pressure the couple to sell. The city then condemned the property for use as a park and playground. The couple challenged the condemnation, but a Missouri appeals court ruled that courts could not inquire into the motives for a condemnation, provided its purpose was for a public use, which a park and playground surely were.52
Fifteen years later, Creve Coeur again forestalled the possibility of integration when it ousted its one small black neighborhood, characterized by small homes on small lots that had been deeded before the city’s zoning law required much larger ones. The city harassed the homeowners with code violations and denied building permits for remodeling. The city itself even bought up lots in the neighborhood through a straw party, as the Creve Coeur mayor allowed that he “personally did not want any colored in there.” The neighborhood was razed and is today the Malcolm Terrace public park and neighborhood, one of the more affluent in Creve Coeur.53
In 1969, a Methodist church-sponsored nonprofit organization proposed to construct a racially integrated and federally subsidized development for moderate- and low-income families in Black Jack, an all-white suburb in unincorporated St. Louis County. In response, Black Jack rapidly incorporated and adopted a zoning ordinance prohibiting more than three homes per acre, making development of new moderate-income housing impossible (although some already existed within the new city boundaries). Several African American residents of the city of St. Louis sued. They claimed they had been unable to find decent housing outside the ghetto and therefore had little access to employment that was increasingly suburban. The incident attracted national attention, and the Nixon administration deliberated for many months about whether to file its own suit to enjoin the zoning ordinance.54
Eventually it did, and a federal appeals court ordered Black Jack to permit the development to proceed. The court observed that opposition to the integrated development was “repeatedly expressed in racial terms by persons whom the District Court found to be leaders of the incorporation movement, by individuals circulating petitions, and by zoning commissioners themselves.” The court continued: “Racial criticism of [the proposed development] was made and cheered at public meetings. The uncontradicted evidence indicates that, at all levels of opposition, race played a significant role, both in the drive to incorporate and the decision to rezone.”
Citing similar cases from elsewhere in the country, the court concluded that Black Jack’s actions were “but one more factor confining blacks to low-income housing in the center city, confirming the inexorable process whereby the St. Louis metropolitan area becomes one that ‘has the racial shape of a donut, with the Negroes in the hole and with mostly Whites occupying the ring.’”55
However, by the time the court order was obtained, the Methodist group had lost its financing, interest rates had climbed, and, according to urban historian Colin Gordon, the federal government was “lukewarm” about proceeding with the integrated development. The lawyers for the integrated project said that, despite the court ruling, “no developer in his or her right mind” would proceed with the project in the face of such hostility. It was never constructed.56
In 1981, an almost identical series of events transpired in Affton, a white suburb south of the city of St. Louis. A religious order offered to sell a parcel of land to a developer who planned to build low-density subsidized housing. Groups that had originally formed to protest court-ordered school busing for racial integration flooded a meeting of the St. Louis County Planning Commission. The groups demanded that the parcel be rezoned to prohibit multifamily housing. A councilman who was one of the leaders of the rezoning proponents, probably with Black Jack in mind, admitted that “I think we’ll get sued” for this rezoning, but the county council nonetheless voted 6 to 1 to ban multifamily construction.57 There were no lawsuits, however, perhaps because the lesson of Black Jack was that winning a lawsuit is not the same as winning the fight for integration.
As years have passed, public officials and citizens generally have learned to be less explicit about racial animus. Other predominantly white areas in southern and western St. Louis County have incorporated to adopt exclusionary zoning ordinances, but support was expressed in terms of desires to keep out low-income families and to preserve uniform single-family lots throughout the communities, not in terms as racially explicit as the court found in Black Jack.
Nationwide, beginning in the 1970s, public housing authorities have demolished their physical projects and substituted subsidies to eligible families for rental of privately owned and operated housing. The subsidies, now known as “Section 8” vouchers, permit low-income families to rent market-rate apartments that would otherwise be unaffordable. The vouchers could, in theory, be used to promote integration, although this would not be possible in communities with exclusionary zoning ordinances. But in the St. Louis County suburbs and unincorporated areas where working class whites were living in multifamily units, the likelihood of housing Section 8 voucher recipients increased as the city of St. Louis demolished more of its projects.
To forestall this growing threat, in 1995 alone two white suburban areas in St. Louis County incorporated to be able to adopt zoning ordinances preventing multifamily buildings accessible to Section 8 voucher holders. One, Wildwood, encompassed all the unincorporated area in western St. Louis County, an area equal in size to the city of St. Louis itself.58 As of the 2010 census, this new city remained 92 percent white and less than 2 percent African American. It has managed to prevent development of housing affordable to most African Americans. Wildwood’s median family income is over twice the national median and its poverty rate is less than 2 percent. The other, Green Park in southern St. Louis County, also incorporated to prevent the construction of apartments that could house Section 8 voucher holders.59 It remains 93 percent white and 1 percent African American, despite its solidly middle-class character. Green Park’s median family income is close to the national median, while the town’s family poverty rate is also less than 2 percent.
Urban renewal and redevelopment programs
In 1950, Olivette in St. Louis County annexed a portion of the adjacent unincorporated community of Elmwood Park. Twenty years later, the chairman of the Olivette Land Clearance and Redevelopment Authority asserted that the annexation was needed simply to “straighten” the city’s boundaries. Olivette was an all-white, solidly middle-class community where nearly two-thirds of residences were single-family; apartment dwellers in the balance were socioeconomically similar. Adjacent Elmwood Park, in contrast, was very poor, African American, with 37 dilapidated homes, subject to frequent flooding from the River Des Peres, and without paved roads or sewers. Elmwood Park had been settled after the Civil War by laborers, formerly slaves on nearby farms.
The area was bisected by railroad tracks; Olivette annexed the portion north of the city and south of the tracks, creating a physical boundary between the expanded city and unincorporated Elmwood Park. Olivette was under no legal obligation to notify affected Elmwood Park residents of the annexation, and it did not do so. After the annexation, Olivette provided no services to its new Elmwood Park neighborhood and erected a barbed-wire fence between the neighborhood and the nearest white subdivision. (Even after 1954 when schools were integrated, school buses did not come into the annexed neighborhood, so black children had to walk around the perimeter of the white subdivision, rather than taking a direct route across it, to board their school bus.) Olivette did mail tax bills to the newly annexed residents, but few Elmwood Park homeowners apparently understood the implication of these bills. Most were not aware of the annexation until 1955, when Olivette began to auction off their homes for nonpayment of taxes and other fees.
The actual aim of Olivette officials was almost certainly not to “straighten boundaries” but to force Elmwood Park residents to abandon their homes (or have them seized) so the area could be redeveloped with industry, both to increase Olivette’s tax revenue and to reinforce the barrier between Olivette and the remaining African American community in unincorporated Elmwood Park.
By 1960, however, a decade after the annexation, Olivette had not succeeded in driving most Elmwood Park residents away. Most had scraped up enough money to pay their back taxes. So Olivette applied for and obtained federal urban renewal funds, enabling it to condemn the land and attract industrial development. Olivette then informed Elmwood Park residents that their homes were too dilapidated to rehabilitate and would be demolished. It rezoned Elmwood Park as industrial, condemned the African American residents’ properties, and began charging them rent to live in homes they had previously possessed clear of mortgages.
Although federal urban renewal policy required Olivette to relocate the displaced residents within Olivette, the federal government initially refused to enforce that requirement, and Olivette instead offered housing either in a public housing project being constructed in unincorporated Elmwood Park or in the city of St. Louis. Responding to protests, the government eventually required Olivette to build 10 residential units in the industrial zone, which the city separated from its middle-class areas by a park.60 Most of the original residents of the annexed neighborhood relocated to St. Louis, to the all-black suburb of Wellston, or to a black neighborhood in another suburb, University City. Once constructed, Olivette’s new public housing development in the industrial zone was also all-black, separated from the rest of the city.61
Meanwhile, St. Louis County also declared the unincorporated area of Elmwood Park a redevelopment zone. The homes of 170 black families there were razed in the early 1960s and the county developed industry and more expensive housing, unaffordable to the former residents. The displaced families were given small relocation allowances, inadequate to purchase comparable housing. Many scattered to other black pockets in the county, or to the city of St. Louis’s ghetto. A grand jury later concluded, too late to reverse the hardship, that because of its racial impact, the urban renewal program was “an evasion of responsibility” and nothing more than a “race clearance program.”62
While suburbs with clusters of black residents were designing redevelopment projects that forced African Americans to seek public housing back in the city, St. Louis itself was pursuing urban renewal and redevelopment that forced black residents into nearby suburbs and attracted white middle-class suburbanites back to the city. Beginning in the 1950s, the city’s urban renewal projects condemned and razed slum housing occupied mostly by African Americans and constructed monuments and other institutions in place of those homes. Neighborhoods were razed for the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial (which includes the Gateway Arch), a museum, a sports stadium, interstate highways (including ramps and interchanges) to bring suburban commuters into white-collar city jobs, new industry and hotels for the city, university expansion, and middle-class housing that was unaffordable to former African American residents of the redeveloped areas.63
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Mill Creek Valley, the community at the heart of St. Louis’s African American life, was demolished beginning in 1959, displacing 20,000 residents, 95 percent of whom were black. Some 40 churches were razed as their parishioners scattered to developing ghettos in inner-ring suburbs. The Mill Creek acreage was then used for an expansion of St. Louis University, an expressway, a private market-rate housing project, and a subsidized public-private project.64
In some cases, as was true elsewhere in the country, after African American neighborhoods were demolished, planners’ designs for redevelopment never materialized, and the cleared land remained vacant. One early St. Louis venture, the Kosciusko Urban Renewal Project, demolished an African American neighborhood of 70 blocks and 221 acres in the early 1960s, with plans for attracting new industry. Much of it still remained vacant or with paved-over lots, 50 years later.65
Some federal urban renewal laws required that displaced residents be provided with new housing, but others did not. But even for those laws with such requirements, only about half of the African Americans displaced by urban renewal in St. Louis were offered any relocation assistance. Displaced families, whether on their own or with assistance, mostly relocated to public housing or to apartments adjoining their former ghetto that were as substandard as those from which they had been displaced.66 Soon public housing itself became unavailable, and the St. Louis Housing Authority issued Section 8 rent supplement vouchers to eligible families. From 1950 to 1980, St. Louis assigned 7,900 family residential units either to public housing or to subsidized apartments. Of these, 94 percent were in census tracts where more than 75 percent of the residents were African American.67 As black families moved repeatedly to stay ahead of the urban renewal bulldozers, space in the city itself disappeared, and a wholesale movement to the northern and northwestern suburbs began.
A 1970 staff report of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights faulted the conduct of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), concluding that:
Federal programs of housing and urban development not only have failed to eliminate the dual housing market, but have had the effect of perpetuating and promoting it.… HUD has failed to carry out [its] affirmative obligations [to prevent discrimination] and has permitted its programs to be operated in a discriminatory manner in the St. Louis metropolitan area.… As long as HUD continues to condone the discriminatory activities of the local housing and home finance industry – public and private – there is little hope of relief for black families from the existing system of separate and unequal housing conditions.68
Regulatory support of policies in the real estate and financial sectors that promoted segregation
Government regulators at the local, state, and federal levels failed to halt, indeed they endorsed, discriminatory practices of the real estate and financial sectors that played significant roles in the segregation of housing in St. Louis and nationwide.
Blockbusting
Real estate speculators assisted the conversion of inner-ring suburbs from white to black by creating panic among white homeowners with the message that unless they sold quickly, their property values would deteriorate. In a systematic fashion, these real estate agents “blockbusted” neighborhood by neighborhood as African American refugees from urban renewal moved north and northwest. The blockbusting contributed to the transformation of inner-ring suburbs like Ferguson from all-white communities that excluded African Americans to today’s deteriorating nearly all-black (or becoming all-black) suburbs.
In St. Louis, blockbusting began as the ghetto expanded, and then proceeded to inner-ring suburbs when St. Louis itself could no longer absorb its growing (and later, displaced) African American population. The practice was not unique to St. Louis. It was commonplace nationwide. Typically, an African American family like the Williamses or Allens found housing in a lower-middle-class neighborhood just outside the ghetto. Frequently a blockbusting real estate agent arranged this initial sale, perhaps subsidizing it himself. Once the family moved in and was visible, real estate agents solicited nearby homeowners to sell quickly before an imminent influx of black buyers caused their homes to lose value. Sometimes the agents supported their predictions by hiring black youth to drive around the neighborhood blasting music, by placing fictitious for-sale advertisements in African American newspapers (and showing copies to white homeowners), or by hiring black women to push baby carriages around, or engaging in other similar tactics.69 While it was not usually necessary for real estate agents to be as flamboyant as this, such tactics were employed more than occasionally.
A 1995 St. Louis newspaper report alleged that in some cases, speculators did not have initial African American buyers but instead bought homes in neighborhoods they anticipated turning into African American communities, and let the empty houses deteriorate to depress the value of others nearby.70 After neighbors were sufficiently panicked, speculators bought properties at reduced prices and then resold them at inflated prices to African Americans in desperate need of housing. Agents made large profits in this way. Once a block or neighborhood had been “busted” in this fashion, agents would proceed to the next block or neighborhood, using similar tactics. Some agents did not resell homes, but subdivided and rented them to black families.
Adel Allen described how, soon after he moved into his new home, “for sale” signs went up on his block in Kirkwood (the town that zoning officials tried so hard in 1940 to keep white and where the advertisement featured earlier shows that the FHA had approved whites-only development in 1952). Allen did not mention a conspicuous role of real estate agents, but they likely were involved in his neighbors’ panic selling.
The problem was serious enough that some St. Louis suburbs, and St. Louis itself, attempted to legislate against blockbusting. But violations were and still are hard to prove, and creating a sufficiently precise definition of blockbusting for statutory purposes was and remains challenging. In 1969, St. Louis adopted ordinances prohibiting solicitation of listings by real estate agents and the placement of “open,” “for sale,” or “sold” signs in specific designated zones considered subject to sudden racial change. A subsequent amendment permitted such a sign if a private individual, not a real estate agent, obtained a permit from the city’s Human Relations Council that could be granted only after the council made a determination that the neighborhood was not subject to rapid racial change.71
In the late 1960s, the western suburb of Vinita Park adopted an ordinance prohibiting all solicitation of listings by real estate agents.72 Blockbusting in another suburb, University City, began as early as 1962; the suburb also banned “for sale” signs and adopted an antiblockbusting ordinance.73 University City remains uniquely integrated, although within the city, black and white neighborhoods are mostly distinct. Other suburbs also took action against blockbusting, but without much impact. The only effective control over blockbusting would have been disciplinary action by the Missouri Real Estate Commission, the state agency charged with regulating the industry, but this was not forthcoming.
Racial steering
Real estate agents’ practices and state action to create and support racial segregation were inseparable in St. Louis and elsewhere. Overlapping with zoning rules adopted by Harland Bartholomew’s City Plan Commission in 1919, the St. Louis Real Estate Exchange surveyed its members in 1923 to define zones in which property could be sold to African Americans. City government worked hand-in-glove with the exchange, providing it with data on changing racial residential patterns so the exchange could adapt its restrictive practices accordingly. By 1930, the City Plan Commission estimated that 80 percent of the city’s African American population was contained within the zones established by the Real Estate Exchange. These boundaries were revised substantially in 1941, and continued to guide real estate practice afterwards.74
The Real Estate Exchange adopted a code of ethics in the mid-1920s, with language taken verbatim from the 1924 code of National Association of Realtors that stated: “A realtor should never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood … members of any race or nationality … whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values in that neighborhood.”75
Both the St. Louis Real Estate Exchange and the Missouri Real Estate Commission deemed sales to African Americans in white neighborhoods to constitute professional misconduct that could result in loss of license. It could also lead to expulsion from the national as well as the local association, making it difficult for real estate agents to stay in business because they would no longer have access to multiple listing services.76
In 1950, the national association amended its code so that integrating a neighborhood was no longer explicitly unethical, instead prohibiting sales that would be “detrimental to property values.” real estate agents nationwide continued to interpret this rule (as it was doubtlessly intended) as prohibiting sales to African Americans in white neighborhoods and continued practices of promoting and enforcing segregation. The revised code suggested no positive obligation of nondiscrimination.77
Making explicit that the revised code, despite its sanitized wording, implied no change in race policy, the St. Louis Real Estate Exchange sent this notice to all members in 1955: “No Member of our Board may, directly or indirectly, sell to Negroes … unless there are three separate and distinct buildings in such block already occupied by Negroes.… This rule is of long standing [and is our interpretation of] the Code of Ethics of the National Association of Real Estate Boards.”78
In 1969, a year after enactment of the Fair Housing Act, a St. Louis real estate agent boasted to an investigator, “We never sell to colored. When they ask for a specific house, we tell them there is already a contract on that house.”79 At that time, St. Louis real estate agents still asserted they would lose their licenses if they sold homes to African Americans in white neighborhoods.80
A 1953 survey by the FHA found that St. Louis had 80,000 African Americans with stable working-class and middle-class jobs who could have afforded to buy their own homes and participate in the postwar suburban boom.81 But few were permitted to do so (in considerable part because of the FHA’s own policy) and instead were forced either to rent ghetto apartments in the city or settle in the few lower-class black enclaves (like Kinloch) in the suburbs. As Larman Williams and Adel Allen later found, until passage of the Fair Housing Act and to some extent afterwards, real estate agents openly steered black home buyers away from white neighborhoods, helping to prevent the emergence of a solid black lower middle class that could have integrated into socioeconomically similar white suburbs.
To address racial steering, the federal government had levers that it declined to use. For example, one St. Louis County employer was the Mallinckrodt Chemical Works, a government contractor that sold medical supplies to the Veterans Administration. At the same 1970 hearing of the Civil Rights Commission at which the Williamses and Adel Allen testified, Charles Swartout, vice president for personnel of Mallinckrodt, said he had difficulty attracting black professional, technical, and administrative employees to the company’s suburban facility because the recruits were unable to find housing in the area. The company maintained a list of real estate agents to which it referred employees it recruited. The commission’s general counsel asked Mr. Swartout whether the company might ask real estate agents on the list to agree not to discriminate. No, he replied, “I don’t think we would [ask that] any more than we do [for] suppliers of chemicals or equipment.”82 This testimony occurred two years after adoption of the Fair Housing Act making discrimination unlawful. The federal government was apparently unwilling to require its contractors to refer prospective employees only to real estate agents who agreed to obey the law.
Federal acquiescence also played a role in the case of McDonnell Douglas, a major suburban St. Louis defense contractor. The company maintained separate housing lists for white and black recruits so that employees of each race could be referred to their respective segregated communities. It merged its lists in the late 1960s, but this had little effect.83 By 1970 the company employed nearly 3,000 nonwhite workers. The previous year alone, some 650 new hires at the plant were nonwhite. Yet when these employees, with good and stable jobs, sought housing, real estate agents still routinely referred them to the black Kinloch suburb, avoiding the many available homes in working-class white suburban communities nearer the plant. Unlike Adel Allen, many were not in jobs paying well enough to enable them to break into a middle-class suburb like Kirkwood. In these cases, real estate agents steered African American workers away from lower-middle-class suburbs. Often these workers could find housing only far away in the St. Louis ghetto, resulting in long commutes and excessive absenteeism when carpooling arrangements failed. With public transportation, the commute took as much as two hours each way.84 Black workers at other industrial plants, increasingly located in the suburbs, faced similar challenges.
Heavily regulated industries as agents of the state
Should the actions of real estate agents contributing to the racial segregation of the St. Louis metropolitan area be considered private or state action? As noted above, the conventional understanding of conditions that led to the recent conflicts in Ferguson emphasizes the white flight of homeowners from inner-ring suburbs once African Americans arrived. But white flight spurred directly by real estate industry practices that were sanctioned, even encouraged, by state regulators calls for remedial public actions that account for government’s role in Ferguson’s transformation.
Almost every industry in the United States is regulated by government to some extent, so it would be foolish to consider the mere fact of regulation to justify a public remedy. Yet few industries are as regulated as real estate. Obtaining a real estate license in Missouri and in other states requires extensive study, testing, and recertification. Regulations cover detailed aspects of real estate practice, including not only who can show a home or how escrow funds should be handled, but the personal behavior of real estate agents in their private lives. Until late in the 20th century, however, it almost seemed that the sole area of real estate practice not subject to regulation was racial discrimination, except to the extent that real estate agents were subject to discipline if they did not discriminate. Racial steering by real estate agents had been unlawful since 1866, but Missouri’s and the nation’s real estate ethics rules required it.85
Blockbusting on its face was a flagrant violation of the Real Estate Exchange’s and the Missouri Real Estate Commission’s prohibition of introducing black families into white neighborhoods, but the commission did not deem blockbusting inappropriate until 1970, two years after federal law reiterated its illegality, and even after that, enforcement was weak or nonexistent.86
Insurance and banking are two industries that are even more regulated than real estate, and these also played important roles in segregating St. Louis and the nation. Until the 1960s, insurance companies openly practiced “redlining” – refusing casualty or title insurance in black neighborhoods, or making it available only at premium rates.87 The nation’s leading insurance companies became developers themselves – of segregated apartment complexes.
For most of the 20th century banks also routinely and openly practiced redlining and refused mortgages or home improvement loans to African Americans in predominantly white neighborhoods. Federal and state regulators rarely took notice. In one recent case, however, the Department of Housing and Urban Development pursued a complaint that the First National Bank of St. Louis had avoiding making loans in predominantly minority neighborhoods. As part of its settlement of the case, the bank promised the federal government that it would open a branch in Ferguson to remedy its past failures. The branch opened in March 2012.88
Public labor market policy contributing to segregation
This report has described the public – federal, state, and local – housing policies that contributed to the residential segregation of Ferguson and the entire St. Louis metropolitan area. Without these policies, we would not be confronted with the racial inequality and conflict we continue to experience today. While it is beyond the scope of this report to fully explore the nonhousing public policies contributing to residential segregation, labor market and employment policy has had such a direct impact on housing that it warrants brief mention here.
If state-sponsored labor and employment discrimination reduced the incomes of African Americans relative to whites in St. Louis, the ability of African Americans to afford housing in middle-class suburbs would have suffered, even in the absence of specific housing discrimination. And, indeed, public labor and employment policy did play such a role.
Defense plants like McDonnell Douglas were, by the 1970s, mostly welcoming to black workers, but this was a relatively late development. During World War II, St. Louis was the site of a large arms and ammunition industry. The St. Louis Small Arms Ammunition Plant alone employed 40,000 workers.89 At first, this federally controlled plant would not hire African Americans except as janitors, landscape gardeners, or other service workers, but after civil rights demonstrations at the plant in 1942, the plant agreed to hire blacks for production work – but only on a separate, segregated production line. In 1944, the plant finally agreed to integrate its production lines, but by then, the war was nearly over.90
The federal government also had a role in other industries’ treatment of black workers. For example, while the United Auto Workers union at the Chrysler plant in the St. Louis suburb of Fenton was unusually hospitable to black workers, unions in other industries denied membership and thus jobs to African Americans. In St. Louis (and elsewhere) these whites-only unions nonetheless were recognized as exclusive bargaining agents by the federal government. This had an especially big impact in the construction trades, which offered numerous jobs during the suburban housing boom but excluded African American workers. Eventually the National Labor Relations Board concluded that it was violating the Constitution when it certified unions that denied membership to black workers, but it did not make such a ruling until the suburban housing boom was mostly complete.
The lower incomes of African Americans today cannot be understood in isolation from the history of pervasive housing segregation. By keeping black families out of the better-off suburbs, segregation not only deprived them of the opportunity to build wealth through rising home equity, but contributed to (and was reinforced by) what urban scholars term the “spatial mismatch” between the neighborhoods where African Americans mostly lived, and the better suburban jobs they had difficulty accessing. After World War II and accelerating in the 1950s and 1960s, industrial corporations nationwide relocated facilities from city to suburb, or established new suburban plants. This phenomenon can be seen in the trajectory of employment opportunities in the city of St. Louis. From 1951 to 1967, the number of jobs in the city of St. Louis declined by 20 percent, while those in suburban St. Louis County increased by 400 percent.91
For black workers who were able to commute to work in the suburbs, higher commuting costs reduced incomes relative to incomes of whites. From 1959 to 2009, Chrysler operated its assembly plant in suburban Fenton. Black workers living in the St. Louis ghetto and unable to live near the plant spent up to an hour, each way, commuting. But many more black workers were simply unable to take jobs at the Chrysler plant because they could not get there. In the 1960s, Chrysler made a special effort to recruit black workers for a training program for production jobs. The program’s retention rate was only 40 percent, mostly because of absenteeism due to transportation difficulties.92 Today, the town of Fenton remains 96 percent white, less than 0.5 percent black.
We now understand that, for both races, intergenerational income mobility – the ability of adult children to do better than their parents – is quite limited, which means we are still paying a price for these labor market practices. Contemporary conditions in Ferguson are but one illustration.
In conclusion: Understanding segregation’s causes suggests remedies
Once rules of residential segregation were firmly in place, other, race-neutral, public policies had and still have a disparate impact on African Americans, reinforcing the segregation. For example, the federal income tax system, permitting the deduction of home mortgage interest, subsidizes those who move to single-family homes in white suburbs and thus imposes a relative penalty on those who remain renting in urban African American neighborhoods.
The federal highway system routed highways through urban areas often to eliminate black neighborhoods that were close to downtowns. And the generous financing of interstate highways relative to efficient public transportation facilitated the commutes of white suburbanites to office jobs in the city while making it harder for African Americans restricted to urban neighborhoods to obtain good industrial jobs in the suburbs.
But the disparate impacts of the mortgage interest deduction and transportation priorities should not distract us from the underlying reality. These policies would have had no racial impact if African Americans had been permitted to suburbanize along with whites.
A century of evidence demonstrates that St. Louis was segregated by interlocking and racially explicit public policies of zoning, public housing, and suburban finance, and by publicly endorsed segregation policies of the real estate, banking, and insurance industries. These governmental policies interacted with public labor market and employment policies that denied African Americans access to jobs available to comparably skilled whites. When these mutually reinforcing public policies conspired with private prejudice to turn St. Louis’s African American communities into slums, public officials razed those slums to devote acreage to more profitable (and less unsightly) uses. African Americans who were displaced then relocated to the few other places available, converting towns like Ferguson into new segregated enclaves.
The pattern – in St. Louis and other U.S. metropolitan areas – of white middle-class suburbs surrounding black ghettos cannot easily be explained without taking account of the myriad public policies that, with race-conscious intent, encouraged and supported this particular distribution of population by race. After all, as historian Colin Gordon has noted, in Europe, the opposite pattern prevails – middle-class whites reside in the center cities, and low-income immigrants settle in the suburbs, where public housing is located.93 Today, as whites in St. Louis and elsewhere find gentrifying urban neighborhoods more attractive, and displaced African Americans relocate in heavy concentrations to specific suburbs, we may be replicating segregation on the European model.
As the federal court observed more than 30 years ago, school desegregation requires housing desegregation.94 Several elementary schools in Ferguson today are 90 percent African American and no elementary school is less than 75 percent African American; educational performance in such racially isolated settings is inadequate. As the tragic death of Michael Brown shows, the interaction of black men and youths with police has much in common with Adel Allen’s experiences 50 years ago, and the reaction in Ferguson (though comparatively mild) is reminiscent of the 1967 race riots that the Kerner Commission investigated.
Litigation has revealed that in the 2000s, federally supervised banks marketed exploitative subprime loans to African American communities like Ferguson, expecting that African Americans (particularly the elderly) were too gullible to resist false promises. When the loans’ exploding interest rates combined with the collapse of the housing bubble, it compounded the devastation of black neighborhoods.95 Half of Ferguson homes today are underwater, with owners owing more than their homes are worth.96
Many practical programs and regulatory strategies can address problems of Ferguson and similar communities nationwide. One example is to prohibit landlords from refusing to accept tenants whose rent is subsidized – a few states and municipalities currently do prohibit such refusal, but most do not. Another example is to require even outer-ring suburbs to repeal zoning ordinances that prohibit construction of housing that lower- or moderate-income residents – white or black – can afford. Going further, we could require every community to permit development of housing to accommodate a “fair share” of its region’s low-income and minority populations – New Jersey, for example, has taken a very modest step towards this requirement.97
But we won’t consider such remedies if we remain blind to how Ferguson became Ferguson. It is impractical to think that the public and policymakers will support remedies to problems whose causes they don’t understand. We flatter ourselves that the responsibility is only borne by rogue police officers, white flight, and suburbanites’ desire for economic homogeneity. Prosecuting the officer who shot Michael Brown, or investigating and integrating Ferguson’s police department, can’t address the deeper obstacles to racial progress.
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TCF: Attacking the Black–White Opportunity Gap That Comes from Residential Segregation
The Deliberate Social Engineering of Black–White Residential Segregation
Both currently and historically, segregation is best understood as a tool used to promote and preserve white supremacy, deployed to make it easier to isolate, divest from, surveil, and police black (and brown) people concentrated in certain communities. The ingenuity of this racist tool is that its evil use creates its own justification—that is, once employed, it creates perspectives and data that seem to support its further use. As communities of color suffer under the deprivations that come with segregation—economic disinvestment, political disenfranchisement, educational inequity, and unfair, ineffective policing practices—those who build and install resilient and enduring racist systems that sustain segregation explain their decisions in terms of protecting and promoting safety, strong schools, and stable housing markets. These indeed are desirable neighborhood attributes—but they are the very same attributes that the conditions of segregation disrupted for blacks.
The ingenuity of this racist tool is that its evil use creates its own justification—that is, once employed, it creates perspectives and data that seem to support its further use.
In fact, regarding neighborhood characteristics, African Americans express the same values and desires as most Americans, even though they have much more difficulty in realizing them. According to a study of black Long Islanders, residents considered the most important neighborhood characteristics to be a low crime rate (89 percent), landlords/homeowners who maintain their property (81 percent), high quality public schools (80 percent), and good public services (78 percent). Yet only 16 percent rated their local public schools as excellent, and 43 percent of residents reported feeling that their local government services were not a good value for the taxes that they pay.18
Extensive evidence suggests that black residents in many segregated communities do not believe that their needs and desires are met in their current environments. Survey results indicate that most Americans prefer integrated neighborhoods, but white and black Americans define “integrated” differently. For African Americans, an integrated community is one where between 20 to 50 percent of residents are African American. White definitions of integration indicate that they accept diversity only when they can continue to dominate, defining integration as a scenario where only 10 percent of neighborhood residents are black.19 A recent Pew Survey found that blacks are much more supportive of integrated schools than are whites, particularly when that integration necessitates children going to schools outside of their neighborhoods. Sixty-eight percent of blacks say that “students should go to schools that are racially and ethnically mixed, even if it means some students don’t go to school in their local community,” compared to just 35 percent of whites.20 Given the close relationship between housing and school integration, such data exposes how the African-American value of integrated school options is crushed by the reality of racially isolated neighborhoods.
Certainly, integration is not a panacea for past and present injustices. In fact, pro-integration advocates should respect the ways that integration might lead to new hardships for black folks—increased discomfort and fear of police encounters, elevated levels of surveillance and suspicion from neighbors, disproportionate discipline of black children in predominantly white schools, and so on.21 In large part due to the very attitudes that sustain segregation, communities of color have a reasonable desire to live in a safe and affirming space when living in a discriminatory society; and despite typically having fewer resources to work with, black and brown people so often foster loving, culturally rich, and affirming communities for themselves. And so one challenge of contemporary housing integration efforts becomes how to dismantle the racist system of policies that created and continue to sustain residential segregation without simultaneously destroying valuable cultural and economic institutions that black and brown communities have created in response to it.
Integration best functions (and is best incentivized) when public policies and private citizens tackle the myriad of inequities and indignities that complicate, and sometimes limit, the lives of African Americans. Despite this caveat, it remains true that (1) both historically and currently, black people have risked their comfort, livelihoods, and sometimes lives to gain access to integrated spaces; and, most importantly, that (2) segregation itself is a white supremacist practice that has proven both durable and highly effective at limiting black wealth and opportunity.
Racial housing segregation, residential poverty concentration, and diminished housing access did not emerge accidentally. Richard Rothstein, author of The Color of Law, contends that this enduring segregation results from “a century of social engineering on the part of federal, state, and local governments that enacted policies to keep African Americans separate and subordinate.”22 Those engineers were both liberal and conservative, dwelling in multiple branches and levels of government—as the following sections will show.
From Racial Zoning to Economic Zoning
Members of government and private entities began to deliberately segregate residential areas by race in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, largely by prohibiting blacks from purchasing homes in majority-white neighborhoods. After the Civil War, those newly liberated black people dispersed throughout the United States, but an abrupt end to Reconstruction ushered in an era of heightened white paramilitary violence, exploitative sharecropping arrangements, and Jim Crow laws. As anti-black discrimination formalized and intensified, many communities systematically expelled African Americans, excluded them from public goods and services, and adopted policies that forbade blacks from residing in towns, or even remaining within town borders after dark.23 Communities who forbade blacks from being within their borders after dark came to be known as “sundown towns”; by 1930, at least 235 counties had “sundowned” black people, often enforcing their rules through violence.24
Pioneered by Baltimore in 1910, racial zoning quickly emerged as an effective way to further subjugate and segregate black folks. Baltimore’s then-mayor did not mince words when discussing the motivation for such an ordinance: “Blacks should be quarantined in isolated slums in order to reduce the incidence of civil disturbance, to prevent the spread of communicable disease into nearby white neighborhoods, and to protect property values among the white majority.”25 Soon, similar policies spread to other cities, including Atlanta, Birmingham, Dade County (Miami), Charleston, Dallas, Louisville, New Orleans, Oklahoma City, Richmond, St. Louis, and others.26
The U.S. Supreme Court in 1917 struck down explicit racial zoning with its decision in Buchanan v. Warley, arguing that such ordinances interfered with the rights of property owners.27 The ruling failed to put an end to segregation, however, instead motivating a new wave of racist creativity by white leaders and communities. Localities quickly found a way to circumvent the ruling and preserve the racial caste system in housing. Some localities created and enforced laws in flagrant violation of Buchanan. Richmond, Virginia, for example, passed a law prohibiting anyone from moving onto a block where they could not marry the majority of people on that block. Because the state had then-enforceable anti-miscegenation laws on the books, the ordinance effectively prevented neighborhood integration without explicitly mentioning race.28
Other localities were slightly more subtle. Switching from race-based zoning to economic zoning, cities and localities designed policies now known as “exclusionary zoning,” which require that neighborhoods consist exclusively of single-family homes, have minimum lot sizes, and/or have minimum square footage requirements. These policies rapidly proliferated. In 1916, just eight cities had zoning ordinances; by 1936, that number had risen to 1,246.29
The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the practice of exclusionary zoning in Euclid v. Ambler (1926), finding that zoning ordinances were reasonable extensions of police power and potentially beneficial to public welfare. While arguments against placement of factories or landfills next to residences can reasonably be said to protect public safety, when it came to siting residences, the opinion in Euclid stated additional concerns: that an apartment could be “a mere parasite, constructed in order to take advantage of the open spaces and attractive surroundings created by the residential character of a neighborhood,” adding later that “apartment houses . . . come very near to being nuisances.”30 Of course, because many blacks could not afford to buy around the expensive housing restrictions, such “race-neutral” economic zoning policies had a racially discriminatory effect.
Restrictive Covenants, Redlining, and Racial Violence
This supposedly “race-neutral” form of economic discrimination emerged alongside longstanding, more explicit political and economic racism. In order to continue to exclude middle- and upper-class blacks from white neighborhoods, public and private interests conspired to establish a web of racist policies and practices surrounding housing and homeownership. One practice for many white homeowners was to band together and adopt racially restrictive covenants in their neighborhoods, which forbade any buyer from reselling a home to black buyers. Initially upheld in Corrigan v. Buckley (1926), the U.S. Supreme Court reasoned that covenants were private contracts not subject to the Constitution.31 But the Court’s logic was faulty, because (1) private contracts are not enforceable except through the power of the state, and (2) the state was using that power of enforcement. In city after city, courts and sheriffs successfully evicted African Americans from homes that they had rightly purchased in order to enforce racially restrictive covenants.32 The racist contracts were so widely accepted that the commissioner of the Federal Housing Administration continued to recommend their use well after the U.S. Supreme Court declared them unconstitutional in Shelley v. Kramer (1948), dismissing the ruling and declaring that it was not “the policy of the government to require private individuals to give up their right to dispose of their property as they see fit.”33 Still today, racially restrictive covenants appear in real estate records, even if they are unenforceable.34
In order to continue to exclude middle- and upper-class blacks from white neighborhoods, public and private interests conspired to establish a web of racist policies and practices surrounding housing and homeownership.
The official position of the Federal Housing Administration—which underwrote $120 billion in new housing construction between 1934 and 1962—was that blacks were an adverse influence on property values.35 In response, the FHA warned against insuring mortgages for homes in racially mixed neighborhoods, and counseled lenders to reject or give poor ratings to loan applicants from black and brown neighborhoods. Baking racial exclusion into programs designed to promote homeownership, an FHA manual suggested that the best financial bets were those where safeguards—such as highways separating communities—could prevent “the infiltration of lower class occupancy, and inharmonious racial groups.”36 The FHA’s chief economist Homer Hoyt designed a racial ranking system that positioned “Mexicans” and “Negroes” as the least desirable neighborhood residents, and worked with the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation to map cities and design areas into various risk categories congruent with that racial hierarchy. Homebuyers seeking to purchase in “red” zone neighborhoods—those with high percentages of black residents, regardless of the wealth of those residents—would likely be denied a mortgage loan and received no federal support. The FHA provided the strongest financial support to green-zoned areas that, as one appraiser noted, lacked “a single foreigner or Negro.”37 In 1940, the FHA actually denied insurance for a white developer with a project located near an African-American community until the builder agreed to construct a half-mile, six-foot high concrete wall to separate the two neighborhoods.38 Not only did this practice of redlining explicitly encourage and perpetuate racial segregation, it also shut black Americans out of key opportunities for one of the country’s most effective wealth-building strategies: homeownership. Of all of the homeownership loans approved by the government between 1934 and 1968, whites received 98 percent of them.39
The U.S. Supreme Court ultimately struck down racially restrictive covenants in Shelley v. Kramer (1948), but even then, many black families faced grave risks when attempting to move into white neighborhoods. Extralegal violence became an all-too-common method of maintaining segregation through intimidation and fear.40 In one case, when a middle-class black family moved into an all-white neighborhood in a suburb of Philadelphia, some 600 white demonstrators gathered in front of the house and pelted the home and family with rocks. Shortly after, several whites rented a unit next door to the family, hoisting up a Confederate flag and blaring music throughout the night. Klan and community members burned a cross in the family’s yard. Law enforcement largely declined to intervene, with one sergeant suffering a demotion to patrolman after objecting to his orders not to interfere with the rioters.41 In Richmond, California, members of the neighborhood homeowners association insisted that they could enforce a racially restrictive covenant against a black war veteran and his wife after they purchased a home there—four years after the Supreme Court had ruled such covenants unconstitutional. When the black family arrived, a mob of 300 gathered outside of their home, threw bricks at the house, and burned a cross in the front yard. As in Pennsylvania, the police refused to step in for several days, only intervening after the NAACP pressed the governor to do so. Still, no arrests were made.42 In Los Angeles, of the more than one hundred incidents of move-in bombings and vandalism between 1950 and 1965, only one led to arrest and prosecution.43 This harassment and racial terrorism was not declared a federal crime until the Fair Housing Act made it so in 1968. Still, the Southern Poverty Law Center found that, in 1985–86, only one-quarter of these incidents were prosecuted.44
Ongoing Discrimination by Realtors, Banks, and Government Officials
To this day, forms of discrimination stymie racial integration and housing opportunities for black Americans. Attorneys and academics alike identify realtor bias and racial steering as factors that continue to disadvantage black people in the housing market. African Americans frequently encounter discrimination when searching for housing at all stages: they are more likely to receive subpar service when interacting with realtors, and are shown fewer homes for sale or rent than are whites. A 2003 study found that realtor steering of residents away from neighborhoods due to their racial composition is shockingly persistent, even if illegal. The practice showed up in up to 15 percent of tests that made their determination based on clear and explicit indications by the realtor.45 Some scholars have explained that “agents typically accept the initial request as an accurate portrayal of a white’s preferences but adjust the initial request made by a black to conform to their preconceptions. In the case of houses with visible problems, agents refuse to accept the initial request that whites want such a house, but have no trouble making this inference for blacks.”46 Now, there is evidence that such discrimination might have moved onto new platforms, with technology reinforcing human and societal biases. In March 2019, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) announced a lawsuit against social media giant Facebook, alleging that the platform allowed advertisers to use data in order to exclude certain racial groups from seeing home or apartment advertisements.47
Relatedly, black homebuyers are also more likely to be steered toward high-interest and high-risk loans when seeking to purchase a home, regardless of income or creditworthiness. A black family that earns $157,000 per year is less likely to qualify for a prime loan than is a white family earning $40,000 per year, which means that white families can borrow heavily at favorable rates, while black families are far less likely to receive a safe, fair loan product.48 In 2006, 53.7 percent of blacks and 46.6 percent of Latinx applicants received high-priced loans; only 17.7 percent of white borrowers did. This pattern remains even after controlling for borrower characteristics (income, credit score) and the amount of the loan, though the gaps do become less stark. Interestingly, these disparities actually worsened at higher income levels.49 Because predatory lenders are more likely to set up shop in predominantly black neighborhoods, their actions wind up leading to generational wealth loss in communities of color. One study indicated that, since 2005, more than half of all borrowers who were issued subprime loans could have qualified for lower-cost loans with more favorable terms.50 Because of their costs and risky nature, subprime loans are more likely to result in foreclosures, which have been disproportionately located in low-income and predominantly black neighborhoods. In the run-up to the subprime mortgage crisis, federal regulators failed in their obligation to recognize the targeting of African Americans and enforce the laws against bad actors who participated in this predatory behavior. The result was a staggering collapse of wealth among black communities; in Prince George’s County, Maryland, for example, during the crisis, “high-earning blacks were 80 percent more likely to lose their homes than their white counterparts.”51
Current public policy choices hardly indicate that government will readily act as a reliable partner in seeking housing desegregation. To this day, public policy choices by state and local officials tend to steer public housing units, which are disproportionately occupied by black and brown residents, into high-poverty areas with fewer resources and opportunities. And the federal government’s two major programs that seek to help low-income people rent homes in the private market—the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) program and Section 8 housing vouchers—often perpetuate economic and racial segregation.
To this day, public policy choices by state and local officials tend to steer public housing units, which are disproportionately occupied by black and brown residents, into high-poverty areas with fewer resources and opportunities.
The Low-Income Housing Tax Credit program, which allocates a certain number of tax credits for states to distribute to developers according to housing needs, allows consideration of several factors that help determine where new housing will be located. Because housing agencies can consider community support levels when determining housing locations, and more affluent areas are more likely to organize in opposition to such developments, this housing is more likely to be steered into already-low-income communities.52 The nation’s largest low-income housing program—Section 8 vouchers—is directed toward individuals rather than state agencies or developers, in theory giving people more control over where they live. But despite this program’s potential advantage for integration, the limited nature of the vouchers does not provide sufficient support for families to rent in higher-income and more-advantaged areas. Moreover, some states actually allow landlords to reject Section 8 housing vouchers, as income (unlike race) is not a protected class.53
Public Policy Remedies
Government is the laboratory in which many of the schemes for black–white segregation were (and still are) concocted; it is also, therefore, where much of the effort must be placed in order for racial segregation to be undone. Members of government who want to reverse segregation must work to remove policies that promote and protect white supremacy, and replace them instead with ones that actively fight segregation. The rest of this report outlines a four-part strategy to address the following four key facets of black–white segregation: (1) the legacy of generations of racial discrimination in housing; (2) contemporary residential racial discrimination; (3) contemporary residential economic discrimination that disproportionately hurts African Americans; and (4) the re-segregating effects of displacement that can come with gentrification.
Addressing the Legacy of Generations of Racial Discrimination in Housing
When Congress passed the Fair Housing Act (FHA) in 1968, it intended for the executive branch to take steps to reduce housing segregation, with several courts interpreting the FHA as assigning HUD a nonnegotiable “statutory duty to promote fair housing.”54 But it was not until decades later, in 2015, that the Obama administration introduced a rule to implement the Fair Housing Act’s “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing” (AFFH) requirement. The 2015 rule charged HUD with “taking meaningful actions, in addition to combating discrimination, that overcome patterns of segregation and foster inclusive communities free from barriers that restrict access to opportunity based on protected characteristics” and “replacing segregated living patterns with truly integrated and balanced living patterns.”55
The failure to implement the AFFH requirements for nearly a half century after passage of the Fair Housing Act allowed segregation to remain the norm—particularly in predominantly black areas. “Segregation decreases most quickly in metro areas with small black populations,” observes NYU’s Furman Center. “Conversely, metropolitan areas with large black populations living in poverty showed the highest levels of black–white segregation, as measured by the dissimilarity index, in 2010.”56 As noted in the first section of this report, while the black–white dissimilarity index has declined over time, it remains extremely high. Furthermore, although the portion of neighborhoods that have only a tiny share of black residents has declined, the proportion of black people living in racially integrated neighborhoods in certain communities has also declined. In New York City, for example, the proportion has actually decreased from 41 percent in 1970 to 21 percent in 2010.57 Rigorous enforcement of the AFFH rule is as important as ever.
Despite this need, President Donald Trump and Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson suspended the AFFH rule in 2018. HUD also removed, without public comment, the Assessment of Fair Housing (AFH) tool, which aided communities in determining housing needs and segregation patterns. This suspension aligns with Secretary Carson’s public disdain for the AFFH rule, which he unfairly derided as “social engineering” and “a tortured reading of fair housing laws.”58
Housing justice and the fulfillment of the Fair Housing Act should not be held hostage to the political whims of an administration led by a man who was himself investigated for racial discrimination in his own real estate holdings.59 Reinstatement and rigorous enforcement of the AFFH are clear next steps in the quest to narrow the black–white housing opportunity gap.
In addition, government should undertake efforts to address the legacy of discrimination in the financing of homes. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), for example, has appropriately proposed providing new mortgage assistance to buy homes in formerly redlined neighborhoods.
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Further Reading
Vice: Racial Discrimination Can Take 18 Years Off Someone’s Life
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Racial Zoning Ordinances
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Urban Institute: Zoning Matters: How Land-Use Policies Shape Our Lives
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Black Feminism: Racial Zoning: Segregation and the U.S. Federal Government
Reconstruction ended in 1877 when U.S. troops stopped protecting freedmen in the South based on a deal made between southern Democrats and Republicans. Residential integration declined after 1880 and stagnated around mid-twentieth century. Slaveowners transformed slaves into sharecroppers while simultaneously preventing Black people from access to voting through state-sanctioned violence and Jim Crow.
Jim Crow spread throughout the United States, slowing the pace of racial integration by expelling Black people from white communities. Towns adopted policies that prevent Black people from residing or being in certain towns after dark, which police and mobs reinforced.
Black people were expelled from homes in small towns and urban areas, starting at the local level. Cities adopted zoning rules starting with Baltimore in 1910. The city prohibited the purchase of homes outside of same-race majority areas and prosecuted at least twenty evictions. The city eventually applied it to entirely same race blocks since integration had already occurred in many areas. This occurred in Atlanta and many other cities too.
How the Federal Government Endorsed Segregation
The enforcement of racial zones happened at the federal level as well. Woodrow Wilson played a significant role in limiting the rights of Black people in D.C. after his 1912 election. He advocated for segregation based on a belief in Black inferiority. Wilson refused to admit Black people during his tenure as Princeton’s university president. Wilson expelled many Black federal workers during his tenure, creating segregation in government offices during his tenure. He tasked the implementation to his cabinet secretaries including Frederick Delano Roosevelt, assistant secretary of the navy and future president of the United States.
President Warren G. Harding instructed his Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover to form an advisory committee on zoning in 1921. He then tasked the committee with the job of creating a model zoning law. They also distributed a print manual to instruct city planners. Hoover placed several segregationists on the committee. Frederick Law Olmsted Sr., architect of Central Park in New York and Piedmont Park in Atlanta. Olmsted Jr. also held presidencies in influential architectural organizations like the American City Planning Institute. Irving B. Hieff had an executive position at the National Association of Real Estate Boards. Finally, Alfred Bettman played a leadership role at the National Conference on City Planning and would later go on to be appointed by Frederick Roosevelt to the Land Use Planning Committee in 1933.
Southern Cities and the Legacy of Racial Zoning
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled against the practice in 1917 Buchanan v. Warley case, overturning the racial zoning ordinance in Louisville, Kentucky. The court cited it as a violation of freedom of contract from government interference as protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. Still southern and border cities ignored the ruling. Prominent city planner Robert Whitten endorsed the practice in a 1922 professional journal article:
“Whitten then went ahead and designed a zoning ordinance for Atlanta, advising city officials that “home neighborhoods had to be protected from any further damage to values resulting from inappropriate uses, including the encroachment of the colored.” The zone plan drafted by Whitten and unpublished by the Atlanta City Planning Commission in 1922 explained that “race zoning is essential in the interest of the public peace, order and security and will promote the welfare and prosperity of both the white and colored race.” The zoning law divided the city into an “R-I white district” and “R-2 colored district” with additional neighborhoods undetermined (Rothstein 2017).”
Atlanta argued to the Georgia Supreme Court in 1924 that Robert Whitten’s plan did not amount to racial zoning, but Georgia rejected the argument. However, the Atlanta School Board used the map to determine where they would close schools. The practice displaced both Black and White students and created racially segregated zones. Other cities followed suit including Indianapolis, Richmond, Birmingham, West Palm Beach, Kansas City, and Norfolk. Zoning experts like Ernst Freund, a professor at Columbia Law, would advocate for segregation as the ideal social order.
How White Residents Displaced People of Color
Residents within communities influenced zoning by advocating that apartments would get zoned outside of single-family neighborhoods. They would create petitions against new developments that excluded racially explicit language. One such tactic included the use of industrial toxic waste zoning to locate industrial business near neighborhoods inhabited by people of color. This had the effect of protecting white neighborhoods from deterioration while also making it difficult for people with low income to live in predominantly white areas.
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- Black Exclusion Laws in Oregon (1844-1857)
- 1844, 1849, 1857 laws prohibiting blacks moving to/residing in OR
- All laws were repealed by 1926
- 1844, 1849, 1857 laws prohibiting blacks moving to/residing in OR
- 1866 Civil Rights Act
- Made it illegal to discriminate in employment and housing
- 1883 Supreme Court decision rejected this stating
- Congress didn’t have authority to regulate private affairs
- Decision allowed a century of private and public housing discrimination still felt today
- De Jure – public policies and laws
- De Facto – private practices and cultures
- Decision allowed a century of private and public housing discrimination still felt today
- Congress didn’t have authority to regulate private affairs
- Racial Zoning Ordinances (After Civil War – 1917)
- 15 states allowed banning people of color in white-zoned areas
- Sundown Towns were one type of Racially Biased Zoning Ordinances
- Thousands of Sundown towns passed ordinances banning people of color
- Couldn’t expelled but instead created zoning ordinances to segregate
- As small towns expelled black people larger towns with large black populations
- Sundown Towns were one type of Racially Biased Zoning Ordinances
- 15 states allowed banning people of color in white-zoned areas
- 1917 SCOTUS Buchanan v. Warley, outlawed racial ordinances
- Although many racial ordinances continued illegally for many decades up to 1960s
- Or found other legal exclusionary zoning like
- Prohibiting multi-family units/single family unit only in white communities
- Excluded poor people but disproportionately were people of color
- Still used today
- Created zoning where polluting industries, negative commercial (liquer stores, etc), waste (including toxic)
- Could only be built in black communities (Industrial and toxic zoning)
- 1921, President Hardy created commission to help cities create zoning ordinances
- Helped advise many cities to use zoning to segregated races
- Excluded poor people but disproportionately were people of color
- Prohibiting multi-family units/single family unit only in white communities
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Richard Rothstein : The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
“Zoning thus had two faces. One face, developed in part to evade a prohibition on racially explicit zoning, attempted to keep African Americans out of white neighborhoods by making it difficult for lower-income families, large numbers of whom were African Americans, to live in expensive white neighborhoods. The other attempted to protect white neighborhoods from deterioration by ensuring that few industrial or environmentally unsafe businesses could locate in them. Prohibited in this fashion, polluting industry had no option but to locate near African American residences. The first contributed to creation of exclusive white suburbs, the second to creation of urban African American slums….
Government’s commitment to separating residential areas by race began nationwide following the violent suppression of Reconstruction after 1877. Although the Supreme Court in 1917 forbade the first wave of policies—racial segregation by zoning ordinance—the federal government began to recommend ways that cities could evade that ruling, not only in the southern and border states but across the country. In the 1920s a Harding administration committee promoted zoning ordinances that distinguished single-family from multifamily districts. Although government publications did not say it in as many words, committee members made little effort to hide that an important purpose was to prevent racial integration.
Simultaneously, and through the 1920s and the Hoover administration, the government conducted a propaganda campaign directed at white middle-class families to persuade them to move out of apartments and into single-family dwellings. During the 1930s the Roosevelt administration created maps of every metropolitan area, divided into zones of foreclosure risk based in part on the race of their occupants. The administration then insured white homeowners’ mortgages if they lived in all-white neighborhoods into which there was little danger of African Americans moving. After World War II the federal government went further and spurred the suburbanization of every metropolitan area by guaranteeing bank loans to mass-production builders who would create the all-white subdivisions that came to ring American cities. In 1973, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights concluded that the “housing industry, aided and abetted by Government, must bear the primary responsibility for the legacy of segregated housing. . . . Government and private industry came together to create a system of residential segregation.”
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Richard Rothstein : The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
Racial Zoning
As THE Jim Crow atmosphere intensified in the South, fear (turning to hatred) of African Americans began to spread beyond that region. Throughout the country, whites came to assume black perversity and inferiority. Consider a state as seemingly improbable as Montana where African Americans thrived in the post—Civil War years. In the early 1900s they were systematically expelled from predominantly white communities in the state. Public officials supported and promoted this new racial order.
The removal of African Americans was gradual. By 1890, black settlers were living in every Montana county. By 1930, though, eleven of the state’s fifty-six counties had been entirely cleared of African Americans, and in the other counties few remained. The African American population of Helena, the state capital, peaked at 420 (3.4 percent) in 1910. It was down to 131 by 1930, and only 45 remained by 1970. By 2010 the 113 African Americans in Helena comprised less than half of one percent of the city’s population.
At the turn of the twentieth century, African Americans in Helena had included an established middle-class community, alongside those who came as laborers or to work on the railroads and in Montana’s mines. The police officer assigned to patrol one of Helena’s wealthiest white neighborhoods was an African American. Helena’s African Methodist Episcopal Church was important enough in 1894 to host its denomination’s western regional conference. The city had black newspapers, black-owned businesses, and a black literary society that sometimes drew one hundred attendees to hear presentations by poets, playwrights, and essayists. But in 1906, Helena’s prosecuting attorney expressed the new attitude of public authorities when he announced, “It is time that the respectable white people of this community rise in their might and assert their rights.” Helena’s newspaper called the prosecutor’s statement masterful and eloquent. Three years later Montana banned marriages between blacks and whites.
During this era many towns across the country adopted policies forbidding African Americans from residing or even from being within town borders after dark. Although the policies were rarely formalized in ordinances, police and organized mobs enforced them. Some towns rang bells at sundown to warn African Americans to leave. Others posted signs at the town boundaries warning them not to remain after sundown.
A 1915 newspaper article in Glendive, Montana, was headlined “Color Line Is Drawn In Glendive.” It noted that the town’s policy was that “the sun is never allowed to set on any niggers in Glendive” and boasted that the town’s black population was now a “minus quantity.” The town of Roundup posted a sign banning African Americans from remaining overnight. In Miles City a once-substantial African American community was forced to flee by white mob violence. In 1910, 81 African Americans comprised 2 percent of the Miles City population. Today it has only 25, or 0.3 percent.
The imposition of a new African American subordination eventually spread to the federal government as well. In Washington, D.C., in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, African Americans in the federal civil service had been making great progress; some rose to positions whose responsibilities included supervising white office workers and manual laborers. This came to an end when Woodrow Wilson was elected president in 1912. Although he had served as president of Princeton University in New Jersey, and then as governor of that state, his origins were in the South, and he was an uncompromising believer in segregation and in black inferiority. At Princeton, for example, he refused to consider African Americans for admission.
In 1913, Wilson and his cabinet approved the implementation of segregation in government offices. Curtains were installed to separate black and white clerical workers. Separate cafeterias were created. Separate basement toilets were constructed for African Americans. Black supervisors were demoted to ensure that no African American oversaw a white employee. One official responsible for implementing segregation was the assistant secretary of the navy: Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He might or might not have been enthusiastic about segregation, but it was an aspect of the changing national political culture in which he matured and that he did not challenge.
In this early-twentieth-century era, when African Americans in the South faced terror that maintained them in subjugation, when African Americans throughout the nation were being driven from small towns where they had previously enjoyed a measure of integration and safety, and when the federal government had abandoned its African American civil servants, we should not be surprised to learn that there was a new dedication on the part of public officials to ensure that white families’ homes would be removed from proximity to African Americans in large urban areas.
Unlike public housing, which was primarily a federal program with some local participation, government policies to isolate white families in all-white urban neighborhoods began at the local level. As African Americans were being driven out of smaller midwestern and western communities like those in Montana, many other cities, particularly in southern and border states, already had large black populations that couldn’t be expelled. Instead, many of these cities adopted zoning rules decreeing separate living areas for black and white families.
The first to do so was Baltimore, which in 1910 adopted an ordinance prohibiting African Americans from buying homes on blocks where whites were a majority and vice versa. Milton Dashiel, the lawyer who drafted Baltimore’s ordinance, explained:
Ordinarily, the negro loves to gather to himself, for he is very gregarious and sociable in his nature. But those who have risen somewhat above their fellows appear to have an intense desire to leave them behind, to disown them, as it were, and get as close to the company of white people as circumstances will permit them.
The segregation ordinance, he said, was needed to prevent this.
The troubles Baltimore encountered in applying the ordinance reflected just how integrated some areas of the city were. Soon after it adopted the ordinance, the city pursued twenty prosecutions to evict wrong-race residents. Judges had to grapple with such questions as whether an African American should be allowed to buy a home on a block that was evenly divided between white and black. A white homeowner moved out while his house was being repaired but then couldn’t move back because the block was 51 percent black. An African American pastor of a church with an African American congregation complained to the mayor that because his church was on a mostly white block, the pastor who succeeded him would be forbidden to move into the parsonage. Eventually, the ordinance was revised so that it applied only to blocks that were entirely white or black, leaving Baltimore’s integrated blocks unaffected.
Many southern and border cities followed Baltimore and adopted similar zoning rules: Atlanta, Birmingham, Dade County (Miami), Charleston, Dallas, Louisville, New Orleans, Oklahoma City, Richmond (Virginia), St. Louis, and others. Few northern cities did so; before the Great Migration stimulated by the First World War, most northern urban black populations were still small. Nonetheless support for these segregation ordinances was widespread among white political and opinion leaders. In 1915, The New Republic, still in its infancy but already an influential magazine of the Progressive movement, argued for residential racial segregation until Negroes ceased wanting to “amalgamate” with whites—which is to say, ceased wanting to engage in relationships that produced mixed-race children. The article’s author apparently did not realize that race amalgamation in the United States was already considerably advanced, resulting from the frequent rapes of slaves by white masters.
In 1917, the Supreme Court overturned the racial zoning ordinance of Louisville, Kentucky, where many neighborhoods included both races before twentieth-century segregation. The case, Buchanan v. Watley, involved an African American’s attempt to purchase property on an integrated block where there were already two black and eight white households. The Court majority was enamored of the idea that the central purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment was not to protect the rights of freed slaves but a business rule: “freedom of contract.” Relying on this interpretation, the Court had struck down minimum wage and workplace safety laws on the grounds that they interfered with the right of workers and business owners to negotiate individual employment conditions without government interference. Similarly, the Court ruled that racial zoning ordinances interfered with the right of a property owner to sell to whomever he pleased.
Many border and southern cities ignored the Buchanan decision. One of the nation’s most prominent city planners, Robert Whitten, wrote in a 1922 professional journal that notwithstanding the Buchanan decision, “[e]stablishing colored residence districts has removed one of the most potent causes of race conflict.” This, he added, was “a sufficient justification for race zoning. . . . A reasonable segregation is normal, inevitable and desirable.” Whitten then went ahead and designed a zoning ordinance for Atlanta, advising city officials that “home neighborhoods had to be protected from any further damage to values resulting from inappropriate uses, including the encroachment of the colored race.” The zone plan drafted by Whitten and published by the Atlanta City Planning Commission in 1922 explained that “race zoning is essential in the interest of the public peace, order and security and will promote the welfare and prosperity of both the white and colored race.” The zoning law divided the city into an “R-1 white district” and an “R-2 colored district” with additional neighborhoods undetermined.
Challenged in court, Atlanta defended its law by arguing that the Buchanan ruling applied only to ordinances identical to Louisville’s. Atlanta’s was different, its lawyers contended, because it designated whole neighborhoods exclusively for black or white residence, without regard to the previous majority-race characteristics of any particular block. The lawyers also claimed that the Louisville decision didn’t apply because Atlanta’s rules addressed only where African Americans and whites could live, not who could purchase the property. The Georgia Supreme Court rejected this argument in 1924, finding Whitten’s plan unconstitutional, but Atlanta officials continued to use the racial zoning map to guide its planning for decades to come.
Other cities continued to adopt racial zoning ordinances after Buchanan, insisting that because their rules differed slightly from Louisville’s, the Court’s prohibition didn’t apply. In 1926, Indianapolis adopted a regulation permitting African Americans to move to a white area only if a majority of its white residents gave their written consent, although the city’s legal staff had advised that the ordinance was unconstitutional. In 1927, the Supreme Court overturned a similar New Orleans law that required a majority vote of opposite-race neighbors.
Richmond, Virginia, attempted a sly evasion of Buchanan. In 1924, the state adopted a law banning interracial marriage, so the city then prohibited anyone from residing on a street where they were ineligible to marry a majority of those already living there. Municipal lawyers told federal courts that Buchanan did not apply because their city’s racial zoning law was solely intended to prevent intermarriage and its interference with residential property rights was incidental. In 1930 the Supreme Court rejected this reasoning.
Birmingham, like Atlanta, defended a racial zoning law with claims that Buchanan banned only sales of property to persons of the other race, not residence in an other-race district; the city also argued that threats to peace were so imminent and severe if African Americans and whites lived in the same neighborhoods that the need to maintain order should trump the constitutional rights involved. After a lower court banned Birmingham’s ordinance in 1947, the city claimed that the ban applied only to the single piece of property involved in the court case, then increased criminal penalties for future violations. The city commission (council) president stated that “this matter goes beyond the written law, in the interest of . . . racial happiness.” Birmingham continued to administer its racial zoning ordinance until 1950, when a federal appeals court finally struck it down.
In Florida, a West Palm Beach racial zoning ordinance was adopted in 1929, a dozen years after Buchanan, and was maintained until 1960. The Orlando suburb of Apopka adopted an ordinance banning blacks from living on the north side of the railroad tracks and whites from living on the south side. It remained in effect until 1968. Other cities, like Austin and Atlanta, continued racial zoning without specific ordinances by designating African American areas in official planning documents and using these designations to guide spot zoning decisions. Kansas City and Norfolk continued this practice until at least 1987.
But in cities that respected Buchanan as the law, segregationist officials faced two distinct problems: how to keep lower-income African Americans from living near middle-class whites and how to keep middle-class African Americans from buying into white middle-class neighborhoods. For each of these conditions, the federal and local governments developed distinct solutions.
In 2014 police killed Michael Brown, a young African American man in Ferguson, a suburb of St. Louis. Protests followed, some violent, and subsequent investigations uncovered systematic police and government abuse of residents in the city’s African American neighborhoods. The reporting made me wonder how the St. Louis metropolitan area became so segregated. It turns out that economic zoning—with a barely disguised racial overlay—played an important role. To prevent lower-income African Americans from living in neighborhoods where middle-class whites resided, local and federal officials began in the 1910s to promote zoning ordinances to reserve middle-class neighborhoods for single-family homes that lower-income families of all races could not afford. Certainly, an important and perhaps primary motivation of zoning rules that kept apartment buildings out of single-family neighborhoods was a social class elitism that was not itself racially biased. But there was also enough open racial intent behind exclusionary zoning that it is integral to the story of de jure segregation. Such economic zoning was rare in the United States before World War I, but the Buchanan decision provoked urgent interest in zoning as a way to circumvent the ruling.
St. Louis appointed its first plan commission in 1911 and five years later hired Harland Bartholomew as its full-time planning engineer. His assignment was to categorize every structure in the city—single-family residential, multifamily residential, commercial, or industrial—and then to propose rules and maps to prevent future multifamily, commercial, or industrial structures from impinging on single-family neighborhoods. If a neighborhood was covered with single-family houses with deeds that prohibited African American occupancy, this was taken into consideration at plan commission meetings and made it almost certain that the neighborhood would be zoned “first-residential,” prohibiting future construction of anything but single-family units and helping to preserve its all-white character.
According to Bartholomew, an important goal of St. Louis zoning was to prevent movement into “finer residential districts … by colored people.” He noted that without a previous zoning law, such neighborhoods have become run-down, “where values have depreciated, homes are either vacant or occupied by colored people.” The survey Bartholomew supervised before drafting the zoning ordinance listed the race of each building’s occupants. Bartholomew attempted to estimate where African Americans might encroach so the commission could respond with restrictions to control their spread.
The St. Louis zoning ordinance was eventually adopted in 1919, two years after the Supreme Court’s Buchanan ruling banned racial assignments; with no reference to race, the ordinance pretended to be in compliance. Guided by Bartholomew’s survey, it designated land for future industrial development if it was in or adjacent to neighborhoods with substantial African American populations.
Once such rules were in force, plan commission meetings were consumed with requests for variances. Race was frequently a factor. For example, one meeting in 1919 debated a proposal to reclassify a single-family property from first-residential to commercial because the area to the south had been “invaded by negroes.” Bartholomew persuaded the commission members to deny the variance because, he said, keeping the first-residential designation would preserve homes in the area as unaffordable to African Americans and thus stop the encroachment.
On other occasions, the commission changed an area’s zoning from residential to industrial if African American families had begun to move into it. In 1927, violating its normal policy, the commission authorized a park and playground in an industrial, not residential, area in hopes that this would draw African American families to seek housing nearby. Similar decision making continued through the middle of the twentieth century. In a 1942 meeting, commissioners explained they were zoning an area in a commercial strip as multifamily because it could then “develop into a favorable dwelling district for Colored people.” In 1948, commissioners explained they were designating a U-shaped industrial zone to create a buffer between African Americans inside the U and whites outside.
In addition to promoting segregation, zoning decisions contributed to degrading St. Louis’s African American neighborhoods into slums. Not only were these neighborhoods zoned to permit industry, even polluting industry, but the plan commission permitted taverns, liquor stores, nightclubs, and houses of prostitution to open in African American neighborhoods but prohibited these as zoning violations in neighborhoods where whites lived. Residences in single-family districts could not legally be subdivided, but those in industrial districts could be, and with African Americans restricted from all but a few neighborhoods, rooming houses sprang up to accommodate the overcrowded population.
Later in the twentieth century, when the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) developed the insured amortized mortgage as a way to promote homeownership nationwide, these zoning practices rendered African Americans ineligible for such mortgages because banks and the FHA considered the existence of nearby rooming houses, commercial development, or industry to create risk to the property value of single-family areas. Without such mortgages, the effective cost of African American housing was greater than that of similar housing in white neighborhoods, leaving owners with fewer resources for upkeep. African American homes were then more likely to deteriorate, reinforcing their neighborhoods’ slum conditions.
LOCAL OFFICIALS elsewhere, like those in St. Louis, did not experiment with zoning in isolation. In the wake of the 1917 Buchanan decision, the enthusiasm of federal officials for economic zoning that could also accomplish racial segregation grew rapidly. In 1921 President Warren G. Harding’s secretary of commerce, Herbert Hoover, organized an Advisory Committee on Zoning to develop a manual explaining why every municipality should develop a zoning ordinance. The advisory committee distributed thousands of copies to officials nationwide. A few months later the committee published a model zoning law. The manual did not give the creation of racially homogenous neighborhoods as the reason why zoning should become such an important priority for cities, but the advisory committee was composed of outspoken segregationists whose speeches and writings demonstrated that race was one basis of their zoning advocacy.
One influential member was Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., a former president of the American City Planning Institute and of the American Society of Landscape Architects. During World War I, Olmsted Jr. directed the Town Planning Division of the federal government’s housing agency that managed or built more than 100,000 units of segregated housing for workers in defense plants. In 1918, he told the National Conference on City Planning that good zoning policy had to be distinguished from “the legal and constitutional question” (meaning the Buchanan rule), with which he wasn’t concerned. So far as policy went, Olmsted stated that “in any housing developments which are to succeed, … racial divisions … have to be taken into account. . . . [If] you try to force the mingling of people who are not yet ready to mingle, and don’t want to mingle,” a development cannot succeed economically.
Another member of the advisory committee was Alfred Bettman, the director of the National Conference on City Planning. In 1933 President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed him to a National Land Use Planning Committee that helped to establish planning commissions in cities and states throughout the country. Planning (i.e., zoning) was necessary, Bettman and his colleagues explained, to “maintain the nation and the race.”
The segregationist consensus of the Hoover committee was reinforced by members who held positions of leadership in the National Association of Real Estate Boards, including its president, Irving B. Hiett. In 1924, two years after the advisory committee had published its first manual and model zoning ordinance, the association followed up by adopting a code of ethics that included this warning: “a realtor should never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood … members of any race or nationality… whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values in that neighborhood.”
Other influential zoning experts made no effort to conceal their expectation that zoning was an effective means of racial exclusion. Columbia Law School professor Ernst Freund, the nation’s leading authority on administrative law in the 1920s, observed that preventing “the coming of colored people into a district” was actually a “more powerful” reason for the spread of zoning during the previous decade than creation of single-family districts, the stated justification for zoning. Because the Buchanan decision had made it “impossible to find an appropriate legal formula” for segregation, Freund said that zoning masquerading as an economic measure was the most reasonable means of accomplishing the same end.
Secretary Hoover, his committee members, and city planners across the nation believed that zoning rules that made no open reference to race would be legally sustainable—and they were right. In 1926, the Supreme Court for the first time considered the constitutionality of zoning rules that prohibited apartment buildings in single-family neighborhoods. The decision, arising from a zoning ordinance in a Cleveland suburb, was a conspicuous exception to the Court’s rejection of regulations that restricted what an owner could do with his property. Justice George Sutherland, speaking for the Court, explained that “very often the apartment house is a mere parasite, constructed in order to take advantage of the open spaces and attractive surroundings created by the residential character of the district” and that apartment houses in single-family districts “come very near to being nuisances.” In reaching this decision, the Supreme Court had to overrule the findings of a district judge who would have preferred to uphold the zoning ordinance but could not pretend ignorance of its true racial purpose, a violation of Buchanan. The judge explained, “The blighting of property values and the congesting of the population, whenever the colored or certain foreign races invade a residential section, are so well known as to be within the judicial cognizance.”
In the years since the 1926 Supreme Court ruling, numerous white suburbs in towns across the country have adopted exclusionary zoning ordinances to prevent low-income families from residing in their midst. Frequently, class snobbishness and racial prejudice were so intertwined that when suburbs adopted such ordinances, it was impossible to disentangle their motives and to prove that the zoning rules violated constitutional prohibitions of racial discrimination. In many cases, however, like Secretary Hoover’s experts, localities were not always fastidious in hiding their racial motivations.
The use of zoning for purposes of racial segregation persisted well into the latter half of the twentieth century. In a 1970 Oklahoma case, the segregated town of Lawton refused to permit a multiunit development in an all-white neighborhood after residents circulated a petition in opposition. They used racial appeals to urge citizens to sign, although the language of the petition itself did not mention race. The sponsors of the apartment complex received anonymous phone calls that expressed racial antagonism. In a subsequent lawsuit, the only member of the planning commission who voted to allow the project testified that bias was the basis of other commissioners’ opposition. Although the commission did not use race as the reason for denying the permit, a federal appeals court found that the stated reasons were mere pretexts. “If proof of a civil rights violation depends on an open statement by an official of an intent to discriminate, the Fourteenth Amendment offers little solace to those seeking its protection,” the court concluded.
Yet the appeals court view did not prevail in other cases. A few years later, in 1977, the Supreme Court upheld a zoning ordinance in Arlington Heights, a suburb of Chicago, that prohibited multiunit development anywhere but adjacent to an outlying commercial area. The ordinance ensured that few, if any, African Americans could reside in residential areas. The city council had adopted its zoning ordinance at a meeting where members of the public urged action for racially discriminatory reasons. Letters to the local newspaper urged support for the ordinance as a way to keep African Americans out of white neighborhoods. But despite the openly racial character of community sentiment, the Supreme Court said the ordinance was constitutional because there was no proof that the council members themselves had adopted the ordinance to exclude African Americans specifically and not exclude all lower-income families, regardless of race.
My purpose, however, is not to argue courtroom standards of proof. I am interested in how we got to the systematic racial segregation we find in metropolitan areas today, and what role government played in creating these residential patterns. We can’t prove what was in council members’ hearts in Arlington Heights or anywhere else, but in too many zoning decisions the circumstantial evidence of racial motivation is persuasive. I think it can fairly be said that there would be many fewer segregated suburbs than there are today were it not for an unconstitutional desire, shared by local officials and by the national leaders who urged them on, to keep African Americans from being white families’ neighbors.
THE USE of industrial, even toxic waste zoning, to turn African American neighborhoods into slums was not restricted to St. Louis. It became increasingly common as the twentieth century proceeded and manufacturing operations grew in urban areas. The pattern was confirmed in a 1983 analysis by the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO), concluding that, across the nation, commercial waste treatment facilities or uncontrolled waste dumps were more likely to be found near African American than white residential areas.
Studies by the Commission for Racial Justice of the United Churches of Christ and by Greenpeace, conducted at about the same time as the GAO report, concluded that race was so strong a statistical predictor of where hazardous waste facilities could be found that there was only a one-in-10,000 chance of the racial distribution of such sites occurring randomly, and that the percentage of minorities living near incinerators was 89 percent higher than the national median. Skeptics of these data speculated that African Americans moved to such communities after these facilities were present. But while this may sometimes have been the case—after all, most African Americans had limited housing choices—it cannot be the full explanation: neighborhoods with proposed incinerators, not those already built, had minority population shares that were much higher than the shares in other communities.
Decisions to permit toxic waste facilities in African American areas did not intend to intensify slum conditions, although this was the result. The racial aspect of these choices was a desire to avoid the deterioration of white neighborhoods when African American sites were available as alternatives. The welfare of African Americans did not count for much in this policy making. Oftentimes, as in St. Louis, zoning boards made explicit exceptions to their residential neighborhood rules to permit dangerous or polluting industry to locate in African American areas.
In Los Angeles, for example, a black community became established in the South Central area of the city in the 1940s. The neighborhood had some industry, but its nonresidential character was more firmly entrenched when the city began a process of “spot” rezoning for commercial or industrial facilities. Automobile junkyards became commonplace in the African American neighborhood. In 1947, an electroplating plant explosion in this newly developing ghetto killed five local residents (as well as fifteen white factory workers) and destroyed more than one hundred homes. When later that year the pastor of an African American church protested a rezoning of property adjacent to his church for industrial use, the chairman of the Los Angeles City Council’s planning committee, responsible for the rezoning, responded that the area had now become a “business community,” adding, “Why don’t you people buy a church somewhere else?”
For the most part, courts have refused to reject toxic siting decisions without proof of explicit, stated intent to harm African Americans because of their race. In a 1979 Houston case, an African American community that already had a disproportionately high number of hazardous waste sites protested the addition of another. A federal judge found that the proposal was “unfortunate and insensitive” but refused to ban it without proof of explicit racial motivation. A 1991 case arose in Warren County, North Carolina, whose overall population was about half white and half African American.
The county had three existing landfills, all in African American areas. When a new landfill was proposed for a white area, residents protested, and county officials did not issue a permit. But when another was proposed, this time in an African American area, county officials ignored residents’ protests and approved the landfill. A federal judge upheld the county’s decision, finding that there was a discriminatory impact but no explicit racial intent.
In 1991, the Environmental Protection Agency issued a report confirming that a disproportionate number of toxic waste facilities were found in African American communities nationwide. President Bill Clinton then issued an executive order requiring that such disparate impact be avoided in future decisions. The order did not, however, require any compensatory actions for the existing toxic placements.
The frequent existence of polluting industry and toxic waste plants in African American communities, along with subdivided homes and rooming houses, contributed to giving African Americans the image of slum dwellers in the eyes of whites who lived in neighborhoods where integration might be a possibility. This, in turn, contributed to white flight when African Americans attempted to move to suburbs.
Zoning thus had two faces. One face, developed in part to evade a prohibition on racially explicit zoning, attempted to keep African Americans out of white neighborhoods by making it difficult for lower-income families, large numbers of whom were African Americans, to live in expensive white neighborhoods. The other attempted to protect white neighborhoods from deterioration by ensuring that few industrial or environmentally unsafe businesses could locate in them. Prohibited in this fashion, polluting industry had no option but to locate near African American residences. The first contributed to creation of exclusive white suburbs, the second to creation of urban African American slums.”
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Christopher Silver: The Racial Origins of Zoning In American Cities
BEYOND RACIAL ZONING: PLANNING IN THE 1930s AND 1940s
By the 1930s, the racial zoning movement had run its course. This is not to suggest that the racial imperatives of zoning disappeared, however. The 1930s and 1940s constituted an important period in local planning since many cities had just recently devised plans that called for separate Black sections regulated in various ways. Federal initiatives in public housing and slum clearance provided additional resources for reconstructing the social landscape, and Southern and non-Southern cities eagerly participated in these efforts. With these new tools for social engineering, Southern cities ceased to confront head-on the legal objections outlined in the Buchanandecision. In Virginia, for example, the final court test of Richmond’s racial zoning plan occurred in 1929 when a Black property owner brought suit after being denied access to a house he owned in a “White” neighborhood. Restingsquarely on the 1917 Supreme Court decision, a federal circuit court of appeals upheld a lower court ruling that the city’s ordinance was intended to restrict property use on the basis of race and declared the city zoning law unconstitutional.56 A state court struck down a general zoning ordinance in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, which provided for racial districts. Birmingham continued illegally to enforce a racial zoning code until 1951.57
The substitute for racial zoning was a race-based planning process that marshaled a wide array of planning interventions in the service of creating separate communities. Street and highway planning served as a means to erect racial barriers as early as the 1920s.58 The siting of public housing projects explicitly (and legally) for Black occupancy proved particularly effective in furthering residential segregation. Slum clearance, neighborhood planning, private deed restrictions, and racially charged real estate practices all served the cause of segregation as effectively as racial zoning. As the planning movement abandoned efforts to create a legally defensible system of racial zoning, support for race-based lanning moved outside the Southern region.
All of the nation’s major cities, especially those outside the South, experienced huge increases in Black population after 1940. The ensuing battle between Blacks and numerically declining Whites for space in the center city produced “powerful social consequences.” While it may be too much to argue that the national urban planningmovement was consumed by racial issues beginning in the 1920s, it is fair to suggest that a widely shared underlying premise of planning was the need to pursue community improvements within the context of separate racial worlds. Planners such as Nolen proposed opportunities to realize substantive community improvements under the aegis of apartheid, but rarely were these ideals realized. Indeed, as the planning movement expanded beyond racial zoning to “racially informed comprehensive planning,” it became more difficult to distinguish between planning for general community improvement and planning merely to reinforce and sharpen “the color line.” The widespread practice of communities seeking to exclude “undesirables” through exclusionary zoning had its greatest impact on African Americans (see Ritzdorf, Chapter 3).59
Both public housing and urban renewal exemplified the difficulty of positively addressingthe problems of the Black community within the murky context of race-based planning. Black leaders and citizens were wary of, and in some cases openly hostile toward, low-income housing projects as early as the 1930s, even though reformers and planners maintained that an impoverished group was being offered substantially improved housingand community facilities. Of course, some opposition by African Americans stemmed from expropriation of land from some Blacks to build public housing or carry out the slum clearance. Still, the land expropriation cannot explain the depth of the hostility to an other-wise legitimate community improvement effort.60The explanation may lie in the experiences of the previous two decades, in which the motives for planning, not only in the urban South but also in the inner-city communities of the North, became clearly associated with the prerogatives of race-based planning. The legacy of the racial zoning movement had an enduring influence on how Blacks perceived the methods and intentions of city planning. In urban communities throughout the South, beginning in the 1930s, Blacks quietly but decidedly launched a tradition of challenging the ideas of their supposed benefactors, the city planners. At times, the planning legacy of racial zoning may have blinded Blacks to the benefits of certain community projects and planningapproaches. As African Americans emerged as a dominant social and political force in American cities in the 1960s, planners quickly discovered that they had cultivated some rather strident opponents. Among their Black clients, in particular, the social legacy of the early zoning movement lived on in the politics of urban America, and challenged planners to adopt a more inclusionary approach to urban development.
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TCF: Attacking the Black–White Opportunity Gap That Comes from Residential Segregation
From Racial Zoning to Economic Zoning
Members of government and private entities began to deliberately segregate residential areas by race in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, largely by prohibiting blacks from purchasing homes in majority-white neighborhoods. After the Civil War, those newly liberated black people dispersed throughout the United States, but an abrupt end to Reconstruction ushered in an era of heightened white paramilitary violence, exploitative sharecropping arrangements, and Jim Crow laws. As anti-black discrimination formalized and intensified, many communities systematically expelled African Americans, excluded them from public goods and services, and adopted policies that forbade blacks from residing in towns, or even remaining within town borders after dark.23 Communities who forbade blacks from being within their borders after dark came to be known as “sundown towns”; by 1930, at least 235 counties had “sundowned” black people, often enforcing their rules through violence.24
Pioneered by Baltimore in 1910, racial zoning quickly emerged as an effective way to further subjugate and segregate black folks. Baltimore’s then-mayor did not mince words when discussing the motivation for such an ordinance: “Blacks should be quarantined in isolated slums in order to reduce the incidence of civil disturbance, to prevent the spread of communicable disease into nearby white neighborhoods, and to protect property values among the white majority.”25 Soon, similar policies spread to other cities, including Atlanta, Birmingham, Dade County (Miami), Charleston, Dallas, Louisville, New Orleans, Oklahoma City, Richmond, St. Louis, and others.26
A map showing the distribution of race and ethnicity in Detroit, Michigan. Red is white, Blue is African American, Green is Asian, Yellow is Hispanic, and Grey is Other. Source: Flickr/Eric Fischer
The U.S. Supreme Court in 1917 struck down explicit racial zoning with its decision in Buchanan v. Warley, arguing that such ordinances interfered with the rights of property owners.27 The ruling failed to put an end to segregation, however, instead motivating a new wave of racist creativity by white leaders and communities. Localities quickly found a way to circumvent the ruling and preserve the racial caste system in housing. Some localities created and enforced laws in flagrant violation of Buchanan. Richmond, Virginia, for example, passed a law prohibiting anyone from moving onto a block where they could not marry the majority of people on that block. Because the state had then-enforceable anti-miscegenation laws on the books, the ordinance effectively prevented neighborhood integration without explicitly mentioning race.28
Other localities were slightly more subtle. Switching from race-based zoning to economic zoning, cities and localities designed policies now known as “exclusionary zoning,” which require that neighborhoods consist exclusively of single-family homes, have minimum lot sizes, and/or have minimum square footage requirements. These policies rapidly proliferated. In 1916, just eight cities had zoning ordinances; by 1936, that number had risen to 1,246.29
The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the practice of exclusionary zoning in Euclid v. Ambler (1926), finding that zoning ordinances were reasonable extensions of police power and potentially beneficial to public welfare. While arguments against placement of factories or landfills next to residences can reasonably be said to protect public safety, when it came to siting residences, the opinion in Euclid stated additional concerns: that an apartment could be “a mere parasite, constructed in order to take advantage of the open spaces and attractive surroundings created by the residential character of a neighborhood,” adding later that “apartment houses . . . come very near to being nuisances.”30 Of course, because many blacks could not afford to buy around the expensive housing restrictions, such “race-neutral” economic zoning policies had a racially discriminatory effect.
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Economic Policy Institute: The Making of Ferguson
Racial zoning
In 1916, the St. Louis Real Estate Exchange, the city’s Realtors’ association, sponsored an organization to draft and campaign for a ballot referendum to prohibit blacks from moving onto blocks where at least 75 percent of existing residents were white (and whites from moving onto blocks where at least 75 percent were black). The referendum passed, but before it could have much effect, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a similar ordinance in Louisville, Kentucky. The court’s 1917 decision didn’t rely primarily on a claim that a racial zoning ordinance violated equal protection principles, but rather that it infringed on property owners’ rights to sell to whomever they wished.11
Some other cities, mostly in the South, ignored the court’s ruling and continued to enforce racial zoning ordinances, but St. Louis, like many others, took a different approach. Before the court’s ruling, it had begun to develop zoning rules that defined boundaries of industrial, commercial, multifamily residential, and single-family residential property. It developed these new rules with racial purposes unhidden, although race was not written into the text of the zoning rules themselves.
St. Louis appointed its first City Plan Commission in 1911 and hired Harland Bartholomew as its full-time planning engineer in 1916. His assignment was to supervise a survey of every building in the city to determine into which of the property types it fell and then to propose rules and maps to prevent future multifamily, industrial, or commercial development from impinging on single-family neighborhoods. A neighborhood filled with single-family homes whose deeds prohibited black residence or prohibited resale to blacks was almost certain to receive a “first residential” zoning designation that prohibited future construction of multifamily, commercial, or industrial buildings.
According to Bartholomew, a St. Louis zoning goal was to “preserv[e] the more desirable residential neighborhoods,” and to prevent movement into “finer residential districts … by colored people.” He noted that without a previous zoning ordinance, such neighborhoods have become run down, “where values have depreciated, homes are either vacant or occupied by colored people.” The survey Bartholomew supervised prior to drafting the new zoning rules collected, among other information, the race of occupants of each residential building in the city, and Bartholomew estimated the future direction of African American population expansion so that the zoning ordinance could attempt to direct and circumscribe it. The Bartholomew Commission’s first zoning ordinance was adopted in 1919, two years after the Supreme Court banned explicit racial zoning, but the St. Louis ordinance, with no explicit mention of race, was apparently in compliance. The new ordinance designated zones for future industrial development if they were in or adjacent to neighborhoods with substantial black populations.
Once the first zoning ordinance was adopted, City Plan Commission meetings were consumed with requests for variances. Race was an important consideration. One meeting in 1919 was devoted to a proposal to reclassify a single-family property from first residential to commercial, because the area to the south had been “invaded by negroes.” Bartholomew persuaded the commission to deny the variance because, he said, keeping the first residential designation would preserve homes in the area as unaffordable to blacks, and thus stop the encroachment. On other occasions the commission changed an area’s zoning from residential to industrial if black families began to move into it. In 1927, violating its normal policy, the commission placed a park and playground in an industrial, not residential area, in hopes that this placement would draw black families to seek housing nearby.
Similar policy continued through the middle of the 20th century. In a 1942 City Plan Commission meeting, commissioners explained that they were zoning an area in a commercial strip as second residential (multifamily) because it could then “develop into a favorable dwelling district for Colored people.” In 1948, commissioners explained that they were designating a U-shaped industrial zone to create a buffer between black residences inside the U and white residences outside it.12
In addition to promoting segregation, zoning decisions contributed to degrading St. Louis’s African American neighborhoods into slums. Not only were these neighborhoods zoned to permit industry, even polluting industry, but taverns, liquor stores, nightclubs, and houses of prostitution were permitted to locate in African American neighborhoods, but prohibited as violations of the zoning ordinance in residential districts elsewhere. Houses in residential districts could not legally be subdivided, but those in industrial districts could be, and with African Americans restricted from all but a few neighborhoods, rooming houses sprung up to accommodate the overcrowded black population. Once the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) was established during the New Deal, these zoning practices rendered African American homes ineligible for mortgage guarantees, because FHA underwriting principles considered “inharmonious uses” of neighboring properties to threaten the security of property value. But such homes were eligible a quarter century later for slum clearance with urban renewal funds, zoning practices having made them unfit for habitation.13
Urban zoning set patterns for subsequent zoning in the suburbs. Jurisdictions farthest from the city of St. Louis typically zoned for single-family homes with large lots only. Communities closer to the city were more likely to have zones for multifamily residences. Some inner-ring suburbs, like Ferguson, were initially zoned only for single-family homes, though without requirements for large minimum lot sizes that would make them unaffordable to working and lower-middle-class families. During the World War II housing shortage, Ferguson and towns like it allowed some multifamily construction, although when Ferguson revised its zoning ordinance a decade after the war, it eliminated any provision for multifamily units. Other inner-ring suburbs, however, increasingly permitted apartment development because of the increased tax revenue the higher assessment on such properties would bring.14
Suburban zoning rules were on their face race-neutral, and the communities using them did not have nationally prominent planners like Harland Bartholomew to boast about their racial implications. In a few cases, scholars have unearthed suburban planning documents with similarities to Bartholomew’s public pronouncements about race. In 1940, for example, officials in Kirkwood (the town to which Adel Allen later moved) prepared a document referring to “several scattered Negro developments” and recommending that this be “corrected” in the city plan. Urging that ways be found to shift black families back to the city of St. Louis, the planning document stated it was “much more desirable for all of the colored families to be grouped in one major section where they could be provided with their own school and recreational facilities, churches, and stores.”15
A 1963 planning document in Webster Groves, a suburb between the city of St. Louis and Kirkwood, identified commercial and multifamily zones as “100% Negro or very close” and took steps to prevent enlargement of a “developing ghetto” across a rail bed it termed the “Great Divide.”16 Such documents were exceptions to suburban zoning plans that were apparently racially innocuous. But it is difficult to consider St. Louis County’s exclusive suburban zoning as merely an expression of economic snobbishness if we keep in mind the racial motivation behind the earliest urban zoning policies, both in St. Louis and elsewhere.
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Further Readings
Medium: Why we keep saying US zoning laws are the legacy of racism
Washington Post: ‘Snob zoning’ is racial housing segregation by another name
Economic Policy Institute: The Making of Ferguson
NY Times: Cities Start to Question an American Ideal: A House With a Yard on Every Lot
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Back to History of Housing Discrimination Top
Sundown Towns
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Orcinus: How to Out A Sundown Town
“After the Civil War, newly-freed black families spread out across the country, looking for places to start over. By 1890, there was hardly a town in America that didn’t have at least a small community of black tradesmen or farmers — aspiring families putting down roots and planning better futures. There was no town too small, no corner so remote, that a handful of African-Americans didn’t take refuge there — hoping against hope they’d finally found a place that was far enough away from Jim Crow…
Starting in the 1890 census — and continuing up until the 1950 one — these communities started to vanish from the census figures. Towns that had 50 or 60 African-Americans in one census had exactly zero in the next. It was like watching these small lights just wink out, as these communities one by one went sundown.”
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James Loewen: Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism
Sundown Towns Are Almost Everywhere
A sundown town is any organized jurisdiction that for decades kept African Americans or other groups from living in it and was thus “all-white” on pur-pose.2 There is a reason for the quotation marks around “all-white”: requiring towns to be literally all-white in the census—no African Americans at all—is inappropriate, because many towns clearly and explicitly defined themselves as sundown towns but allowed one black household as an exception.’ Thus an all-white town may include nonblack minorities and even a tiny number of African Americans…
Beginning in about 1890 and continuing until 1968, white Americans established thousands of towns across the United States for whites only. Many towns drove out their black populations, then posted sundown signs. Other towns passed ordinances barring African Americans after dark or prohibiting them from owning or renting property; still others established such policies by informal means, harassing and even killing those who violated the rule. Some sundown towns similarly kept out Jews, Chinese, Mexicans, Native Americans, or other groups.
Independent sundown towns range from tiny hamlets such as De Land, Illinois (population 500), to substantial cities such as Appleton, Wisconsin (57,000 in 1970).4 Sometimes entire counties went sundown, usually when their county seat did. Independent sundown towns were soon joined by “sundown suburbs,” which could be even larger: Levittown, on Long Island, had 82,000 residents in 1970, while Livonia, Michigan, and Parma, Ohio, had more than 100,000. Warren, a suburb of Detroit, had a population of 180,000 including just 28 minority families, most of whom lived on a U.S. Army facility.5
Outside the traditional South—states historically dominated by slavery, where sundown towns are rare—probably a majority of all incorporated places kept out African Americans. If that sentence startles, please suspend disbelief until Chapter 3, which will show that Illinois, for example, had 671 towns and cities with more than 1,000 people in 1970, of which 475 (71%)—were all-white in census after census.6 Chapter 3 will prove that almost all of these 475 were sundown towns. There is reason to believe that more than half of all towns in Oregon, Indiana, Ohio, the Cumberlands, the Ozarks, and diverse other areas were also all-white on purpose. Sundown suburbs are found from Darien, Connecticut, to La Jolla, California, and are even more prevalent; in-deed, most suburbs began life as sundown towns.
Sundown towns also range across the income spectrum. In 1990, the median owner-occupied house in Tuxedo Park, perhaps the wealthiest suburb of New York City, was worth more than $500,000 (the highest category in the census). So was the median house in Kenilworth, the richest suburb of Chicago. The median house in Pierce City, in southwestern Missouri, on the other hand, was worth just $29,800 and in Zeigler, in southern Illinois, just $21,900. All four towns kept out African Americans for decades.
This History Has Been Hidden
Even though sundown towns were everywhere, almost no literature exists on the topic.’ No book has ever been written about the making of all-white towns in America.8 Indeed, this story is so unknown as to deserve the term hidden. Most Americans have no idea such towns or counties exist, or they think such things happened mainly in the Deep South. Ironically, the traditional South has almost no sundown towns. Mississippi, for instance, has no more than 6, mostly mere hamlets, while Illinois has no fewer than 456, as Chapter 3 will show.
Even book-length studies of individual sundown towns rarely mention their exclusionary policies. Local historians omit the fact intentionally, knowing that it would reflect badly on their communities if publicized abroad. I read at least 300 local histories—some of them elaborate coffee-table books—about towns whose sundown histories I had confirmed via detailed oral histories, but only about 1 percent of these mentioned their town’s racial policies. In conversation, however, the authors of these commemorative histories were often more forthcoming, showing that they knew about the policy but didn’t care to disclose it in print.
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- Sundown towns (1890s– 1960s)
- Thousands of all-white towns harshly enforcing segregation
- Restricted people of color from living or visiting
- With discriminatory local laws, intimidation, violence
- Named after signs saying black people must leave by sundown
- Many signs were still up in the 1970s
- Occurred all over country
- Largely in opposition to Great Migration and de-segregation efforts
- By 1970 70% of Illinois towns were sundown towns
- Sundown also included suburbs, neighborhoods, villages, counties
- Chevy Chase Maryland one of the first Sundown Suburb
- 1909: Chevy Chase Land Company successfully sued developer to prevent Black housing
- By 2000 its 6,183 residents included just 18 African Americans
- 1909: Chevy Chase Land Company successfully sued developer to prevent Black housing
- Chevy Chase Maryland one of the first Sundown Suburb
- Largely in opposition to Great Migration and de-segregation efforts
- Restricted people of color from living or visiting
- Thousands of all-white towns harshly enforcing segregation
- Many Sundown towns ethnically cleansed black people
- “whites in about 50 towns used mob violence to expel and keep out African Americans, and many more relied on the threat of violence. Some towns passed “legal” ordinances banning hiring blacks or renting or selling them homes; others relied on citizens to pay informal visits to warn visiting African Americans that they “must not remain in town.”” James Loewen – Sundown Towns: Hidden Dimension of American Racism
“Whenever a town had African American residents and no longer does, we should seek to learn how and why they left. Expulsions and prohibitions often lurk behind the census statistics. Vienna, a town in southern Illinois, provides a rather recent example. In 1950, Vienna had 1,085 people, including a black community of long standing, dating to the Civil War. In the 1950 census, African Americans numbered 34; additional black families lived just outside Vienna’s city limits. Then in the summer of 1954, two black men beat up a white grandmother and allegedly tried to rape her teenage granddaughter. The grandmother eventually died, and “every [white] man in town was depu-tized” to find the culprits, according to a Vienna resident in 2004. The two men were apprehended; in the aftermath, whites sacked the entire black com-munity. “They burned the houses,” my informant said. “The blacks literally ran for their lives.” The Vienna Times put it more sedately: “The three remaining buildings on the South hill in the south city limits of Vienna were destroyed by fire about 4:30 o’clock Monday afternoon.” The report went on to tell that the state’s attorney and circuit judge later addressed a joint meeting of the Vienna city council and Johnson County commissioners, “telling them of the loss sustained by the colored people.” Both bodies “passed a resolution condemning the acts of vandalism” and promised to pay restitution to those who lost their homes and belongings. Neither body invited the black community to return, and no one was ever convicted of the crime of driving them out. In the 2000 census, Vienna’s population of 1,234 included just 1 African American.” James Loewen – Sundown Towns: Hidden Dimension of American Racism
- Sundown communities continue to exist today
- Most white people in US live in majority white communities, schools churches
- Lack any serious connections with a person of color
- Most white people in US live in majority white communities, schools churches
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Map of Sundown Towns
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The History Of “Sundown Towns” | This Day Forward | msnbc
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Vox: The guide book that helped black Americans travel during segregation
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Further Reading
Teaching Tolerance: Does My Town Have a Racist Past?
Orcinus: How to Out A Sundown Town
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Back to History of Housing Discrimination Top
Racial Covenants
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Fair Housing Center of Boston: What is a racially restricted covenant?
A covenant is a legally enforceable “contract” imposed in a deed upon the buyer of property. Owners who violate the terms of the covenant risk forfeiting the property. Most covenants “run with the land” and are legally enforceable on future buyers of the property.
Racially restrictive covenants refer to contractual agreements that prohibit the purchase, lease, or occupation of a piece of property by a particular group of people, usually African Americans. Racially restrictive covenants were not only mutual agreements between property owners in a neighborhood not to sell to certain people, but were also agreements enforced through the cooperation of real estate boards and neighborhood associations. Racially restrictive covenants became common after 1926 after the U.S. Supreme Court decision, Corrigan v. Buckley, which validated their use.
The practice of private, racially restrictive covenants evolved as a reaction to the Great Migration of Southern blacks and in response to the 1917 Court ruling (see Buchanan v. Warley) which declared municipally mandated racial zoning unconstitutional. Buchanan dealt only with legal statutes, thus leaving the door open for private agreements, such as restrictive covenants, to continue to perpetuate residential segregation.
A typical covenant included the following:
“…hereafter no part of said property or any portion thereof shall be…occupied by ay person not of the Caucasian race, it being intended hereby to restrict the use of said property…against occupancy as owners or tenants of any portion of said property for resident or other purposes by people of the Negro or Mongolian race.”
The practice of using racial covenants became so socially acceptable that in “1937 a leading magazine of nationwide circulation awarded 10 communities a ‘shield of honor’ for an umbrella of restrictions against the ‘wrong kind of people’.1 The practice was so widespread that by 1940, 80% of property in Chicago and Los Angeles carried restrictive covenants barring black families.2
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- Racial Covenants
- Agreements to not rent/sell home(s) to non-whites
- 1917 SCOTUS Buchanan v. Warley decision only applied to gov
- Not private agreements
- Racially-restrictive “covenants” became a common practice
- 19 states legally supported
- Community/Neighborhood Assoc.
- More enforceable if covenants with white-only community associations
- Fed gov promoted these associations
- LA, 1937-1948, over a 100 lawsuits to evict black people due to covenants
- More enforceable if covenants with white-only community associations
- 1948, Shelley v. Kraemer
- Made racial covenants illegal
- Still allowed in private deeds
- Although less legally unenforceable
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DC Racial Covenant map for the “Mapping Segregation in Washington DC” project by Prologue DC
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Richard Rothstein : The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
Private Agreements, Government Enforcement
“Increasingly in the twentieth century, racial covenants took the form of a contract among all owners in a neighborhood. Under these conditions, a neighbor could sue if an African American family made a purchase. Sometimes owners created such contracts and persuaded all or most of their neighbors to sign. But this was also not fully satisfactory, because anyone who didn’t sign might sell to an African American with little fear of being successfully sued.
To get around this problem, many subdivision developers created a community association before putting homes up for initial sale, and they made membership in it a condition of purchase. Association bylaws usually included a whites-only clause. In the 1920s, this tactic gained national prominence when developer J. C. Nichols constructed the Country Club District in Kansas City, which included 6,000 homes, 160 apartment buildings, and 35,000 residents. Nichols required each purchaser to join the district’s association. Not only did its rules prohibit sales or rentals to black families, but this racial exclusion policy could not be modified without the assent of owners of a majority of the development’s acreage. Nichols’s developments were a racial model for the rest of Kansas City, which was soon covered by such agreements.
In the Northeast the pattern established in Brookline was pervasive. Around suburban New York City, for example, a survey of 300 developments built between 1935 and 1947 in Queens, Nassau, and Westchester Counties found that 56 percent had racially restrictive covenants. Of the larger subdivisions (those with seventy-five or more units), 85 percent had them.
It was also the case in midwestern metropolises. By 1943, an estimated 175 Chicago neighborhood associations were enforcing deeds that barred sales or rentals to African Americans. By 1947, half of the city’s residential area outside its African American areas had such deed restrictions. In Detroit from 1943 to 1965, white homeowners, real estate agents, or developers organized 192 associations to preserve racial exclusion.
And so it was, too, in the Great Plains. The Oklahoma Supreme Court in 1942 not only voided an African American’s purchase of a property that was restricted by a racial covenant; it charged him for all court costs and attorney’s fees, including those incurred by the white seller.
Cities and their suburbs in the West were also blanketed by racial covenants. Between 1935 and 1944 W. E. Boeing, the founder of Boeing Aircraft, developed suburbs north of Seattle. During this period and after World War II, the South Seattle Land Company, the Puget Mill Company, and others constructed more suburbs. These builders all wrote racially restrictive language into their deeds. The result was a city whose African American population was encircled by all-white suburbs. Boeing’s property deeds stated, for example, “No property in said addition shall at any time be sold, conveyed, rented, or leased in whole or in part to any person or persons not of the White or Caucasian race.” An African American domestic servant, however, was permitted to be an occupant. Within Seattle itself, numerous neighborhood associations sponsoring racial covenants were also formed during the first half of the twentieth century.
In Oakland, California, DeWitt Buckingham was a respected African American physician who had been a captain in the Army Medical Corps during World War II. After the war he established a medical practice serving the city’s African American community, and in 1945, a white friend purchased and then resold a home to him in Claremont, a Berkeley neighborhood where many University of California professors and administrators lived. When the identity of the true buyer became known, the Claremont Improvement Club, a neighborhood association that controlled a covenant restricting the area to those of “pure Caucasian blood,” sued. A state court ordered Dr. Buckingham to vacate the residence.
In Los Angeles from 1937 to 1948, more than one hundred lawsuits sought to enforce restrictions by having African Americans evicted from their homes. In a 1947 case, an African American man was jailed for refusing to move out of a house he’d purchased in violation of a covenant.”
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TCF: Attacking the Black–White Opportunity Gap That Comes from Residential Segregation
Restrictive Covenants, Redlining, and Racial Violence
This supposedly “race-neutral” form of economic discrimination emerged alongside longstanding, more explicit political and economic racism. In order to continue to exclude middle- and upper-class blacks from white neighborhoods, public and private interests conspired to establish a web of racist policies and practices surrounding housing and homeownership. One practice for many white homeowners was to band together and adopt racially restrictive covenants in their neighborhoods, which forbade any buyer from reselling a home to black buyers. Initially upheld in Corrigan v. Buckley (1926), the U.S. Supreme Court reasoned that covenants were private contracts not subject to the Constitution.31 But the Court’s logic was faulty, because (1) private contracts are not enforceable except through the power of the state, and (2) the state was using that power of enforcement. In city after city, courts and sheriffs successfully evicted African Americans from homes that they had rightly purchased in order to enforce racially restrictive covenants.32 The racist contracts were so widely accepted that the commissioner of the Federal Housing Administration continued to recommend their use well after the U.S. Supreme Court declared them unconstitutional in Shelley v. Kramer (1948), dismissing the ruling and declaring that it was not “the policy of the government to require private individuals to give up their right to dispose of their property as they see fit.”33 Still today, racially restrictive covenants appear in real estate records, even if they are unenforceable.34
In order to continue to exclude middle- and upper-class blacks from white neighborhoods, public and private interests conspired to establish a web of racist policies and practices surrounding housing and homeownership.
The official position of the Federal Housing Administration—which underwrote $120 billion in new housing construction between 1934 and 1962—was that blacks were an adverse influence on property values.35 In response, the FHA warned against insuring mortgages for homes in racially mixed neighborhoods, and counseled lenders to reject or give poor ratings to loan applicants from black and brown neighborhoods. Baking racial exclusion into programs designed to promote homeownership, an FHA manual suggested that the best financial bets were those where safeguards—such as highways separating communities—could prevent “the infiltration of lower class occupancy, and inharmonious racial groups.”36 The FHA’s chief economist Homer Hoyt designed a racial ranking system that positioned “Mexicans” and “Negroes” as the least desirable neighborhood residents, and worked with the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation to map cities and design areas into various risk categories congruent with that racial hierarchy. Homebuyers seeking to purchase in “red” zone neighborhoods—those with high percentages of black residents, regardless of the wealth of those residents—would likely be denied a mortgage loan and received no federal support. The FHA provided the strongest financial support to green-zoned areas that, as one appraiser noted, lacked “a single foreigner or Negro.”37 In 1940, the FHA actually denied insurance for a white developer with a project located near an African-American community until the builder agreed to construct a half-mile, six-foot high concrete wall to separate the two neighborhoods.38 Not only did this practice of redlining explicitly encourage and perpetuate racial segregation, it also shut black Americans out of key opportunities for one of the country’s most effective wealth-building strategies: homeownership. Of all of the homeownership loans approved by the government between 1934 and 1968, whites received 98 percent of them.39
A covenant signed by both John J. Buckley and Irene H. Corrigan. Source: Wikimedia Commons
The U.S. Supreme Court ultimately struck down racially restrictive covenants in Shelley v. Kramer (1948), but even then, many black families faced grave risks when attempting to move into white neighborhoods. Extralegal violence became an all-too-common method of maintaining segregation through intimidation and fear.40 In one case, when a middle-class black family moved into an all-white neighborhood in a suburb of Philadelphia, some 600 white demonstrators gathered in front of the house and pelted the home and family with rocks. Shortly after, several whites rented a unit next door to the family, hoisting up a Confederate flag and blaring music throughout the night. Klan and community members burned a cross in the family’s yard. Law enforcement largely declined to intervene, with one sergeant suffering a demotion to patrolman after objecting to his orders not to interfere with the rioters.41 In Richmond, California, members of the neighborhood homeowners association insisted that they could enforce a racially restrictive covenant against a black war veteran and his wife after they purchased a home there—four years after the Supreme Court had ruled such covenants unconstitutional. When the black family arrived, a mob of 300 gathered outside of their home, threw bricks at the house, and burned a cross in the front yard. As in Pennsylvania, the police refused to step in for several days, only intervening after the NAACP pressed the governor to do so. Still, no arrests were made.42 In Los Angeles, of the more than one hundred incidents of move-in bombings and vandalism between 1950 and 1965, only one led to arrest and prosecution.43 This harassment and racial terrorism was not declared a federal crime until the Fair Housing Act made it so in 1968. Still, the Southern Poverty Law Center found that, in 1985–86, only one-quarter of these incidents were prosecuted.44
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Economic Policy Institute: The Making of Ferguson
Restrictive covenants
When St. Louis leaders developed zoning rules to control black population movement in the second decade of the 20th century, private real estate agents and individual white homeowners began to attach clauses to property deeds and adopt neighborhood contracts to prevent African Americans from moving into their environs. Called “restrictive covenants,” the first in St. Louis was recorded in 1910.28 Later, covenants were promoted nationwide by the National Association of Real Estate Boards, which provided model language. In St. Louis, the Real Estate Exchange provided a “Uniform Restriction Agreement” for neighborhood associations to use. By 1945, about 300 neighborhood covenants were in force.29
The legal instruments took two forms. In one, homebuilders attached clauses to property deeds committing the first and subsequent buyers of a house never to sell that property to an African American or permit the property to be occupied by one. Exceptions were typically made for live-in domestic servants. In the other, associations of homeowners in particular neighborhoods signed mutual agreements that no member of the association would sell to, or permit occupancy by, an African American – again, with a similar exception. The second form was easier to enforce, because any signatory had standing to compel compliance. The Real Estate Exchange itself was typically a signatory, and it frequently initiated litigation to prevent a breach.
Typical restrictive covenant language in this 1923 document covers streets a half mile from the St. Louis house whose sale Shelley v. Kraemer upheld. The streets have since been renamed Dick Gregory Place and Dr. Martin Luther King Drive. Photo reproduced with permission from the Colin Gordon, University of Iowa
Courts in Missouri and elsewhere supported this segregation by consistently ordering the cancellation of sales made in violation of such agreements. But if initial sales in an all-white neighborhood proceeded without challenge, courts frequently refused to prohibit subsequent sales because the all-white character of the neighborhood had already been lost, and the intent of an association to preserve segregation could no longer be fulfilled by enforcing the covenant. This legal theory required the Real Estate Exchange and other white activists to be perfectly vigilant, something rarely achieved. Once sales to African Americans proceeded without challenge, neighborhoods bordering overcrowded ghetto areas quickly flipped from white to black.
Public policy was deeply entangled in restrictive covenants, and not only because Harland Bartholomew’s City Plan Commission considered their existence to be a factor supporting a neighborhood’s first-residential classification.30 The federal government also became entangled in racial covenants because so many of them were promoted by institutions subsidized by the government with tax exemptions and tax deductibility.
As the U.S. Supreme Court found in an unrelated case in 1983, the Internal Revenue Service has the power to revoke the tax favoritism of institutions practicing racial discrimination. Although that case involved a seemingly tangential aspect of the institution’s mission and practice (Bob Jones University banned interracial dating by its students), the court found this sufficient to justify the IRS revocation. The court did not reach the question of whether the IRS is compelled by the Constitution and law to withhold tax exemption from institutions that are heavily involved in promoting racial discrimination, but such an interpretation seems to follow. The court observed that the Internal Revenue Code intends that “an institution seeking tax-exempt status must serve a public purpose and not be contrary to established public policy.”31 IRS regulations specifically authorize charitable deductions for organizations that “eliminate prejudice and discrimination” and “defend human and civil rights secured by law.”32
In as much as the right of African Americans to purchase residential property without discrimination had been secured by law since 1866,33 it follows that granting tax-exempt status to churches or other institutions promoting restrictive covenants constituted improper federal support, as it violated established public policy. The government, however, never questioned the prominent involvement of tax-exempt churches, hospitals, and universities in enforcing segregation. If church leaders had to choose between their tax-exemptions and racial exclusion, there might have been many fewer covenants blanketing white St. Louis and other cities.
Although the Supreme Court had upheld the legality of covenants themselves in 1926, it found in 1948 that state courts could not enforce them without violating the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. The decision came in Detroit and St. Louis cases (although many similar cases had been pursued elsewhere, in Los Angeles with the greatest frequency) and the decision has come to be known by the St. Louis case, Shelley v. Kraemer.34 And this case was particularly interesting because of the role played by tax-exempt institutions.
The case arose from the objections of a white St. Louis homeowner, Fern Kraemer, to the purchase of a home near hers by the African American Shelley family. The area had been covered by a restrictive covenant organized by a neighborhood group, the Marcus Avenue Improvement Association. The association, including 2,000 property owners, was sponsored by the Cote Brilliante Presbyterian Church, whose trustees provided funds from the church treasury to finance Ms. Kraemer’s lawsuit to enforce the covenant. Another church, the Waggoner Place Methodist Episcopal Church South, was also a signatory to the covenant; its pastor had defended the covenant in court in an earlier (1942) case.35
Restrictive covenants also became an expression of public policy when, in the early New Deal, the Federal Housing Administration subsidized suburbanization and made the existence of racial covenants an important condition of mortgage insurance. Beginning in 1934, and continuing thereafter, FHA underwriting manuals stated that “protection against some adverse influences is obtained by the proper zoning and deed restrictions that prevail in a neighborhood” and elaborated that “the more important among the adverse influential factors are the ingress of undesirable racial or nationality groups.”36 As public housing helped define the north side of St. Louis as black, and the south side as white, this FHA policy began a half-century of federal government effort to move St. Louis’s white families to newly growing exclusively white suburbs.
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New Deal and GI Bill Discrimination
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Background
- First Great Migration
- During WW1 factories “forced” to hire black people due to labor shortages
- Vagrancy laws enacted in many of these cities to ensure only “needed” workers come
- 600,000 black people “escaped” Southern violence for jobs near war industries
- Sharecropping, Vagrancy Laws, Convict Leasing, prevented millions from leaving
- Due to union support many were able to keep their jobs after the war
- Many more blacks weren’t allowed in unions
- Today, wages of unionized black people are 35% higher
- During WW1 factories “forced” to hire black people due to labor shortages
- Southern Voting Bloc
- After the failure of Reconstruction white supremacy took back the South
- Any policy/legislation needing congressional support had to promote segregation
- for Southern votes
- Including the New Deal programs that excluded people of color from
- Minimum wages, labor protections, unions, child labor laws, housing assistance, etc.
- Any policy/legislation needing congressional support had to promote segregation
- After the failure of Reconstruction white supremacy took back the South
- “Blighted”, “Ghettos”, “Slums”,
- Gov code words for black/integrated communities needing to be segregated
- Many of these communities were thriving middle class communities
- Many of these communities needed to be built but responsibility
- Not for the purpose of segregation, displacement and concentrating black poverty
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New Deal and GI Bill
- New Deal (1933-36)
- Series of initiatives aimed at benefiting the lower and middle class
- Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC): created mortgage assistance programs
- Federal Housing Administration (FHA): created gov backed housing loans
- Social Security Act (1935): Safety net programs for elderly, unemployed, injured workers, children, disabled
- The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (Wagner Act) : guaranteed right to unionize, collective bargain and strike
- Series of initiatives aimed at benefiting the lower and middle class
- GI Bill (1944)
- The G.I. Education Bill (1944): gave WW2 vets funding for college, housing, healthcare, unemployment insurance
- Majority of benefits from the New Deal and GI Bill excluded people of color
- Was a requirement to win Southern votes (Solid South)
- After Reconstruction failed, white supremacy regained the South creating a voting block against civil rights
- “Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, first with industry codes and then with the Fair Labor Standards Act,prohibited child labor and established minimum wages of about twelve dollars a week in the South, rising to twenty-five centsan hour in 1938. But to pass such economic legislation, Roosevelt needed the votes of southern congressmen and senators, whoagreed to support economic reform only if it excluded industries in which African Americans predominated, like agriculture.” Richard Rothstein – Color of law
- Created huge racial disparities in wealth, homes, communities, schools, jobs, health, etc
- 1934-68 – 98% of home loans, the number one way to accrue generational equity, were only given to white people
- Created a middle class for white people while leaving people of color in post depression poverty
- Segregation was required in all housing loans, benefits, suburbs, and public housing created in New Deal and GI Bill
- Creating enormous segregation and concentrated poverty for people of color, still felt today
- Less than 1% of black workers were in unions at the time the Wagner Act was signed
- Most unions excluded people of color
- 1934-68 – 98% of home loans, the number one way to accrue generational equity, were only given to white people
- Was a requirement to win Southern votes (Solid South)
“More than 200,000 war veterans used the bill’s benefits to buy a farm or start a business, 5 million purchased new homes and almost 10 million went o college. Between 1944 and 1971, federal spending for former soldiers in this ‘”model welfare system” totaled over $95 billion. As with the New Deal welfare programs, however Black veterans faced discrimination that reduce or denied them the benefits. Combined with the New Deal and suburban housing construction (in developments that found legal ways to keep Blacks out), the GI Bill gave birth to the White middle class and widened the economic gap between the races, a growing disparity racist blamed on poor Black fiscal habits.” Ibram Kendi, Stamped From the Beginning
- New Deal programs didn’t open to non-whites until LBJ’s Great Society/60s civil rights bills
- Rather than fixing the past injustices and huge white head starts
- These policies preserved them by:
- By avoiding any reparations programs
- Only focusing on future “explicit” discrimination
- Ignoring “race neutral” forms of discrimination
- These policies preserved them by:
- Rather than fixing the past injustices and huge white head starts
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Economic Policy Institute: The Making of Ferguson
Subsidization of suburban development for whites only
The FHA not only insured individual mortgages of white homeowners. Perhaps even more important, it effectively financed the construction of entire segregated subdivisions by making advance commitments to builders who met FHA construction standards for materials used, lot size, setback from street, and location in a properly zoned neighborhood that prohibited industry or commercial development threatening home values. Aware that the Supreme Court had prohibited explicit racial zoning, the FHA took the position that the presence of African Americans in nearby neighborhoods was nonetheless a consideration that could threaten FHA insurability and that racial exclusion in the insured subdivision itself could be accomplished if deeds in the subdivision included mutually obligatory clauses prohibiting African Americans from residence.37
Subdivision developers who obtained such commitments could use them to persuade bankers to issue low-interest construction loans. Developers could then also assure potential (white) buyers that their homes were FHA-approved and that FHA (and later VA) mortgages would be available at low interest rates and with no or limited down payments. The FHA’s policy was to prefer homebuilding priced for lower-middle- to middle-class buyers.38
At its peak in 1943 when civilian construction was limited, the FHA financed 80 percent of all private home construction nationwide. During the postwar period, it dropped to one-third.39 But even when subdivisions were not built with advance FHA commitments, individual homebuyers needed access to FHA or VA insured mortgages, so similar standards for new construction pertained. Subdivisions throughout St. Louis County were developed in this way, with FHA advance commitments for the builders and a resulting whites-only sale policy.
The FHA’s suburban whites-only policy continued through the postwar housing boom that lasted through the mid-1960s. In 1947, the FHA sanitized its manual, removing literal race references but still demanding “compatibility among neighborhood occupants” for mortgage guarantees. “Neighborhoods constituted of families that are congenial,” the FHA manual explained, “…generally exhibit strong appeal and stability.”40 This very slightly sanitized language suggested no change in policy, and the FHA continued to finance builders with open policies of racial exclusion for another 15 years.
These practices of the FHA were once well known, but have now mostly been forgotten, although their effects persist. In 1959, the United States Commission on Civil Rights’ annual report summarized how the suburban landscape, by then firmly established, was created:
Nonwhite home buyers and renters have not, however enjoyed the benefits of FHA mortgage insurance to the same extent as whites. According to testimony given before this Commission, less than 2 percent of the total number of new homes insured by FHA since 1946 have been available to minorities. Most of this housing has been all-Negro developments in the South.…
Although the relatively low participation [of] nonwhites has in part been due to their lower incomes, FHA bears some responsibility. Of great significance in this respect are FHA’s policies with regard to the discriminatory practices toward Negroes of real estate boards, home builders and lending institutions.
For the first 16 years of its life, FHA itself actually encouraged the use of racially restrictive covenants. It not only acquiesced in their use but in fact contributed to perfecting them. The 1938 FHA Underwriting Manual, which contained the criteria used in determining eligibility for receipt of FHA benefits, warned against insuring property that would be used by “inharmonious racial groups,” and declared that for stability of a neighborhood, “properties shall continue to be occupied by the same social and racial classes.” The Manual contained a model restrictive covenant which FHA strongly recommended for inclusion in all sales contracts. Furthermore, FHA instructed land valuators that among their considerations should be a determination as to whether “effective restrictive covenants are recorded against the entire tract, since these provide the surest protection against undesirable encroachment and inharmonious use. To be most effective, deed restrictions should be imposed upon all land in the immediate environment of the subject location.” [Footnote: …Many housing experts believe that while FHA did not invent the restrictive covenant its official sanction played a large role in the spread of racial restrictions, particularly in newly developed areas.]
FHA continued this practice of encouraging racially restricted housing developments until 1950, despite mounting pressure from civic organizations, State and local antidiscrimination commissions and other groups to abandon the practice. The only change made by FHA during this period was a softening of the wording in the Underwriting Manual in 1947. This change in language amounted to no real change in policy, however….
While the unenforceability of racial restrictive covenants [following the Supreme Court’s 1948 Shelley ruling] has undoubtedly increased Negro participation in FHA’s insurance programs by making available to them additional existing housing, it has done little in the way of new housing or of apartment units in suburban and outlying areas. There the discriminatory practices of the real estate business, home building industry, and financial institutions continue for the most part unabated. FHA insurance remains available to builders with known policies of discrimination. With the help of FHA financing, all-white suburbs have been constructed in recent years around almost every large city. Huge FHA-insured projects that become whole new residential towns have been built with an acknowledged policy of excluding Negroes.41
In the St. Louis metropolitan area as well as elsewhere, the FHA and VA continued to promote racial restrictions in their loan insurance programs until the 1960s.42
The FHA seal of approval guaranteed that a subdivision was for whites only. Advertisements for suburban subdivisions like those from 1952 featured here were commonplace in St. Louis (and nationwide). The two advertisements were among those collected in a booklet for home seekers, published and distributed by the Home Builders Association of Greater St. Louis. By marketing an “FHA Financed” subdivision in Ferguson, and an “FHA approved” Peaseway subdivision in Kirkwood, these ads signal the development’s whites-only character. Other advertisements in the booklet tout a “Veterans’ Preference” subdivision called Woodson, located in Overland (a few towns south of Ferguson); and “FHA terms” for houses in Webster Groves.43
In that era, the St. Louis-area builder with the most liberal attitudes on racial matters was Charles Vatterott, a devout Catholic (and brother of the Ferguson subdivision builder in the advertisement reproduced here). Charles Vatterott obtained FHA guarantees for St. Ann, a subdivision (later an incorporated town) he started building in 1943. Vatterott intended for St. Ann to be a community for lower-middle-class Catholics, particularly returning war veterans, although he did not prohibit sales to non-Catholic whites, but only to blacks, as the FHA expected. As was conventional for FHA-financed subdivisions in St. Louis County, deeds on St. Ann homes stated that “no lot or portion of a lot or building erected thereon shall be sold, leased, rented or occupied by any other than those of the Caucasian race.”
Vatterott’s limited liberalism was expressed in an insistence, over residents’ opposition, that the golf course he built as part of the St. Ann development be open to nonresident African Americans. And he built a separate, lower-quality subdivision for African Americans – De Porres in the town of Breckenridge Hills, a few miles away (but not adjacent to) St. Ann. The buyers had incomes and occupations – from truck drivers to chemists – similar to those of St. Ann buyers. Had they been permitted to do so by the FHA and its merchant builders, they could have purchased homes in St. Ann or in any of the many other subdivisions that were built for whites in St. Louis County in the postwar period.
Vatterott could not get FHA financing for De Porres because it was intended for African Americans. As a result, many of the homes were rented, and Vatterott set up a special savings plan by which residents could put aside money towards a purchase of their homes without an FHA or VA mortgage. The De Porres development for African Americans also lacked the full community facilities – parks and playgrounds – that Vatterott had built into the St. Ann subdivision.44
As noted earlier, the federal and local governments in 1952 were still operating public housing projects restricted to lower-middle-class white families. The option of these families to remain in public housing was an impediment to suburban home sales. The Home Builders Association booklet denounced public housing (because it “shackles private builders who can’t compete with the government’s half-price product”) and included a barely disguised racial appeal: “IN YOUR OWN HOME you can pick your own neighbors, IN PUBLIC HOUSING … the government picks them for you.”45 On its face, the claim was clearly false – homeowners could not pick their own neighbors because they had no control over the identities of those buying homes nearby. The only way in which they could pick their neighbors was to purchase their homes in subdivisions that, with government approval, excluded a class of buyers, specifically, African Americans.
The Home Builders’ 1952 warning was accurate that the government picks one’s neighbors in public housing, so there was always the threat that the St. Louis Housing Authority would end its segregation policy and assign African Americans to white projects. In fact, as noted earlier, only three years later, a federal court ordered the authority to do so. The only plausible explanation for the Home Builders’ warning about the government picking neighbors is that if families remained in public housing, they might experience racial integration.
Each of the subdivisions in the advertisements described here is in St. Louis County. The farther south and west in the county a suburb is, the more distant it is from the north St. Louis black ghetto. The suburban developments in the advertisements were all-white, with FHA approval, when constructed; by the 2010 census, Ferguson was only 29 percent white, and then, going south and west, Overland was 73 percent white, Webster Groves was still 90 percent white, and Kirkwood was 89 percent white.
This governmental policy of segregation, though now more than a half-century distant, has had enduring consequences. It contributed mightily not only to our present-day residential segregation, but to all aspects of black-white economic inequality. For example, as shown in the Kirkwood subdivision advertisement, homes were marketed as selling to white FHA buyers for “$8,100 up” in 1952. In that year, such home prices were about twice the national median family income of $3,890, and easily affordable to lower-middle or middle-class African Americans, especially to veterans if they could have benefitted from VA mortgage guarantees. A decade later, when assistant principal Larman Williams and engineer Adel Allen were looking for homes in integrated middle-class suburban neighborhoods, those homes were still affordable. Today, however, houses in Kirkwood sell for about $400,000, more than six times national median family income, and mostly unaffordable to working- and middle-class families.46 But for whites permitted to buy in Kirkwood 50 years ago, the advantages they’ve been able to bequeath to their children have been considerable, relative to those of blacks who were denied similar opportunities.
Even accounting for home improvement investments that owners of these homes have made since 1952, the capital gain for white homeowners, and their heirs, endures. The federal government’s support for residential segregation in the mid-20th century is largely responsible for the fact that while the median family income of African Americans is now about 60 percent of whites’ income, the median household wealth of African Americans is only about 5 percent of whites’ wealth.47 This enormous difference translates into differences between blacks and whites in the security and comfort of retirement (and in the obligations of adult children to divert their incomes to support elderly parents), in the ability of young people to attend college, and in the selectivity of the colleges they can afford to attend.
In small ways, local government also worked closely with private agencies to encourage whites to leave the city and move to suburbs to escape proximity to African Americans. A 1947 pamphlet of the Social Planning Council of St. Louis and St. Louis County, a federation of public and private social welfare agencies, rated every neighborhood by, among other characteristics, the “presence of negroes” and concluded, “People Who Can, Move Away.”48 Of 70,000 housing units built in the city of St. Louis and in St. Louis County between 1947 and 1952, fewer than 35 were available to African Americans, whether because of FHA policy, restrictive covenants, or the policy of the real estate industry.49
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TCF: Attacking the Black–White Opportunity Gap That Comes from Residential Segregation
Restrictive Covenants, Redlining, and Racial Violence
This supposedly “race-neutral” form of economic discrimination emerged alongside longstanding, more explicit political and economic racism. In order to continue to exclude middle- and upper-class blacks from white neighborhoods, public and private interests conspired to establish a web of racist policies and practices surrounding housing and homeownership. One practice for many white homeowners was to band together and adopt racially restrictive covenants in their neighborhoods, which forbade any buyer from reselling a home to black buyers. Initially upheld in Corrigan v. Buckley (1926), the U.S. Supreme Court reasoned that covenants were private contracts not subject to the Constitution.31 But the Court’s logic was faulty, because (1) private contracts are not enforceable except through the power of the state, and (2) the state was using that power of enforcement. In city after city, courts and sheriffs successfully evicted African Americans from homes that they had rightly purchased in order to enforce racially restrictive covenants.32 The racist contracts were so widely accepted that the commissioner of the Federal Housing Administration continued to recommend their use well after the U.S. Supreme Court declared them unconstitutional in Shelley v. Kramer (1948), dismissing the ruling and declaring that it was not “the policy of the government to require private individuals to give up their right to dispose of their property as they see fit.”33 Still today, racially restrictive covenants appear in real estate records, even if they are unenforceable.34
In order to continue to exclude middle- and upper-class blacks from white neighborhoods, public and private interests conspired to establish a web of racist policies and practices surrounding housing and homeownership.
The official position of the Federal Housing Administration—which underwrote $120 billion in new housing construction between 1934 and 1962—was that blacks were an adverse influence on property values.35 In response, the FHA warned against insuring mortgages for homes in racially mixed neighborhoods, and counseled lenders to reject or give poor ratings to loan applicants from black and brown neighborhoods. Baking racial exclusion into programs designed to promote homeownership, an FHA manual suggested that the best financial bets were those where safeguards—such as highways separating communities—could prevent “the infiltration of lower class occupancy, and inharmonious racial groups.”36 The FHA’s chief economist Homer Hoyt designed a racial ranking system that positioned “Mexicans” and “Negroes” as the least desirable neighborhood residents, and worked with the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation to map cities and design areas into various risk categories congruent with that racial hierarchy. Homebuyers seeking to purchase in “red” zone neighborhoods—those with high percentages of black residents, regardless of the wealth of those residents—would likely be denied a mortgage loan and received no federal support. The FHA provided the strongest financial support to green-zoned areas that, as one appraiser noted, lacked “a single foreigner or Negro.”37 In 1940, the FHA actually denied insurance for a white developer with a project located near an African-American community until the builder agreed to construct a half-mile, six-foot high concrete wall to separate the two neighborhoods.38 Not only did this practice of redlining explicitly encourage and perpetuate racial segregation, it also shut black Americans out of key opportunities for one of the country’s most effective wealth-building strategies: homeownership. Of all of the homeownership loans approved by the government between 1934 and 1968, whites received 98 percent of them.39
A covenant signed by both John J. Buckley and Irene H. Corrigan. Source: Wikimedia Commons
The U.S. Supreme Court ultimately struck down racially restrictive covenants in Shelley v. Kramer (1948), but even then, many black families faced grave risks when attempting to move into white neighborhoods. Extralegal violence became an all-too-common method of maintaining segregation through intimidation and fear.40 In one case, when a middle-class black family moved into an all-white neighborhood in a suburb of Philadelphia, some 600 white demonstrators gathered in front of the house and pelted the home and family with rocks. Shortly after, several whites rented a unit next door to the family, hoisting up a Confederate flag and blaring music throughout the night. Klan and community members burned a cross in the family’s yard. Law enforcement largely declined to intervene, with one sergeant suffering a demotion to patrolman after objecting to his orders not to interfere with the rioters.41 In Richmond, California, members of the neighborhood homeowners association insisted that they could enforce a racially restrictive covenant against a black war veteran and his wife after they purchased a home there—four years after the Supreme Court had ruled such covenants unconstitutional. When the black family arrived, a mob of 300 gathered outside of their home, threw bricks at the house, and burned a cross in the front yard. As in Pennsylvania, the police refused to step in for several days, only intervening after the NAACP pressed the governor to do so. Still, no arrests were made.42 In Los Angeles, of the more than one hundred incidents of move-in bombings and vandalism between 1950 and 1965, only one led to arrest and prosecution.43 This harassment and racial terrorism was not declared a federal crime until the Fair Housing Act made it so in 1968. Still, the Southern Poverty Law Center found that, in 1985–86, only one-quarter of these incidents were prosecuted.44
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Atlanta Black Star: 9 Ways Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal Purposely Excluded Blacks People
Until the New Deal, Blacks had shown their traditional loyalty to the party of Abraham Lincoln by voting overwhelmingly Republican. By the end of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first administration, however, one of the most dramatic voter shifts in American history had occurred. In 1936, some 75 percent of Black voters supported the Democrats. But instead of using New Deal programs to promote civil rights, the administration consistently succumbed to discrimination — in order to pass major New Deal legislation, Roosevelt needed the support of Southern Democrats. In the end, while Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt became beloved figures to millions of American Blacks, the New Deal did little to advance the cause of racial equality in America.
- Authorizing Lower Pay Scales for Blacks
The National Recovery Administration, intended to reduce “destructive competition” and to help workers by setting minimum wages and maximum weekly hours, not only offered whites the first crack at jobs, but authorized separate and lower pay scales for Blacks, according to the site Digital History.
2. Keeping Blacks Out of White Neighborhoods
The Federal Housing Administration was created by Congress in 1934 to insure loans for construction and repairs of homes. White middle-class families could buy suburban homes with little or no down payments and extended 30-year amortization schedules and their monthly charges were often less than rents the families had previously paid to housing authorities or private landlords. But the FHA had an explicit policy of not insuring suburban mortgages for African-Americans, according to writer Richard Rothstein on the The American Prospect website. In suburban New York’s Nassau County, just east of Queens, Levittown was built in 1947 containing 17,500 mass-produced two-bedroom houses, requiring nothing down and monthly payments of about only $60. At the FHA’s insistence, developer William Levitt did not sell homes to Blacks, and each deed included a prohibition of such resales in the future.
3. Segregated Camps in the Civilian Conservation Corps
The CCC was created to employ young single men from ages 18 to 25 on outdoor conservation projects. Enrollees had to be physically fit and come from families that were on relief and to whom they were willing to send most of their pay. During its nine-year existence, the CCC distributed more than $2.4 billion in federal funds to employ more than 2.5 million jobless young men (up to 519,000 were enrolled at any one time) who worked in about 3,000 camps. According to the Texas Almanac, the CCC was of very limited assistance to Black families because of local bigotry and national CCC leaders’ political concerns. Though CCC rules forbade discrimination based on race, color or creed, the local relief boards often refused to enroll Blacks, particularly in the South. When they were enrolled, Blacks were almost always placed in segregated camps, not only in the South, but all over the country.
4. Social Security Excluded Most Blacks
The Social Security Act of 1935, which provided a safety net for millions of workers by guaranteeing them an income after retirement, excluded from coverage about half the workers in the American economy. Among the excluded groups were agricultural and domestic workers — job categories traditionally filled by Black workers.
5. Killing the Crops
The Agricultural Adjustment Administration reduced agricultural production by paying farmers subsidies not to plant on part of their land and to kill off excess livestock, which in turn reduced crop surplus and effectively raised the value of crops. But since 40 percent of all Black workers made their living as sharecroppers and tenant farmers, the (AAA) acreage reduction hit Blacks hard, according to Digital History. White landlords could make more money by leaving land untilled than by putting land back into production. As a result, the AAA’s policies forced more than 100,000 Blacks off the land in 1933 and 1934. The act initially required landowners to pay the tenant farmers and sharecroppers on their land a portion of the money, but after Southern Democrats in Congress complained, the secretary of agriculture surrendered and reinterpreted the act to no longer send checks to sharecroppers directly.
6. Roosevelt Refuses to Support Anti-Lynching Bill
The president disappointed Black leaders by failing to support an anti-lynching bill and a bill to abolish the poll tax. Roosevelt feared that conservative Southern Democrats, who had seniority in Congress and controlled many committee chairmanships, would block his bills if he tried to fight them on the race question. In 1938, liberal congressmen attempted to pass federal anti-lynching legislation to halt the most horrific type of anti-Black terrorism. Southern Senators angrily filibustered, and FDR defied Black leaders and his own wife by refusing to throw his support behind the measure.
7.Roosevelt Let Southern Racists Spurn Blacks
Roosevelt’s need to accommodate Southern racists often complicated the implementation of his programs, according to Digital History. Distribution of relief in the South, for example, slowed to a trickle because Southern relief administrators didn’t want to distribute money to Blacks. One Georgia relief agent told Roosevelt’s emissary Lorena Hickok that “any N*gger who gets over $8 a week is a spoiled N*gger, that’s all … The Negroes regard the President as the Messiah, and they think that … they’ll all be getting $12 a week for the rest of their lives.”
8.Roosevelt’s Programs Widened the Gap Between Blacks and Whites
Ira Katznelson, a political science and history professor at Columbia University, in his book, ”When Affirmative Action Was White,” contends that Roosevelt’s programs not only discriminated against Blacks, but actually contributed to widening the gap between white and Black Americans — judged in terms of educational achievement, quality of jobs and housing, and attainment of higher income. Arguing for the necessity of affirmative action today, Katznelson contends that policymakers and the judiciary previously failed to consider just how unfairly Blacks had been treated by the federal government in the 30 years before the civil rights revolution of the 1960s.
9.Gaping Disparity in Treatment of White and Black Soldiers
By October 1946, the G.I. Bill had placed 6,500 former soldiers in nonfarm jobs in Mississippi; 86 percent of the skilled and semiskilled jobs were filled by whites, 92 percent of the unskilled ones by Blacks. In New York and northern New Jersey, fewer than 100 of the 67,000 mortgages insured by the G.I. Bill supported home purchases by nonwhites. Discrimination continued as well in elite Northern colleges. The University of Pennsylvania, along with Columbia the least discriminatory of the Ivy League colleges, enrolled only 46 Black students in its student body of 9,000 in 1946. The traditional Black colleges did not have places for an estimated 70,000 Black veterans in 1947. At the same time, white universities were doubling their enrollments and prospering with the infusion of public and private funds, and of students with their G.I. benefits.
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JSTOR Daily: The Inequality Hidden Within the Race-Neutral G.I. Bill
President Roosevelt’s race-neutral G.I. Bill, which went into effect in 1944, had state-controlled pushbacks that kept many black veterans from reaping its full benefits.
A 2006 article in the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education details the advantages and disadvantages the black population faced when putting the G.I. Bill to use. Edward Humes writes, “[B]lack veterans and their families were denied their fair share of the multigenerational, enriching impact of home ownership and economic security that the G.I. Bill conferred on a majority of white veterans, their children, and their grandchildren.” Such an imbalance went against Roosevelt’s intentions, as he had purposefully created the first social legislation that did not discriminate on the basis of race.
According to one scholar, 28 percent of white veterans went to college on the G.I. Bill, while only 12 percent of black veterans did so.
Much of the disparity in the dissemination of G.I. benefits came from the efforts of Representative John Elliot Rankin, who argued for the bill to be “a matter of local control and states’ rights.” In many parts of the U.S., this allowed Veterans Administration counselors to push black veterans into vocational and trade schools instead of academic institutions. “[T]he counselors didn’t merely discourage black veterans. They just said no. No to home loans. No to job placement, except for the most menial positions. And no to college, except for historically black colleges, maintaining the sham of ‘separate but equal’…” According to Humes, 28 percent of white veterans went to college on the G.I. Bill, while only 12 percent of black veterans did so.
The introduction of the G.I. Bill led to an increase in vocational training for both black and white veterans, from just 100 private vocational schools to over 10,000 by 1950. Some of these institutions provided a quality education that would lead to lucrative employment, but many vocational schools emerged merely to accept the plethora of G.I. Bill payments. To make matters worse, this deceit wasn’t limited to white-run programs. Black institutions also took advantage of black veterans. “Programs for black veterans—some of them owned and operated by African Americans—appeared to have been among the most abusive, preying on those veterans most in need of help.”
While the bill itself was progressive, much of the country still functioned under both covert and blatant segregation. Therefore, when blacks did receive thorough training, they still weren’t considered for positions that matched their skill set. Humes writes, “86 percent of the skilled, professional, and semiskilled jobs went to white veterans, while 92 percent of the nonskilled and service positions went to black vets.” Blacks were also pushed away from G.I.-sponsored home loans, which enabled white vets to own property that they could then pass down to their children and grandchildren. In the summer of 1947, three thousand VA home loans were issued in Mississippi, with only two of those loans being granted to black veterans.
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The Living New Deal: New Deal Inclusion
Histories of the New Deal have often noted its failures to overcome the barriers of race, gender, religion and more in American life. The New Deal revolutionized many aspects of US society and politics, but it ran up against many harsh realities of an imperfect social order that blocked and distorted the goals of reformers in the government. It would be unfair, however, to blame the New Deal for racial and other policies that were rooted in the larger contours of American society. Yet, recently there have been far too many voices criticizing the New Deal for racism and discrimination and too few looking carefully into the record to discern what the New Deal did and did not do to correct racism, misogyny and other injustices.
Let us be clear at the outset that a handful of the New Deal’s hallmark programs were marred by fundamental exclusions. The Social Security Act and National Labor Relations Act both made an exception for agricultural and domestic workers – which was effectively a means of preventing African, Latino and Asian-Americans from enjoying their benefits and protections. The Federal Housing Administration adopted rules that cemented residential segregation into the landscape of US cities. Native Americans saw their livelihoods badly damaged by big water projects like the Bonneville and Grand Coulee dams on the Columbia River, which interrupted salmon migrations on which the tribes depended. And, the most flagrant case of racism was Executive Order 9066, which imprisoned some 120,000 Japanese Americans on the West Coast as the country went to war in 1942 – President Roosevelt’s single worst decision and a blight on his legacy.
Nevertheless, we need to look more carefully into the political foundations for these failures of the New Deal to treat people equally and inclusively.
The biggest reason for the omissions in the Social Security system and labor protections was the power of Southern Democrats in Congress (cheap black labor was fundamental to the economic order of the south); President Roosevelt had to defer to the Dixiecrats in order to keep the New Deal Coalition together to get his programs passed at all.
The FHA rule that red-lined racialized neighborhoods – meaning that it was hard for minorities to secure mortgages and become homeowners – was written by the chief lobbyist of the National Association of Real Estate Boards. Realtors had every reason to favor racial segregation that conformed to prevailing white prejudices, and they had the political clout to see that it became federal policy.
Another case of political expediency was FDR’s capitulation to war hysteria in the widespread calls for Japanese internment, backed by a notorious record of anti-Asian agitation on the West Coast where internment took place.
A more subtle reasons for the New Deal’s failures was deference to local governments in the selection of projects and distribution of funds in a variety of public works projects. That is why segregation ruled in public housing, WPA work teams and CCC camps in Jim Crow country (but not throughout the country). On the one hand, deference to localism was a strength of the New Deal because it allowed local people to choose projects they wanted and gave local politicians a stake in federal programs. On the other hand, localism crippled the national government’s ability to force change from above.
It is essential to remember, however, that the New Deal had to cope with deeply held beliefs by the vast majority of Americans about the indolence of the unemployed, women’s place in society, the superiority of the White Race, the threat of immigration, and the worth of the disabled. It was not enough to change federal policies; the dominant culture had to be eroded. New Deal arts and cultural programs did a great deal on this front, as well. Government-sponsored writers, painters and performers were free to depict working people as heroes, to honor native cultures, and to put women in the spotlight. New Deal artists portrayed national life in dramatically new ways that included a host of ordinary Americans, featured African Americans in prominent roles and gave voice to the disenfranchised.
A striking example of New Deal rethinking of American society was the Federal Writers Project (FWP) chronicles of the experience of African Americans. Hundreds of first-person accounts of former slaves were transcribed, an unparalleled resource for historians and citizens alike. FWP writers produced such classics as James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and Richard Wright’s scathing account of life under Jim Crow, Twelve Million Black Voices. Alan Lomax and others were paid to travel the South recording the songs of folk and blues musicians, creating a magnificent repository of folk music. Federal Security Administration (FSA) photographers compiled a superb visual account of popular life and suffering of all races.
In short, The New Deal generated a political and cultural revolution that began to transform the country and lay the foundation for later achievements in Civil Rights, disabled rights, women’s rights, senior citizen programs, and better treatment of Native Americans.
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History: How the GI Bill’s Promise Was Denied to a Million Black WWII Veterans
When Eugene Burnett saw the neat tract houses of Levittown, New York, he knew he wanted to buy one. It was 1949, and he was ready to settle down in a larger home with his family. The newly established Long Island suburb seemed like the perfect place to begin their postwar life—one that, he hoped, would be improved with the help of the GI Bill, a piece of sweeping legislation aimed at helping World War II veterans like Burnett prosper after the war.
But when he spoke with a salesman about buying the house using a GI Bill-guaranteed mortgage, the door to suburban life in Levittown slammed firmly in his face. The suburb wasn’t open to black residents.
“It was as though it wasn’t real,” Burnett’s wife, Bernice, recalled. “Look at this house! Can you imagine having this? And then for them to tell me because of the color of my skin that I can’t be part of it?”
The Burnetts weren’t the only black Americans for whom the promise of the GI Bill turned out to be an illusion. Though the bill helped white Americans prosper and accumulate wealth in the postwar years, it didn’t deliver on that promise for veterans of color. In fact, the wide disparity in the bill’s implementation ended up helping drive growing gaps in wealth, education and civil rights between white and black Americans.
While the GI Bill’s language did not specifically exclude African-American veterans from its benefits, it was structured in a way that ultimately shut doors for the 1.2 million black veterans who had bravely served their country during World War II, in segregated ranks.
Fear of Black Advancement
When lawmakers began drafting the GI Bill in 1944, some Southern Democrats feared that returning black veterans would use public sympathy for veterans to advocate against Jim Crow laws. To make sure the GI Bill largely benefited white people, the southern Democrats drew on tactics they had previously used to ensure that the New Deal helped as few black people as possible.
During the drafting of the law, the chair of the House Veterans Committee, Mississippi Congressman John Rankin, played hardball and insisted that the program be administered by individual states instead of the federal government. He got his way. Rankin was known for his virulent racism: He defended segregation, opposed interracial marriage, and had even proposed legislation to confine, then deport, every person with Japanese heritage during World War II.
When the bill came to a committee vote, he stonewalled in an attempt to gut another provision that entitled all veterans to $20 a week of unemployment compensation for a year. Rankin knew this would represent a significant gain for black Southerners, so he refused to cast a critical proxy vote in protest. The American Legion ended up tracking down the Congressman who had left his proxy vote with Rankin and flying him to Washington to break the deadlock.
Roosevelt signed the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act into law on June 22, 1944, only weeks after the D-Day offensive began. It ushered into law sweeping benefits for veterans, including college tuition, low-cost home loans, and unemployment insurance.
The GI Bill’s Effect on Black Veterans
From the start, black veterans had trouble securing the GI Bill’s benefits. Some could not access benefits because they had not been given an honorable discharge—and a much larger number of black veterans were discharged dishonorably than their white counterparts.
Veterans who did qualify could not find facilities that delivered on the bill’s promise. Black veterans in a vocational training program at a segregated high school in Indianapolis were unable to participate in activities related to plumbing, electricity and printing because adequate equipment was only available to white students.
Simple intimidation kept others from enjoying GI Bill benefits. In 1947, for example, a crowd hurled rocks at black veterans as they moved into a Chicago housing development. Thousands of black veterans were attacked in the years following World War II and some were singled out and lynched.
Though Rankin had lost the battle to exclude black men from VA unemployment insurance, it was doled out inequitably. Men who applied for unemployment benefits were kicked out of the program if any other work was available to them, even work that provided less than subsistence wages. Southern postmasters were even accused of refusing to deliver the forms black veterans needed to fill out to receive their unemployment benefits.
Black veterans’ and civil rights groups protested their treatment, calling for protections like black involvement in the VA and non-discriminatory loans, but the racial disparities in the implementation of the GI Bill had already been set into motion. As the years went on, white veterans flowed into newly created suburbs, where they began amassing wealth in skilled positions. But black veterans lacked those options. The majority of skilled jobs were given to white workers.
Staff Sergeant Herbert Ellison explanes the G.I. Bill of Rights to the African American members of the quartermaster trucking company.
Library of Congress/Corbis/VCG/Getty Images
A White Post-War Housing Boom—And Redlining in Black Neighborhoods
The postwar housing boom almost entirely excluded black Americans, most of whom remained in cities that received less and less investment from businesses and banks.
Though the GI Bill guaranteed low-interest mortgages and other loans, they were not administered by the VA itself. Thus, the VA could cosign, but not actually guarantee the loans. This gave white-run financial institutions free reign to refuse mortgages and loans to black people.
Redlining—a decades-old practice of marking maps by race to characterize the risks of lending money and providing insurance—made purchasing a home even more difficult for black veterans. Lenders froze out poorer neighborhoods, ensuring that loan assistance and insurance would be denied. And new white suburbs often came with overtly racist covenants that denied entry to black people.
In 1947, only 2 of the more than 3,200 VA-guaranteed home loans in 13 Mississippi cities went to black borrowers. “These impediments were not confined to the South,” notes historian Ira Katznelson. “In New York and the northern New Jersey suburbs, fewer than 100 of the 67,000 mortgages insured by the GI bill supported home purchases by non-whites.”
Failure to Receive GI Bill Education Benefits
Black veterans in search of the education they had been guaranteed fared no better. Many black men returning home from the war didn’t even try to take advantage of the bill’s educational benefits—they could not afford to spend time in school instead of working. But those who did were at a considerable disadvantage compared to their white counterparts. Public education provided poor preparation for black students, and many lacked much educational attainment at all due to poverty and social pressures.
As veteran applications flooded universities, black students often found themselves left out. Northern universities dragged their feet when it came to admitting black students, and Southern colleges barred black students entirely. And the VA itself encouraged black veterans to apply for vocational training instead of university admission and arbitrarily denied educational benefits to some students.
Veterans lining up for a last day rush to get counseling on GI bill educational courses at the New York regional office Veterans Administration on July 25, 1951.
Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
Those students who did try to attend college found doors closed at every turn. A full 95 percent of black veterans were shunted off to black colleges—institutions that were underfunded and overwhelmed by the influx of new students. Most were unaccredited, and with a massive influx in applicants, they had to turn away tens of thousands of veterans.
“Though Congress granted all soldiers the same benefits theoretically,” writes historian Hilary Herbold, “the segregationist principles of almost every institution of higher learning effectively disbarred a huge proportion of black veterans from earning a college degree.”
The GI Bill and the Racial Wealth Gap
The original GI Bill ended in July 1956. By that time, nearly 8 million World War II veterans had received education or training, and 4.3 million home loans worth $33 billion had been handed out. But most black veterans had been left behind. As employment, college attendance and wealth surged for whites, disparities with their black counterparts not only continued, but widened. There was, writes Katznelson, “no greater instrument for widening an already huge racial gap in postwar America than the GI Bill.”
Today, a stark wealth gap between black and white Americans persists. The median wealth for white households is about $171,000. For black households, it’s just $17,100—about one tenth that of their white counterparts. The legacy of the GI Bill is still at work—and for black families, its negative impact could linger for years to come.
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Further Reading
Washington Post: The New Deal as raw deal for blacks in segregated communities
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Back to History of Housing Discrimination Top
Redlining
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Wikipedia: Redlining
“In the United States and Canada, redlining is the systematic denial of various services to residents of specific, often racially associated, neighborhoods or communities, either directly or through the selective raising of prices.[2][3] While the best known examples of redlining have involved denial of financial services such as banking or insurance,[4] other services such as health care (see also Race and health) or even supermarkets[5] have been denied to residents. In the case of retail businesses like supermarkets, purposely locating impractically far away from said residents results in a redlining effect.[6] Reverse redlining occurs when a lender or insurer targets particular neighborhoods that are predominantly nonwhite, not to deny residents loans or insurance, but rather to charge them more than in a non-redlined neighborhood where there is more competition.[7][8]
In the 1960s, sociologist John McKnight coined the term “redlining” to describe the discriminatory practice of fencing off areas where banks would avoid investments based on community demographics.[9] During the heyday of redlining, the areas most frequently discriminated against were black inner city neighborhoods. For example, in Atlanta in the 1980s, a Pulitzer Prize-winning series of articles by investigative reporter Bill Dedman showed that banks would often lend to lower-income whites but not to middle-income or upper-income blacks.[10] The use of blacklists is a related mechanism also used by redliners to keep track of groups, areas, and people that the discriminating party feels should be denied business or aid or other transactions. In the academic literature, redlining falls under the broader category of credit rationing.
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The Root: How Redlining Shaped Black America As We Know It | Unpack That
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Redlining Overview
- After 1917 Buchanan case legal exclusionary zoning could only block poor black people
- Middle class black people who could afford single home units could still move into white neighborhoods
- Gov created incentives for whites to go to suburbs while making it impossible for blacks to follow
- 1933, Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) created
- Helped with mortgage payments with people in trouble
- After Buchannon gov couldn’t technically discriminate but private industry could
- Fed gov hired local real estate agents to underwrite/measure risk of communities for housing assistance
- Helped with mortgage payments with people in trouble
- 1934, Federal Housing Administration (FHA) was created
- Revolutionized home ownership by creating our current financial mortgaging system
- Before FHA to own a home you typically needed 50% down and 100% repayment within 5 years
- Private mortgage insurance was created in 1880s to lessen burden but went bankrupt during Great Depression
- FHA insured/guaranteed private bank home loans covering 80% cost and more time to pay off
- Excluded people of color and white people intending to rent to black people
- Before FHA to own a home you typically needed 50% down and 100% repayment within 5 years
- Revolutionized home ownership by creating our current financial mortgaging system
- 1935, FHA Underwriting Handbook
- FHA used the racially coded maps created by HOLC to create guidelines on insuring loans only to promote segregation
- Green – Growing homogenous white professional areas
- Blue – Static homogenous white areas
- Yellow – Declining and typically bordering on all black neighborhoods
- Red – Either people of color, mixed race or low income neighborhoods
- Marked black neighborhoods “too risky” for FHA mortgages on unfounded claim black people lower property values
- No evidence ever proved this
- In reality due to predatory practices black people increased home values by paying more for their homes
- FHA used the racially coded maps created by HOLC to create guidelines on insuring loans only to promote segregation
- Created Redlining
- Practice of refusing to back mortgages in neighborhoods based on race
- These maps created segregation & housing discrimination as institutional practices still occurring and being felt today
- Due to redlining from 1934-68, 98% of home loans, the number one way to accrue generational equity, were only given to white people
A redlining map of New Orleans
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Realtor Code of Ethics
- National Association of Real Estate Boards (NAR)
- Trade association to regulate realtors
- Formed in 1908
- NAR Code of Ethics
- Adopted in 1908
- Realtors disagreed/violated code could be fined or removed from local board
- Especially if they sold property to the wrong person
- From 1924 to 1950, Article 34 of the Realtor Code of Ethics read:
- “A Realtor should never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood a character of property or occupancy, members of any race or nationality, or any individuals whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values in that neighborhood.”
- 1950, Shelley v. Kraemer, SCOTUS outlawed protective racial covenants
- Realtor Code of Ethics was amended as follows:
- “A Realtor should never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood a character of property or use which will clearly be detrimental to property valuesin that neighborhood.”
- Realtor Code of Ethics was amended as follows:
- Although race was removed from code…
- Realities were still instrumental in preserving and promoting segregation
- Blamed it on market values instead of race, although outcomes were same
- Realities were still instrumental in preserving and promoting segregation
“Indeed, the real-estate industry grew in tandem with and helped to popularize racist, even eugenic ideas about African Americans, including the notions that Black residents negatively impact property values, are undesirable neighbors, and pose an existential risk to communities and neighborhoods. As early as the 1920s, the National Association of Real Estate Boards had threatened professional discipline against any agent who disrupted segregated neighborhood racial patterns.” Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Dissent
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The Two Hundred: Redlined, A Legacy of Housing Discrimination
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The Root: Redlining: The Origin Story of Institutional Racism
To understand racism in America, one must first disabuse themselves of the idea that race is a social construct—an idea that has been created and accepted by the people in a society.
Money is a social construct. We accept the idea that a dollar issued by the U.S. government is worth more than Monopoly money. Even if our currency were backed by gold, the precious metal is only valuable because we have collectively agreed to its worth. The American idea of race, specifically whiteness, is an economic construct. From the beginning, it has existed in conjunction with trade, ownership and the laws of supply and demand.
To see how the government-sanctioned policy of redlining impacts America 80 years after it was instituted, one must first understand the era in which the policy originated. In the mid-193os, to lift America out of the Great Depression, the New Deal created huge economic programs sponsored by the federal government.
These are the policies that essentially built what we now know as the middle class. Programs like the new Social Security Administration gave people financial security, the Works Progress Administration gave people jobs, and the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) refinanced mortgages at low interests rates to prevent foreclosures.
To ensure that these mortgages were not risky, the HOLC created color-coded “residential security maps” of 239 cities. The maps essentially highlighted the neighborhoods that were good investments versus neighborhoods that were poor investments. The “risky” neighborhoods were highlighted in red, including every one of the 239 cities’ black neighborhoods.
We must remember that, because everyone was poor during the Great Depression, these maps did not reflect economic status. In fact, upscale black neighborhoods like LaVilla and Sugar Hill in Jacksonville, Fla., home to Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, and Zora Neale Hurston, were deemed “too risky,” by the HOLC.
But instead of using these maps only for HOLC refinances, which would have been racist in and of itself, banks began using these maps for all home purchases and refinances. Again, with Jim Crow segregation in place, blacks couldn’t simply move to the non-redlined, white neighborhoods. So, because of this, as generations of Americans lifted themselves out of poverty, black people could not take part in the primary driver of wealth, homeownership.
Redlining was outlawed in 1968 by the Fair Housing Act, but it still affects almost every economic aspect of black communities to this day.
The University of Richmond has compiled high-resolution images of the original redlining maps, and it is startling to see how much they reflect the racial, economic and wealth disparities in cities across America.
Residents who live in redlined areas pay higher interest rates and are denied mortgages more often than whites with the same credit and income, according to reporting for the Center for Investigative Journalism. People in redlined areas pay higher auto insurance rates, ProPublica reports. Homes in black neighborhoods are valued, on average, $48,000 less than homes in white neighborhoods with similar crime rates and amenities.
According to the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, about 36 percent of education funding comes from local property taxes. These lower home values, which are the direct result of redlining, means that schools in black neighborhoods receive less funding. This is why, according to a 2019 study by Edbuild, schools serving nonwhite students receive $23 billion less in funding than majority-white schools despite serving the same number of students. It’s why the average nonwhite school district receives $2,226 less per student than a white school district.
Because poverty, education, or lack thereof, and crime rates are interrelated, it makes sense that black children, who are more likely to live in undervalued homes inside underfunded school districts, are also more vulnerable to the criminal justice system. This is the real school-to-prison pipeline.
Even though blacks and whites use drugs at about the same rate, blacks are three times more likely to be arrested for possession of an illegal substance. This is partly because police patrol formerly redlined areas and make more drug arrests. In Baltimore, maps of poverty, drug arrests and police shootings are nearly identical and are almost totally contained within the boundaries of formerly redlined areas. A study by the state of Maryland Public Defenders Office also found that 13 of the 15 zip codes where suspects routinely receive higher bail amounts were in redlined areas.
Aside from crime, education and economics, redlining still affects black people in numerous ways. People in redlined neighborhoods wait longer to vote, are disproportionately disenfranchised, wait longer for emergency services, receive more parking violations, and have less access to fresh food.
These things are not a coincidence. They all stem from the fact that black people have been denied access to intergenerational wealth building by a government policy that is interwoven into the fabric of American society. This nation became an international economic superpower because it was built on the foundation of slavery.
But if the middle class is the lifeblood of this country, then racism is in America’s DNA.
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Washington Post: Redlining was banned 50 years ago. It’s still hurting minorities today.
Racial discrimination in mortgage lending in the 1930s shaped the demographic and wealth patterns of American communities today, a new study shows, with 3 out of 4 neighborhoods “redlined” on government maps 80 years ago continuing to struggle economically.
The study by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, released Wednesday, shows that the vast majority of neighborhoods marked “hazardous” in red ink on maps drawn by the federal Home Owners’ Loan Corp. from 1935 to 1939 are today much more likely than other areas to comprise lower-income, minority residents.
“It’s as if some of these places have been trapped in the past, locking neighborhoods into concentrated poverty,” said Jason Richardson, director of research at the NCRC, a consumer advocacy group.
[The Senate rolls back rules meant to root out discrimination by mortgage lenders]
Researchers compared the HOLC maps, the most comprehensive documentation of discriminatory lending practices, with modern-day census data to determine how much neighborhood demographics have changed in 80 years. The findings have implications for today’s political debates over housing, banking and financial regulation, as well as civil rights, as Congress seeks to weaken the government’s ability to enforce fair-lending requirements. Policies that influence access to capital and credit have long-lasting effects on residential patterns, neighborhoods’ economic health and household accumulation of wealth, the report said.
In the 1930s, government surveyors graded neighborhoods in 239 cities, color-coding them green for “best,” blue for “still desirable,” yellow for “definitely declining” and red for “hazardous.” The “redlined” areas were the ones local lenders discounted as credit risks, in large part because of the residents’ racial and ethnic demographics. They also took into account local amenities and home prices.
Neighborhoods that were predominantly made up of African Americans, as well as Catholics, Jews and immigrants from Asia and southern Europe, were deemed undesirable. “Anyone who was not northern-European white was considered to be a detraction from the value of the area,” said Bruce Mitchell, a senior researcher at the NCRC and one of the study’s authors.
[White families have nearly 10 times the net worth of black families. And the gap is growing.]
Loans in these neighborhoods were unavailable or very expensive, making it more difficult for low-income minorities to buy homes and setting the stage for the country’s persistent racial wealth gap. (White families today have nearly 10 times the net worth of black families and more than eight times that of Hispanic families, according to the Federal Reserve.)
“Homeownership is the number-one method of accumulating wealth, but the effect of these policies that create more hurdles for the poor is a permanent underclass that’s disproportionately minority,” said John Taylor, president and chief executive of the NCRC. “I think most people believe the problem is not with the rules but with the people. Most middle-class whites in America don’t have empirical observations of what happens in underserved neighborhoods or understand the historical treatment of poor and minority communities.”
The Federal Housing Administration institutionalized the system of discriminatory lending in government-backed mortgages, reflecting local race-based criteria in their underwriting practices and reinforcing residential segregation in American cities. The discriminatory practices captured by the HOLC maps continued until 1968, when the Fair Housing Act banned racial discrimination in housing.
[Could the #BankBlack movement help African Americans close the wealth gap?]
But 50 years after that law passed, the lingering effects of redlining are clear, with the pattern of economic and racial residential segregation still evident in many U.S. cities — from Montgomery, Ala., to Flint, Mich., to Denver.
Nationally, nearly two-thirds of neighborhoods deemed “hazardous” are inhabited by mostly minority residents, typically black and Latino, researchers found. Cities with more such neighborhoods have significantly greater economic inequality. On the flip side, 91 percent of areas classified as “best” in the 1930s remain middle-to-upper-income today, and 85 percent of them are still predominantly white.
Researchers found that redlined neighborhoods in the South and the West are more likely today to be home to a largely minority population. Neighborhoods in the South and Midwest display the most persistent economic inequality.
In Macon, Ga., 65 percent of neighborhoods were marked “hazardous” in the 1930s, making it the most redlined city in the United States, followed closely by Birmingham, Ala., and Wichita, Kan.
Here are the 10 U.S. cities with the highest percentages of neighborhoods marked “hazardous” in the 1930s:
In Macon today, 91 percent of redlined neighborhoods are inhabited by mostly minorities; 73 percent of such neighborhoods remain low-to-moderate income, researchers found. Whites, on the other hand, remain the overwhelming majority in Macon neighborhoods deemed “best” in the 1930s — all of which remain middle-to-upper income.
In Macon today, 73 percent of formerly redlined neighborhoods remain low-to-moderate income. The effect of redlining has spread into adjoining communities.
In Macon, 91 percent of formerly redlined neighborhoods now comprise mostly minorities.
The racial disparity is reflected in the city’s poverty statistics. Nearly 35 percent of blacks in Macon live in poverty today, compared with less than 13 percent of whites, according to 2012 to 2016 census data.
In Baltimore, one of the earliest cities to officially adopt restrictive covenants limiting African Americans and Jews to certain neighborhoods, nearly every census tract labeled “hazardous” in the 1930s remains low-to-moderate income today, researchers found. The only exceptions are the areas surrounding Baltimore’s harbor, a former industrial front that’s been redeveloped to attract businesses and tourism.
Nearly 70 percent of formerly redlined communities in Baltimore remain predominantly minority, as well as lower income. Even neighborhoods in western Baltimore that had been rated as “desirable” subsequently became populated with minority, low-income residents as middle-class whites fled to the suburbs, researchers said.
A 2015 study of home mortgage and small-business lending in Baltimore by the NCRC found that race, more than income, affected mortgage lending in the city. Lending is greater in neighborhoods with larger white populations, with banks making more than twice as many mortgage loans to whites as they did to blacks.
[Interactive: View and download NCRC maps for 114 metropolitan areas]
A February report by the Center for Investigative Reporting showed that redlining persists in 61 metro areas — from Detroit and Philadelphia to Little Rock and Tacoma, Wash. — even when controlling for applicants’ income, loan amount and neighborhood, according to its analysis of Home Mortgage Disclosure Act records.
Banks have largely blamed the racial lending discrepancies on borrowers’ credit scores. Lenders were supposed to soon start reporting extra information about credit scores and other loan-pricing features. But the Senate recently voted to roll back the new reporting requirements for small lenders.
The researchers also analyzed 30 cities for patterns of gentrification, where once-redlined neighborhoods showed an increase in median home values and educational attainment between 2000 and 2010. They found that in cities with higher levels of gentrification, more redlined neighborhoods had become middle-to-upper-income neighborhoods. These areas saw a greater influx in economic activity and changes to their downtowns. They also now have lower levels of segregation, with more interaction between blacks and whites, as well as greater economic inequality between newcomers and those who have historically lived there.
Current lending discrimination reinforces the economic gulf, Mitchell said, as middle- and upper-income gentrifiers moving into lower-income areas are able to obtain loans to buy and renovate homes, while longtime residents rarely have access to that type of capital.
Researchers ranked Portland, Ore., which has seen an influx of financial investment from the tech sector, as the most gentrified American city, with 58 percent of its census tracts having gentrified. It is followed by Minneapolis, Seattle, Atlanta and Denver.
Detroit was the least gentrified city, the research showed, with less than 3 percent of its census tracts having gentrified, and only around the downtown core. But artists and other “urban pioneers” have in recent years begun moving into more pockets of the city, researchers said.
Longtime residents of formerly redlined neighborhoods are often pushed out when the areas’ economic fortunes are reversed, researchers said. Many can no longer afford the rising rents. Homeowners often can’t afford the increases in property taxes, and as their home values rise, many are tempted to sell and cash out.
“Is gentrification promoting sustainable desegregation?” Mitchell said. “Or is it just a movement towards increased segregation in the next census period?”
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Economic Policy Institute: The Making of Ferguson
Subsidization of suburban development for whites only
The FHA not only insured individual mortgages of white homeowners. Perhaps even more important, it effectively financed the construction of entire segregated subdivisions by making advance commitments to builders who met FHA construction standards for materials used, lot size, setback from street, and location in a properly zoned neighborhood that prohibited industry or commercial development threatening home values. Aware that the Supreme Court had prohibited explicit racial zoning, the FHA took the position that the presence of African Americans in nearby neighborhoods was nonetheless a consideration that could threaten FHA insurability and that racial exclusion in the insured subdivision itself could be accomplished if deeds in the subdivision included mutually obligatory clauses prohibiting African Americans from residence.37
Subdivision developers who obtained such commitments could use them to persuade bankers to issue low-interest construction loans. Developers could then also assure potential (white) buyers that their homes were FHA-approved and that FHA (and later VA) mortgages would be available at low interest rates and with no or limited down payments. The FHA’s policy was to prefer homebuilding priced for lower-middle- to middle-class buyers.38
At its peak in 1943 when civilian construction was limited, the FHA financed 80 percent of all private home construction nationwide. During the postwar period, it dropped to one-third.39 But even when subdivisions were not built with advance FHA commitments, individual homebuyers needed access to FHA or VA insured mortgages, so similar standards for new construction pertained. Subdivisions throughout St. Louis County were developed in this way, with FHA advance commitments for the builders and a resulting whites-only sale policy.
The FHA’s suburban whites-only policy continued through the postwar housing boom that lasted through the mid-1960s. In 1947, the FHA sanitized its manual, removing literal race references but still demanding “compatibility among neighborhood occupants” for mortgage guarantees. “Neighborhoods constituted of families that are congenial,” the FHA manual explained, “…generally exhibit strong appeal and stability.”40 This very slightly sanitized language suggested no change in policy, and the FHA continued to finance builders with open policies of racial exclusion for another 15 years.
These practices of the FHA were once well known, but have now mostly been forgotten, although their effects persist. In 1959, the United States Commission on Civil Rights’ annual report summarized how the suburban landscape, by then firmly established, was created:
Nonwhite home buyers and renters have not, however enjoyed the benefits of FHA mortgage insurance to the same extent as whites. According to testimony given before this Commission, less than 2 percent of the total number of new homes insured by FHA since 1946 have been available to minorities. Most of this housing has been all-Negro developments in the South.…
Although the relatively low participation [of] nonwhites has in part been due to their lower incomes, FHA bears some responsibility. Of great significance in this respect are FHA’s policies with regard to the discriminatory practices toward Negroes of real estate boards, home builders and lending institutions.
For the first 16 years of its life, FHA itself actually encouraged the use of racially restrictive covenants. It not only acquiesced in their use but in fact contributed to perfecting them. The 1938 FHA Underwriting Manual, which contained the criteria used in determining eligibility for receipt of FHA benefits, warned against insuring property that would be used by “inharmonious racial groups,” and declared that for stability of a neighborhood, “properties shall continue to be occupied by the same social and racial classes.” The Manual contained a model restrictive covenant which FHA strongly recommended for inclusion in all sales contracts. Furthermore, FHA instructed land valuators that among their considerations should be a determination as to whether “effective restrictive covenants are recorded against the entire tract, since these provide the surest protection against undesirable encroachment and inharmonious use. To be most effective, deed restrictions should be imposed upon all land in the immediate environment of the subject location.” [Footnote: …Many housing experts believe that while FHA did not invent the restrictive covenant its official sanction played a large role in the spread of racial restrictions, particularly in newly developed areas.]
FHA continued this practice of encouraging racially restricted housing developments until 1950, despite mounting pressure from civic organizations, State and local antidiscrimination commissions and other groups to abandon the practice. The only change made by FHA during this period was a softening of the wording in the Underwriting Manual in 1947. This change in language amounted to no real change in policy, however….
While the unenforceability of racial restrictive covenants [following the Supreme Court’s 1948 Shelley ruling] has undoubtedly increased Negro participation in FHA’s insurance programs by making available to them additional existing housing, it has done little in the way of new housing or of apartment units in suburban and outlying areas. There the discriminatory practices of the real estate business, home building industry, and financial institutions continue for the most part unabated. FHA insurance remains available to builders with known policies of discrimination. With the help of FHA financing, all-white suburbs have been constructed in recent years around almost every large city. Huge FHA-insured projects that become whole new residential towns have been built with an acknowledged policy of excluding Negroes.41
In the St. Louis metropolitan area as well as elsewhere, the FHA and VA continued to promote racial restrictions in their loan insurance programs until the 1960s.42
The FHA seal of approval guaranteed that a subdivision was for whites only. Advertisements for suburban subdivisions like those from 1952 featured here were commonplace in St. Louis (and nationwide). The two advertisements were among those collected in a booklet for home seekers, published and distributed by the Home Builders Association of Greater St. Louis. By marketing an “FHA Financed” subdivision in Ferguson, and an “FHA approved” Peaseway subdivision in Kirkwood, these ads signal the development’s whites-only character. Other advertisements in the booklet tout a “Veterans’ Preference” subdivision called Woodson, located in Overland (a few towns south of Ferguson); and “FHA terms” for houses in Webster Groves.43
In that era, the St. Louis-area builder with the most liberal attitudes on racial matters was Charles Vatterott, a devout Catholic (and brother of the Ferguson subdivision builder in the advertisement reproduced here). Charles Vatterott obtained FHA guarantees for St. Ann, a subdivision (later an incorporated town) he started building in 1943. Vatterott intended for St. Ann to be a community for lower-middle-class Catholics, particularly returning war veterans, although he did not prohibit sales to non-Catholic whites, but only to blacks, as the FHA expected. As was conventional for FHA-financed subdivisions in St. Louis County, deeds on St. Ann homes stated that “no lot or portion of a lot or building erected thereon shall be sold, leased, rented or occupied by any other than those of the Caucasian race.”
Vatterott’s limited liberalism was expressed in an insistence, over residents’ opposition, that the golf course he built as part of the St. Ann development be open to nonresident African Americans. And he built a separate, lower-quality subdivision for African Americans – De Porres in the town of Breckenridge Hills, a few miles away (but not adjacent to) St. Ann. The buyers had incomes and occupations – from truck drivers to chemists – similar to those of St. Ann buyers. Had they been permitted to do so by the FHA and its merchant builders, they could have purchased homes in St. Ann or in any of the many other subdivisions that were built for whites in St. Louis County in the postwar period.
Vatterott could not get FHA financing for De Porres because it was intended for African Americans. As a result, many of the homes were rented, and Vatterott set up a special savings plan by which residents could put aside money towards a purchase of their homes without an FHA or VA mortgage. The De Porres development for African Americans also lacked the full community facilities – parks and playgrounds – that Vatterott had built into the St. Ann subdivision.44
As noted earlier, the federal and local governments in 1952 were still operating public housing projects restricted to lower-middle-class white families. The option of these families to remain in public housing was an impediment to suburban home sales. The Home Builders Association booklet denounced public housing (because it “shackles private builders who can’t compete with the government’s half-price product”) and included a barely disguised racial appeal: “IN YOUR OWN HOME you can pick your own neighbors, IN PUBLIC HOUSING … the government picks them for you.”45 On its face, the claim was clearly false – homeowners could not pick their own neighbors because they had no control over the identities of those buying homes nearby. The only way in which they could pick their neighbors was to purchase their homes in subdivisions that, with government approval, excluded a class of buyers, specifically, African Americans.
The Home Builders’ 1952 warning was accurate that the government picks one’s neighbors in public housing, so there was always the threat that the St. Louis Housing Authority would end its segregation policy and assign African Americans to white projects. In fact, as noted earlier, only three years later, a federal court ordered the authority to do so. The only plausible explanation for the Home Builders’ warning about the government picking neighbors is that if families remained in public housing, they might experience racial integration.
Each of the subdivisions in the advertisements described here is in St. Louis County. The farther south and west in the county a suburb is, the more distant it is from the north St. Louis black ghetto. The suburban developments in the advertisements were all-white, with FHA approval, when constructed; by the 2010 census, Ferguson was only 29 percent white, and then, going south and west, Overland was 73 percent white, Webster Groves was still 90 percent white, and Kirkwood was 89 percent white.
This governmental policy of segregation, though now more than a half-century distant, has had enduring consequences. It contributed mightily not only to our present-day residential segregation, but to all aspects of black-white economic inequality. For example, as shown in the Kirkwood subdivision advertisement, homes were marketed as selling to white FHA buyers for “$8,100 up” in 1952. In that year, such home prices were about twice the national median family income of $3,890, and easily affordable to lower-middle or middle-class African Americans, especially to veterans if they could have benefitted from VA mortgage guarantees. A decade later, when assistant principal Larman Williams and engineer Adel Allen were looking for homes in integrated middle-class suburban neighborhoods, those homes were still affordable. Today, however, houses in Kirkwood sell for about $400,000, more than six times national median family income, and mostly unaffordable to working- and middle-class families.46 But for whites permitted to buy in Kirkwood 50 years ago, the advantages they’ve been able to bequeath to their children have been considerable, relative to those of blacks who were denied similar opportunities.
Even accounting for home improvement investments that owners of these homes have made since 1952, the capital gain for white homeowners, and their heirs, endures. The federal government’s support for residential segregation in the mid-20th century is largely responsible for the fact that while the median family income of African Americans is now about 60 percent of whites’ income, the median household wealth of African Americans is only about 5 percent of whites’ wealth.47 This enormous difference translates into differences between blacks and whites in the security and comfort of retirement (and in the obligations of adult children to divert their incomes to support elderly parents), in the ability of young people to attend college, and in the selectivity of the colleges they can afford to attend.
In small ways, local government also worked closely with private agencies to encourage whites to leave the city and move to suburbs to escape proximity to African Americans. A 1947 pamphlet of the Social Planning Council of St. Louis and St. Louis County, a federation of public and private social welfare agencies, rated every neighborhood by, among other characteristics, the “presence of negroes” and concluded, “People Who Can, Move Away.”48 Of 70,000 housing units built in the city of St. Louis and in St. Louis County between 1947 and 1952, fewer than 35 were available to African Americans, whether because of FHA policy, restrictive covenants, or the policy of the real estate industry.49
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TCF: Attacking the Black–White Opportunity Gap That Comes from Residential Segregation
Restrictive Covenants, Redlining, and Racial Violence
This supposedly “race-neutral” form of economic discrimination emerged alongside longstanding, more explicit political and economic racism. In order to continue to exclude middle- and upper-class blacks from white neighborhoods, public and private interests conspired to establish a web of racist policies and practices surrounding housing and homeownership. One practice for many white homeowners was to band together and adopt racially restrictive covenants in their neighborhoods, which forbade any buyer from reselling a home to black buyers. Initially upheld in Corrigan v. Buckley (1926), the U.S. Supreme Court reasoned that covenants were private contracts not subject to the Constitution.31 But the Court’s logic was faulty, because (1) private contracts are not enforceable except through the power of the state, and (2) the state was using that power of enforcement. In city after city, courts and sheriffs successfully evicted African Americans from homes that they had rightly purchased in order to enforce racially restrictive covenants.32 The racist contracts were so widely accepted that the commissioner of the Federal Housing Administration continued to recommend their use well after the U.S. Supreme Court declared them unconstitutional in Shelley v. Kramer (1948), dismissing the ruling and declaring that it was not “the policy of the government to require private individuals to give up their right to dispose of their property as they see fit.”33 Still today, racially restrictive covenants appear in real estate records, even if they are unenforceable.34
In order to continue to exclude middle- and upper-class blacks from white neighborhoods, public and private interests conspired to establish a web of racist policies and practices surrounding housing and homeownership.
The official position of the Federal Housing Administration—which underwrote $120 billion in new housing construction between 1934 and 1962—was that blacks were an adverse influence on property values.35 In response, the FHA warned against insuring mortgages for homes in racially mixed neighborhoods, and counseled lenders to reject or give poor ratings to loan applicants from black and brown neighborhoods. Baking racial exclusion into programs designed to promote homeownership, an FHA manual suggested that the best financial bets were those where safeguards—such as highways separating communities—could prevent “the infiltration of lower class occupancy, and inharmonious racial groups.”36 The FHA’s chief economist Homer Hoyt designed a racial ranking system that positioned “Mexicans” and “Negroes” as the least desirable neighborhood residents, and worked with the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation to map cities and design areas into various risk categories congruent with that racial hierarchy. Homebuyers seeking to purchase in “red” zone neighborhoods—those with high percentages of black residents, regardless of the wealth of those residents—would likely be denied a mortgage loan and received no federal support. The FHA provided the strongest financial support to green-zoned areas that, as one appraiser noted, lacked “a single foreigner or Negro.”37 In 1940, the FHA actually denied insurance for a white developer with a project located near an African-American community until the builder agreed to construct a half-mile, six-foot high concrete wall to separate the two neighborhoods.38 Not only did this practice of redlining explicitly encourage and perpetuate racial segregation, it also shut black Americans out of key opportunities for one of the country’s most effective wealth-building strategies: homeownership. Of all of the homeownership loans approved by the government between 1934 and 1968, whites received 98 percent of them.39
A covenant signed by both John J. Buckley and Irene H. Corrigan. Source: Wikimedia Commons
The U.S. Supreme Court ultimately struck down racially restrictive covenants in Shelley v. Kramer (1948), but even then, many black families faced grave risks when attempting to move into white neighborhoods. Extralegal violence became an all-too-common method of maintaining segregation through intimidation and fear.40 In one case, when a middle-class black family moved into an all-white neighborhood in a suburb of Philadelphia, some 600 white demonstrators gathered in front of the house and pelted the home and family with rocks. Shortly after, several whites rented a unit next door to the family, hoisting up a Confederate flag and blaring music throughout the night. Klan and community members burned a cross in the family’s yard. Law enforcement largely declined to intervene, with one sergeant suffering a demotion to patrolman after objecting to his orders not to interfere with the rioters.41 In Richmond, California, members of the neighborhood homeowners association insisted that they could enforce a racially restrictive covenant against a black war veteran and his wife after they purchased a home there—four years after the Supreme Court had ruled such covenants unconstitutional. When the black family arrived, a mob of 300 gathered outside of their home, threw bricks at the house, and burned a cross in the front yard. As in Pennsylvania, the police refused to step in for several days, only intervening after the NAACP pressed the governor to do so. Still, no arrests were made.42 In Los Angeles, of the more than one hundred incidents of move-in bombings and vandalism between 1950 and 1965, only one led to arrest and prosecution.43 This harassment and racial terrorism was not declared a federal crime until the Fair Housing Act made it so in 1968. Still, the Southern Poverty Law Center found that, in 1985–86, only one-quarter of these incidents were prosecuted.44
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Designing the We: Undesign the Redline (interactive Exhibit
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Shelterforce: Redlining and Mental Health: Connecting the Dots Across Poverty, Place, and Exclusion
Redlining as a form of systemic exclusion
One of the prime examples of the systematic denial of opportunities and choice is the practice of redlining, which dates back to the 1930s, when the federally created Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) developed color-coded maps to indicate the relative risk of different neighborhoods. Areas deemed high risk were marked in red, which provided the justification for the Federal Housing Administration to deny mortgage credit access to borrowers in these neighborhoods. A HOLC map for San Francisco (Fig. 1) shows that neighborhoods like the Fillmore, Potrero Hill, Bayview, and Hunters Point were redlined.
When we examine the detailed neighborhood descriptions that provided the rationale for the color coding of each map, it becomes clear that redlining was an explicitly racially motivated practice of exclusion and denial of opportunity. For example, consider the description for San Francisco map area D-1, just west of the Fillmore (Fig. 2), which states, “There is a decided concentration of undesirable racial elements. More than half the Negro population of San Francisco are located here, and it is considered a highly hazardous area.”
The systematic exclusion of entire neighborhoods from mortgage credit access during the postwar period has had major implications for the economic disparities we see across neighborhoods today. As Fig. 3 shows, many of the same communities that were redlined 80 years ago still experience higher concentrations of poverty in the present.
Poverty, Place, and Mental Health
As the past decade of healthy communities efforts across the country has shown, poverty is also highly correlated with poor physical health outcomes, particularly preventable chronic diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, and asthma. There is also a correlation between poverty and poor mental health, as demonstrated in Fig. 4, which shows the prevalence of adults who report that their mental health was not good for 14 or more days out of the past 30 days. Poverty is a major risk factor for poor mental health, as it increases the likelihood of negative factors such as adverse childhood experiences, social isolation and loneliness, discrimination, and detachment from academic or work achievement. These negative experiences can diminish a person’s sense of control, self-efficacy, connectedness, and hope, all of which are important elements for resilience and mental health promotion. People in poverty are also less likely to have protective factors that promote mental health, including many of the things that community development works to provide, such as stable housing, supportive community networks, and financial security.
A side by side comparison of the maps (Fig. 5) reveals a strong spatial relationship between a history of systemic exclusion in the form of redlining and poor mental health, with persistent poverty serving as the through line that connects these issues across generations. Although the causal pathways are complex and multifactoral, it is clear that neighborhood level factors, and therefore community development interventions, do indeed matter for mental health.
Further Readings
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The Root: Redlining: The Origin Story of Institutional Racism
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GI Bill Housing Discrimination
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- The G.I. Education Bill (1944)
- WW2 vets funding for college, housing, healthcare, unemployment insurance
- Excluded people of color
- WW2 vets funding for college, housing, healthcare, unemployment insurance
- The Veterans Administration (VA)
- Established under the GI Bill
- Insure mortgages for returning veterans
- Adopted all FHA racial exclusion standards
- FHA and VA subsidized segregated subdivisions
- FHA subsidized building subdivisions for white-only
- Requirement that none of homes be sold to black people
- House deeds also prohibited resale to black people
- At its peak in 1943 the FHA financed 80 percent of all private home construction nationwide.
- FHA underwrote $120 billion in new housing construction between 1934-1962
- FHA subsidized building subdivisions for white-only
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“More than 200,000 war veterans used the bill’s benefits to buy a farm or start a business, 5 million purchased new homes and almost 10 million went o college. Between 1944 and 1971, federal spending for former soldiers in this ‘”model welfare system” totaled over $95 billion. As with the New Deal welfare programs, however Black veterans faced discrimination that reduce or denied them the benefits. Combined with the New Deal and suburban housing construction (in developments that found legal ways to keep Blacks out), the GI Bill gave birth to the White middle class and widened the economic gap between the races, a growing disparity racist blamed on poor Black fiscal habits.” Ibram Kendi, Stamped From the Beginning
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Richard Rothstein : The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
AFTER WORLD War II, the newly established VA also began to guarantee mortgages for returning servicemen. It adopted FHA housing policies, and VA appraisers relied on the FHA’s Underwriting Manual. By 1950, the FHA and VA together were insuring half of all new mortgages nationwide.
The FHA had its biggest impact on segregation, not in its discriminatory evaluations of individual mortgage applicants, but in its financing of entire subdivisions, in many cases entire suburbs, as racially exclusive white enclaves. Frank Stevenson was not denied the opportunity to follow his job to Milpitas because the FHA refused to insure an individual mortgage for him. Vince Mere day was not denied the opportunity to live in Levittown because a VA appraiser considered his individual purchase too risky for a mortgage guarantee. Rather, in these and thousands of other locales, mass-production builders created entire suburbs with the FHA- or VA-imposed condition that these suburbs be all white. As Frank Stevenson and Robert Mereday understood, and as Vince Mereday learned, African Americans need not bother to apply.
Levittown was a massive undertaking, a development of 17,500 homes. It was a visionary solution to the housing problems of returning war veterans—mass-produced two-bedroom houses of 750 square feet sold for about $8,000 each, with no down payment required. William Levitt constructed the project on speculation; it was not a case in which prospective purchasers gave the company funds with which to construct houses. Instead, Levitt built the houses and then sought customers. He could never have amassed the capital for such an enormous undertaking without the FHA and the VA. But during the World War II years and after, the government had congressional authority to guarantee bank loans to mass-production builders like Levitt for nearly the full cost of their proposed subdivisions. By 1948, most housing nationwide was being constructed with this government financing.
Once Levitt had planned and designed Levittown, his company submitted drawings and specifications to the FHA for approval. After the agency endorsed the plans, he could use this approval to negotiate low-interest loans from banks to finance its construction and land-acquisition costs. The banks were willing to give these concessionary loans to Levitt and to other mass-production builders because FHA preapproval meant that the banks could subsequently issue mortgages to the actual buyers without further property appraisal needed. Instead of local FHA appraisers taking the Underwriting Manual and going out to inspect the individual properties for which mortgage insurance was sought—there was, after all, nothing but empty land to inspect—the FHA almost automatically insured mortgages for the eventual buyers of the houses, based on its approval of the preconstruction plans. The banks, therefore, were exposed to little risk from issuing these mortgages.
For Levittown and scores of such developments across the nation, the plans reviewed by the FHA included the approved construction materials, the design specifications, the proposed sale price, the neighborhood’s zoning restrictions (for example, a prohibition of industry or commercial development), and a commitment not to sell to African Americans. The FHA even with held approval if the presence of African Americans in nearby neighborhoods threatened integration. In short, the FHA financed Levittown on condition that, like the Richmond suburb of Rollingwood during the war, it be all white, with no foreseeable change in its racial composition.
The FHA’s involvement was so pervasive that full-time government inspectors were stationed at the construction siteswhere Levittown and similar projects were being built. As William Levitt testified before Congress in 1957, “We are 100percent dependent on Government.”
In 1960, a New Jersey court concluded that Levitt’s project in that state was so dependent on the FHA that it was “publiclyassisted housing” and that it therefore could not refuse to sell to African Americans under New Jersey law. The court opinionincluded a detailed description of the numerous ways in which the FHA directed the project’s design, construction, andfinancing, as well as Levitt’s acknowledgment of his dependence on government involvement. The case had no nationalconsequences because the order to sell to African Americans was based on New Jersey, not federal, law.
Although Levittown came to symbolize postwar suburbanization, Levittown was neither the first nor the only such development financed by the FHA and VA for white families. Metropolitan areas nationwide were suburbanized by this government policy. The first was Oak Forest, built in 1946 on Houston’s northwest side. Shortly thereafter Prairie Village in Kansas City mushroomed, also financed with FHA guarantees. The extraordinary growth of California and the West in the decades following World War II was financed on a racially restricted basis by the federal government: Westlake, a 1950development in Daly City, south of San Francisco; Lakewood, south of Los Angeles, constructed between 1949 and 1953 and only slightly smaller than Levittown; Westchester, also south of Los Angeles and developed by Kaiser Community Homes, an offshoot of the wartime shipbuilding company; and Panorama City, in the San Fernando Valley—all were FHA whites-only projects.
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Vox: American segregation, mapped at day and night
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Back to History of Housing Discrimination Top
Disinvestment of Public Housing
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Beginning of Public Housing
- The Public Works Administration (PWA)
- In early 1900s many urban neighborhoods were integrated
- So workers of both races lived in walking distance of downtown factories
- During 1930s as part of the New Deal
- PWA demolished many integrated neighborhoods, deemed
- Built segregated housing instead
- White housing would often be built well
- Black housing was poorly built if built at all
- In early 1900s many urban neighborhoods were integrated
- Public Housing
- 1937 Housing Act established US Housing Admin to build publicly subsidized housing
- Only built segregated housing
- 1:1 slum clearance ratio for every new public house built
- To appeased Real Estate lobby to prevent falling rents and declining property values
- While fed gov would provide funding, housing managed by local gov
- Ensured communities could avoid public housing/determine project’s location
- Ensuring racial segregation and concentration of poverty
- 98% public-housing units built in Chicago in 1950‑60s in all-black communities
- Ensured communities could avoid public housing/determine project’s location
- 1937 Housing Act established US Housing Admin to build publicly subsidized housing
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Disinvestment of Public Housing
- Before 1950s Public Housing
- Was originally for working class and well maintained
- at least for white people, up until 1949
- Was originally for working class and well maintained
- Housing Acts of 1949, 1954, 1960
- Real estate lobby and other lobby groups were able to shift:
- Gov building public housing to subsidize private developers making profit
- Low density working class tenants to low income tenants living in high density projects
- Often built to house displaced residents of color from very profitable urban development projects
- “public housing was to have the special role of making private development possible by providing a place to put poor people uprooted by renewal” Rachel G. Bratt: What Happened to Public Housing?
- Real estate lobby and other lobby groups were able to shift:
- Because of federal segregation policies
- New public housing was concentrated in black ghettos
- Concentrating poverty and limiting black people’s ability to escape the poverty
- Public began to associate public housing, not housing discrimination, to poverty and crime
- Reducing public support for public housing
- New public housing was concentrated in black ghettos
- While fed gov heavily subsidized white people to move to suburbs
- Black people had few options to move out due to housing discrimination
- Public housing funding and its public support soon deteriorated
- Causing less motivation to subsidize it or reform it
- Disinvestment era
- White flight, deindustrialization, Nixon scandals, Reagan disinvestments, privatization, etc.
- Caused massive disinvestment in public housing
- White flight, deindustrialization, Nixon scandals, Reagan disinvestments, privatization, etc.
“It is of course ironic that those who began by opposing public housing (real estate lobby) have been largely able to shape its destiny. They were able to determine its client population, then made it work for private sector interests as part of the urban renewal plan, and finally stigmatized it by playing on the fears created by these two factors. Never did they acknowledge their own role in the way the program turned out.” Rachel G. Bratt: What Happened to Public Housing?
“In 1998, investigative reporters from the Dallas Morning News visited federally funded developments in 47 metropolitan areas. The reporters found that the nation’s nearly ten million public housing tenants were almost always segregated by race and that every predominately white-occupied project had facilities, amenities, services, and maintenance that were superior to what was found in predominately black-occupied projects. “Richard Rothstein – Color of law
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Neo-liberal Disinvestment and Privatization of Public Housing
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1. Early Privatization and Ghettoization: Pre-1968
- Housing Acts of 1949, 1954, 1960
- Shifted building public housing to subsidize private developers making profit
- Shifted from working class communities to dense low income segregated communities
- Often used to house displaced residents of color of very profitable urban development projects
- Managed by local gov
- Could avoid public housing/determine project’s location
- Ensure racial segregation and concentration of poverty
- 98% public-housing units built in Chicago in 1950‑60s in all-black communities
- Shifted from working class communities to dense low income segregated communities
- Shifted building public housing to subsidize private developers making profit
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2. White Flight, Suburbanization and Deindustrialization (1950-70s)
- As more minorities found ways into white communities, whites fled to suburbs
- White Flight/Suburbanization
- “White only” Federally funded mortgage subsidies, GI subdivisions and highways encouraged move
- Not just physical flight but economic flight as well
- Jobs, schools, gov funding, followed
- Loss of urban population decreased tax revenue, city services and caused urban decay
- Jobs, schools, gov funding, followed
- People of color move into “white only” suburbs due to housing discrimination
- Redlining, racial convenants, exclusive ordinances, lack of public housing, violence, etc.
- Many industries/jobs followed white people to suburbs (deindustrialization, ghettoization)
- Leaving inner city poor stranded with little economic opportunities
- Forced many people of color in concentrated poverty, ghettos
- Leaving inner city poor stranded with little economic opportunities
“The lack of housing choices available to African Americans removed the pressure from landlords to improve the quality of housing. African Americans were a captured market with nowhere else to turn…The result was African Americans paying more for inferior housing in comparison to whites who were being lured to new suburban developments. By the mid-1960s, these conditions had reached a breaking point. The 1967–68 urban uprisings—the largest wave of domestic riots in the twentieth century—were the result.” Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Dissent
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3. False Promises of the Fair Housing Act of 1968
- Fair Housing Act of 1968
- Outlawed housing discrimination
- Declared “legal” housing discrimination unconstitutional
- Prohibits
- Racial steering, Racial covenants, Blockbusting, Redlining, intimidation, coercion, etc.
- Many old and new discriminatory practices still continued regardless
- Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) grants
- HUD founded as a Cabinet department in 1965, as part of the “Great Society” program of President Lyndon Johnson, to develop and execute policies on housing and metropolises.
- Fair Housing Act directed HUD to “affirmatively further” fair housing
- To receive HUD funding , localities are supposed to identify obstacles to fair housing, keep records of their efforts to overcome them, and certify that they do not discriminate.
- HUD has rarely verified lack of discrimination in their grantees
- Instead has sent grants to communities even after they’ve been found by courts to have promoted segregated housing or been sued by the U.S. Department of Justice.
- HUD has rarely verified lack of discrimination in their grantees
- George Romney only head of HUD to try to support “fair housing” with his “Open Communities” program
- Pressured white communities to
- build more integrated affordable housing and end discriminatory zoning practices
- By rejecting HUD grants for projects from communities that fostered segregated housing
- Pressured white communities to
- Was stopped and dismissed by Nixon
- To receive HUD funding , localities are supposed to identify obstacles to fair housing, keep records of their efforts to overcome them, and certify that they do not discriminate.
“I realize that this position will lead us to a situation in which blacks will continue to live for the most part in black neighborhoods and where there will be predominately black schools and predominately white schools.” Nixon, 1972 “eyes only” memo
- Since then HUD has given over $137 billion to over 1,200 communities
- HUD has only rejected 2 grants due to violating the Fair Housing Act
- Despite evidence of discrimination and lack of addressing it in most communities that receive HUD grants
“In several instances, records show, HUD has sent grants to communities even after they’ve been found by courts to have promoted segregated housing or been sued by the U.S. Department of Justice. New Orleans, for example, has continued to receive grants after the Justice Department sued it for violating that Fair Housing Act by blocking a low-income housing project in a wealthy historic neighborhood.” Nikole Hannah-Jones, Propublica
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Divestment of HUD
- Planned Shrinkage/Municipal disinvestment
- Deliberate withdrawal of city services to blighted neighborhoods to displace residents/cope with tax loss
- Narratives of blight and crime can give white city planners more power to displace
- Emergency laws, redevelopment plans, etc.
- South Bronx and Harlem(mid-1970s), Roxbury, Boston (70s-80s), New Orleans (post Katrina)
Wikipedia: Municipal disinvestment
Municipal disinvestment is a term in the United States which describes an urban planning process in which that a city or town or other municipal entity decides to abandon or neglect an unproductive zone. It can happen when a municipality is in a period of economic prosperity, and it seeks to improve its communities and infrastructure, and sees that its poorest and most blighted communities are both the cheapest targets for revitalization as well as the areas with the greatest potential for improvement.[1] When a city is facing urban decay, and has to compromise in allocating its resources, the poorest communities are the least profitable and investing in them seems unwise from a long term perspective, and so these communities are neglected as a matter of choice.[2] Disenfranchised neighborhoods are slated for demolition, relocation, and eventual replacement. According to one view, disinvestment in urban and suburban communities tends to fall strongly along racial and class lines, and intensifies and perpetuates the cycle of poverty exerted upon the space, since more affluent individuals with social mobility can leave the disenfranchised areas.[3] According to one view, municipal disinvestment is a direct consequence of local, state, and federal urban planning and urban renewal projects.
Change in urban development policy
Johnson responded to the radicalization of Black Americans Watts Riots by ceding control of local OEO’s to municipal authorities such as the mayor (a reversal of the original strategy of community-lead development) while funding was reduced and the practices of the offices and local community projects were more closely supervised.[5] Moynihan was startled by what he perceived as the consequences of the War on Poverty and changed his philosophy and its practice under Johnson. He found the social policies of the past decades naive for trying to fix the “tangled pathology” he described in the white paper he authored for the US Department of Labor, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.[1][5][6] When the administration transitioned over to Nixon, Moynihan remained as Counselor to the President, where he further pushed for dismantling the OEO.[5] Though it continued to exist into the Reagan Administration, the OEO was put under the control of Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, who more tightly controlled its function.[5] It is during this time that Moynihan suggests to Nixon that Black communities be treated with a “benign neglect,” a philosophy-of-action which would later be translated into the planned shrinkage policies of the 70s and 80s.
Benign neglect
Benign neglect is a policy proposed in 1969 by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who was at the time on President Richard Nixon’s staff as an urban affairs adviser. While serving in this capacity, he sent the President a memo suggesting, “The time may have come when the issue of race could benefit from a period of ‘benign neglect.’ The subject has been too much talked about. The forum has been too much taken over to hysterics, paranoids, and boodlers on all sides. We need a period in which Negro progress continues and racial rhetoric fades.”[7] The policy was designed to ease tensions after the Civil Rights Movement of the late 1960s. Moynihan was particularly troubled by the speeches of Vice-President Spiro Agnew. However, the policy was widely seen as an abandonment of urban neighborhoods, particularly ones with a majority black population, as Moynihan’s statements and writings appeared to encourage, for instance, fire departments engaging in triage to avoid a supposedly futile war against arson.[2]
Planned shrinkage
Planned shrinkage is a controversial public policy of the deliberate withdrawal of city services to blighted neighborhoods as a means of coping with dwindling tax revenues.[8] Planned shrinkage involves decreasing city services such as police patrols, garbage removal, street repairs, and fire protection, from selected city neighborhoods suffering from urban decay, crime, and poverty. While it has been advocated as a way to concentrate city services for maximum effectiveness given serious budgetary constraints, it has been criticized as an attempt to “encourage the exodus of undesirable populations”[8] as well as to open up blighted neighborhoods for development by private interests. Planned shrinkage was mentioned as a development strategy for the South Bronx section of New York City in the 1970s, and more recently for another urban area in the United States, the city of New Orleans.[9][10] The term was first used in New York City in 1976 by Housing Commissioner Roger Starr.[11][12]
Background
During the twentieth century, a boom in suburban growth caused in part by increased automobile use led to urban decline, particularly in the poorer sections of many large cities in the United States and elsewhere. A dwindling tax base depleted many municipal resources. A common view was that it was part of a “downward spiral” caused first by an absence of jobs, the creation of a permanent underclass, and a declining tax base hurting many city services, including schools. It was this interplay of factors which made change difficult.[13] New York City was described as “so broke” by the 1970s with neighborhoods which had become “so desperate and depleted” that municipal authorities wondered how to cope.[14] Some authorities felt the process of decline was inevitable, and instead of trying to fight it, searched for alternatives. According to one view, authorities searched for ways to have the greatest population loss in the areas with the poorest non-white populations.[12][2]
The RAND report
In the early 1970s, a RAND study examining the relation between city services and large city populations concluded that when services such as police and fire protection were withdrawn, the numbers of people in the neglected areas would decrease.[2] There had been questions about many fires that had been happening in the South Bronx during the 1970s. One account (including the RAND report) suggested that neighborhood fires were predominantly caused by arson, while a contrasting report suggested that arson was not a major cause.[15] If arson had been a primary cause, according to the RAND viewpoint, then it did not make sense financially for the city to try to invest further funds to improve fire protection, according to this view. The RAND report allegedly influenced then Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who used the report’s findings to make recommendations for urban policy.[2] In Moynihan’s view, arson was one of many social pathologies caused by large cities, and suggested that a policy of benign neglect would be appropriate as a response.[2]
Case studies
New York City
Partly in response to the RAND report, and in an effort to address New York’s declining population, New York’s housing commissioner, Roger Starr, proposed a policy which he termed planned shrinkage to reduce the impoverished population and better preserve the tax base.[16] According to the “politically toxic”[16] proposal, the city would stop investing in troubled neighborhoods and divert funds to communities “that could still be saved.”[16] He suggested that the city should “accelerate the drainage” in what he called the worst parts of the South Bronx through a policy of planned shrinkage by closing subway stations, firehouses and schools. Starr felt these actions were the best way to save money.[17] Starr’s arguments soon became predominant in urban planning thinking nationwide.[12] The people who lived in the communities where his policies were applied protested vigorously; without adequate fire service and police protection, the residents faced waves of crime and fires that left much of the South Bronx and Harlem devastated.[2] A report in 2011 in the New York Times suggested that the planned shrinkage approach was “short-lived”.[18] Under the planned shrinkage program, for example, an abandoned 100-unit development on one piece of land could be cleared by a real estate developer, and such an outcome would have been preferable to ten separate neighborhood-based efforts to produce 100 housing units each, according to advocates of planned shrinkage.[12] According to this view, a planned shrinkage approach would encourage so-called “monolithic development”, resulting in new urban growth but at much lower population densities than the neighborhoods which had existed previously.[12] The remark by Starr caused a political firestorm: then mayor Abraham Beame disavowed the idea while City Council members called it “inhuman,” “racist” and “genocidal.”[11]
According to one report, the high inflation during the 1970s combined with the restrictive rent control policies in the city meant that buildings were worth more dead for the insurance money than alive as sources of rental income; as investments, they had limited ability to provide a solid stream of rental income. Accordingly, there was an economic incentive on the part of building owners, according to this view, to simply let the buildings burn. An alternative view was that the fires were a result of the city’s municipal policies. While there are differing views about whether planned shrinkage caused fire outbreaks in the 1970s, or was a result of such fires, there is agreement that the fires in the South Bronx during these years were extensive.
In the South Bronx, the average number of people per [fire] engine is over 44,000. In Staten Island, it’s 17,000. There is no standard for manning areas of multiple dwellings as opposed to one- and two-family residences.
— A New York City battalion chief from the New York City Fire Department interviewed in the BBC-TV special “The Bronx is Burning,” in 1976.[2]
By the mid-1970s, The Bronx had 120,000 fires per year, for an average of 30 fires every 2 hours. 40 percent of the housing in the area was destroyed. The response time for fires also increased, as the firefighters did not have the resources to keep responding promptly to numerous service calls. A report in The New York Post suggested that the cause of the fires was not arson but resulted from decisions by bureaucrats to abandon sections of the city.[15] According to one report, of the 289 census tracts within the borough of the Bronx, seven census tracts lost more than 97% of their buildings, and 44 tracts lost more than 50% of their buildings, to fire and abandonment.[15]
There have been claims that planned shrinkage impacted public health negatively.[19][20] According to one source, public shrinkage programs targeted to undermine populations of African-Americans and Hispanic-Americans in the South Bronx and Harlem had an effect on the geographic pattern of the AIDS outbreak. According to this view, municipal abandonment was interrelated with health issues and helped to cause a phenomenon termed “urban desertification”.[21]
The populations in the South Bronx, Lower East Side, and Harlem plummeted during the two decades after 1970. Only after two decades did the city begin to invest in these areas again.
New Orleans
New Orleans differed from other cities in that the cause of decline was not based on economic or political shifts but rather a destructive flood caused by a hurricane. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, planned shrinkage was proposed as a means to create a “more compact, more efficient and less flood-prone city”.[10] Areas of the city which were most damaged by the flooding – and thus, most likely to be flooded again – would not be rebuilt and would become green space.[10] These areas were frequently less desirable, lower-income areas which had lower property values precisely because of the risk of flooding.[10] Some residents rejected a “top-down” approach of planned shrinkage of municipal planners and attempted to rebuild in flood-prone areas.[9]
Detroit
Roxbury, Boston
Planned shrinkage in Roxbury is not unique to the RAND policies enacted in the 70s and 80s. The area succumbed to numerous fires as out-of-town landlords sought out the only way to earn back some profit on homes that no longer sold. However, the neighborhood’s response to planned shrinkage through community action has made it an example to other neighborhoods of the success of people-first organizing. The neighborhood had worked with the Boston’s administration, but refused to give in to bureaucratic control by the city, protesting whenever the municipality neglected their redevelopment.[22]
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Trailer: ‘Decade Of Fire’ Explores The Burning Of The Bronx In The ’70s
Synopsis: In the 1970s, the Bronx was on fire. Abandoned by city government, nearly a half-million people were displaced as their close-knit, multi-ethnic neighborhood burned to the ground. While insidious government policies caused the devastation, Black and Puerto Rican residents bore the blame. Now, Bronx-born Vivian Vázquez Irizarry exposes the truth about the borough’s untold history and reveals how her community chose to resist, remain, and rebuild.
Interview with the Director
Open host Rhina Valentin sits down the Co-Director/Producer Vivian Vazquez and Film Score Composer Arturo Ortiz to discuss Decade of Fire, a documentary that unveils the Bronx fires in the 1970’s and the effect it has had on the community.
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Click here for the rest of the paper
Some key takeways
“Accompanying the racialized spatial reordering of American cities like New York in the 1950s and 60s was a marked increase in racial tension. The Great Migration brought racial issues to the urban North in a previously unseen way and over these two decades the modern American city became “the primary space of racial division and racial tension” as “the apparatuses of urban racial segregation” took “new, sophisticated forms.” America’s racial tumult mounted throughout the decade, manifesting itself in U.S. cities in the form of palpable tension and explosive violent conflict.
In reaction, President Lyndon B. Johnson formed the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, colloquially known as the Kerner Commission, an 11-member committee with the goal of investigating the racial problem in America’s cities as of 1967. The commission, headed in part by New York Mayor John Lindsay, issued a 50-page report that offers an illuminating look at the state of black urban life. The report states unequivocally that “our nation is moving toward two societies: one, largely Negro and poor, located in the central cities; the other, predominantly white and affluent, located in the suburbs and outlying areas.”
While the acknowledgement of this cleavage alone is important, the commission identified “white racism” as “essentially responsible for the explosive mixture which has been accumulating in our cities since the end of World War II,” citing ghettoization of African Americans, “pervasive discrimination and segregation,” and white exodus as main causes. Ultimately, the commission warned, “to continue present policies is to make permanent the division of our country” and suggested “federal programs must be given a new thrust aimed at overcoming the prevailing patterns of racial segregation.” Despite the strong recommendations made by the committee, President Johnson rejected the report’s findings”
“Although flawed coverage was prevalent, its ill effects did not go unacknowledged. The 1967 Kerner report attacked “the media” for their “overall treatment…of Negroghettos,” citing the dangerous “exaggeration of both mood and event.” The single-minded and sensationalist coverage of violence in urban areas like the South Bronx led to “a series of moral panics” that ultimately “demonized inner-cityminorit[ies].”
“whites used factors like crime…as nonracial reasons to legitimize their preferences for largely whiteneighborhoods.”49 Instead of blaming race for their departure they “collaps[ed] race into culture and learned behavior,” ultimately conveying their belief that the “destruction of their old neighborhoods was caused by individual behaviors associated with flawed blackculture”50 like crime and violence. Using these distorted lies, the participants voiced their distaste for and the inferiority of their new, darker neighbors implicitly and did so only by relying on the fabricated link between black culture and violence. Though pervasive, crime and violence were just a few of the aspects of life in the South Bronx that critics used as a vehicle for veiled racial criticisms of black and Hispanic life.”
“In addition to the prevalent critiques of crime in the South Bronx, the dominant voices criticizing the neighborhood consistently focused on the area’s lack of political organization and strong nuclear families as a major reason for its deterioration.”
“As conditions in minority urban neighborhoods like the South Bronx deteriorated the depiction of these locations as diseases attacking the body of the larger city gained traction. To be sure, metaphors connecting urban ghettos with illness had been present for as long as American cities had existed but they took on a greater importance in an environment where racial hierarchies had to be enforced in a language purged of overt racial reference. Bradley Gardener explains this process, saying “one of the ways space is commonly used to conceal race is through urban planning language.” In this lexicon, the city is the body politic and “difference in the form of racialized groups is seen as a disease invading the city, a threat to its wellbeing.” Popular discourse quickly labeled the black and Hispanic residents of the geographically expanding South Bronx as a disease. It’sa powerful metaphor as the association of the expansion of black urban space with sickness justifies preventative measures associated with tackling an illness, which in the South Bronx manifested itself in efforts to contain the neighborhood, segregate of its black and Hispanic residents, and neglect the problems that arose within.”
“Private and Public Reaction to the New South BronxThe racist constructions that systematically tore down the South Bronx encouraged a private and public reaction that compounded, rather than addressed, the area’s devastating problems. The popular presentation of the neighborhood established it as a location populated by inferior people and worthy of abandonment. The policy makers, residents and those with an economic interest in the borough responded accordingly.”
“The major institutional reaction to racist perception of the new South Bronx was the policies of benign neglect and planned shrinkage, two political philosophies that claimed the neighborhood should be disinvested and left alone to die to improve the health of the city. Private actors, especially within the South Bronx’s real estate industry, also expressed similar feelings of authorized contempt for the area.When the real estate market collapsed due to the media-stoked hysteria surrounding demographic transitions and neighborhood change, landlords slashed services, knowing full well that dominant society had already characterized the area as blighted and would place blame not on them but on the racial flaws of the residents. Once the South Bronx had been built up as an international symbol of black urban failure it became labeled, in many ways, as a place not worth saving. That notion became a self-fulfilling prophecy as private and public actors found no reason to help the South Bronx, seeking instead to tear it down either in the name of saving the more “desirable” parts of the city or for personal profit.”
“Starr justified his plan by citing the same supposed flaws in black and Hispanic culture that his ideological predecessors like Moynihan did. By “denying the existence of the community’s social fabric and…evoking dysfunctional poor families” Starr “provide[d] the intellectual basis for massive demolition of the housing of thepoor.”102 He used the old critiques that cited black cultural inferiority as the cause of the neighborhood’s failure as grounds for its abandonment. The racist logic, a clear extension of earlier racist rhetoric, states that since the neighborhood’s current residents aren’t able to properly care for their neighborhoods in the way their white predecessors did, the city has no duty to provide for those neighborhoods in the way it does for others.”
“The South Bronx, the area that would supposedly not suffer from these service reductions, was devastated.Between 1970 and 1980, seven census tracts in the borough lost “more than 97% of their buildings to fire and abandonment and 44 tracts (out of 289 in the borough) lost more than 50%.” Some previously “healthy” areas in the South Bronx lost 80% of both housing units and population between 1970 and1980.109 Despite the fact that the vast majority of these fires started due to ordinary causes, conventional wisdom blamedarson.110 As the epidemic worsened, the falsified notion that the contagion existed because of arson persisted. Arsonists and criminals bore the brunt of the responsibility, continuing the phenomenon of misplaced blame that dropped responsibility for the South Bronx’s failures solely on the shoulders of its black and brown residents.”
Private Reaction
“The devastating reaction to the new South Bronx was not limited to the public sphere as private economic interests responded to the construction of the neighborhood as flawed and worthless. The real estate market in the neighborhoods that the politicians and media doomed with the name “South Bronx” crashed throughout the late 60s and early 70s. While many forces encouraged the collapse of the South Bronx’s real estate market, in a Housing Rehabilitation Task Force report issued in 1976 the New York City Urban Coalition proclaimed that what really killed the South Bronx’s real estate market was a loss of hope. “The owner loses hope in thebuilding, the banks in the neighborhood, and the tenants in the landlord…thus the building has nofuture.” As popular racist perceptions trumpeted the neighborhood’s death, destructive pessimism was inevitable.
The popular construction of the neighborhood led politicians, investors, and “owners and residents to redline the South Bronx as an area not worthsaving.”112 The landlord of a South Bronx building acknowledged that “white middle class people just don’t want to live in that kind of an area,” while a banker damningly claimed that by 1975 “you can write off the entire area south of the Cross-Bronxexpressway.”113 These vague, sweeping generalizations declaring the South Bronx’s worthlessness only made sense due to the widely disseminated, racist image ofthe neighborhood as destitute, inferior and deserving of abandonment.”
“Media, especially The New York Times, fueled the hysteria surrounding the South Bronx and its demise. As early as 1966, The Times lent support to the notion that the neighborhood’s changed racial composition had compromised its value. A July cover story blared the headline “Grand Concourse: Hub of the Bronx Is Undergoing Ethnic Changes” with the explanatory sub header stating “Transition Felt to Be Posing Threat to Stability ofArea.” A Bronx developer charged the story with the “ruination of thisneighborhood” and Irma Fleck, a Bronx community activist, claimed that the article kicked off a “self-fulfilling prophecy. Landlords read that article and the real estate market fell immediately. No one wants to live in a neighborhood the Times has said is becoming aslum.” As the perception of the South Bronx as worthless disseminated,private sector disinvestment picked up, real estate demand plummeted and landlords quickly realized that they would have to resort to “unethical practices to reap profits from theirbuildings.” The vast majority “cut down on maintenance, defer[red] paying taxes, rent[ed] to undesirable tenants or ‘problem families,’ aggressively collect[ed] whatever rents they could get, and ‘ran for thehills.” The politically weak and disadvantaged black and Hispanic residents of buildings crippled by landlord abuse found their appeals for assistance were ignored and unheard. The rampant linking of the buildings’ and neighborhood’s squalor to the residents’ racial flaws and the desire of many of New York’s most powerful decision makers to abandon this part of the cityfurther drowned out their cries for help and support.The landlords’ exploitation of their now decrepit buildings often ended with burning them to the ground in order to cash in on fire insurance policies. Tragically, the landlords could shirk responsibility for the burned downed carcasses of their buildings as, despite data stating otherwise, dominant voices like those of Daniel Patrick Moynihan and the RAND Institute continually “accused the poor of arson andmischief.” Soon, the market crashed around the residents’ feet. The destitution that came to define the South Bronx grew worse and worse while the blame for these problems continued to be misplaced, falling overwhelmingly on its beleaguered black and Hispanics.”
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Divestment in HUD (1980s-present)
- 1968, Fair Housing Act created Dept. of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)
- Imposed a special requirement upon HUD to “administer the programs and activities relating to housing and urban development in a manner affirmatively to further” fair housing
- HUD Act of 1968 (4 months after Fair Housing Act)
- Shifted responsibility to provide public housing from the fed gov to the private sector
- Provided billions of dollars to private industry motivated by a racist real estate industry
- President Reagan
- Drastically cut HUD budget from $30 billion to $9 billion (60%)
- Cut funding for public housing and Section 8 rent subsidies in half
- Funding for new housing subsidies dipped below 100,000 units per year
- Eliminating the antipoverty Community Development Block Grant program
- Did little to enforce laws against discrimination in housing and lending
- Used housing funds for GOP consultants
- Drastically cut HUD budget from $30 billion to $9 billion (60%)
- President Bush Senior, Clinton, Bush Jr, Obama, Trump
- Steady disinvestment and privatization of public housing
- Shifted responsibility to provide public housing from the fed gov to the private sector
The Nation: Reagan’s Real Legacy
“During his two terms in the White House (1981–89), Reagan presided over a widening gap between the rich and everyone else, declining wages and living standards for working families, an assault on labor unions as a vehicle to lift Americans into the middle class, a dramatic increase in poverty and homelessness, and the consolidation and deregulation of the financial industry that led to the current mortgage meltdown, foreclosure epidemic and lingering recession…
Many Americans credit Reagan with reducing the size of government. In reality, he increased government spending, cut taxes and turned the United States from a creditor to a debtor nation. During his presidency, Reagan escalated the military budget while slashing funds for domestic programs that assisted working-class Americans and protected consumers and the environment. Not surprisingly, both George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush followed in Reagan’s footsteps. But, unfortunately, so did Bill Clinton…
Reagan’s fans give him credit for restoring the nation’s prosperity. But whatever economic growth occurred during the Reagan years mostly benefitted those already well off. The income gap between the rich and everyone else in America widened. Wages for the average worker declined and the nation’s homeownership rate fell. During Reagan’s two terms in the White House, the minimum wage was frozen at $3.35 an hour, while prices rose, thus eroding the standard of living of millions of low-wage workers. The number of people living beneath the federal poverty line rose from 26.1 million in 1979 to 32.7 million in 1988. Meanwhile, the rich got much richer. By the end of the decade, the richest 1 percent of Americans had 39 percent of the nation’s wealth.
After signing the Garn–St. Germain Depository Institutions Act in 1982, Reagan presided over the dramatic deregulation of the nation’s savings-and-loan industry. The law allowed S&Ls to end their reliance on home mortgages and permitted banks to provide adjustable-rate mortgage loans. The S&Ls began a decade-long orgy of real estate speculation, mismanagement and fraud. The industry indulged in a wild ride of merger mania, with banks and S&Ls gobbling each other up and making loans to finance shopping malls, golf courses, office buildings and condo projects that had no financial logic other than a quick-buck profit.
When the dust settled in the late 1980s, hundreds of S&Ls and banks had gone under, billions of dollars of commercial loans were useless and the federal government was left to bail out the depositors whose money the speculators had looted to the tune of over $130 billion.
Under Reagan, government’s role shifted from policing Wall Street and protecting consumers to a see-no-evil enabler, encouraging banks to engage in irresponsible practices. This was just the first chapter in the slide towards today’s financial crisis. Things got even worse—much worse—in the decades after Reagan left office. Both Bushes, as well as Clinton, took up where Reagan left off in granting banks and insurance companies permission to wreak havoc on consumers and the economy. This lead to the epidemic of subprime loans and foreclosures of the past three years and the costly federal bail-out of “too big to fail” Wall Street banks.
Reagan’s indifference to urban problems was legendary. Early in his presidency, at a White House reception, Reagan greeted the only black member of his Cabinet, Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Samuel Pierce, saying: “How are you, Mr. Mayor? I’m glad to meet you. How are things in your city?”
Reagan not only failed to recognize his own HUD Secretary, he failed to deal with the growing corruption scandal at the agency that resulted in the indictment and conviction of top Reagan administration officials for illegally targeting housing subsidies to politically connected developers. Pierce and others rigged the allocation of subsidies for housing projects to favor Reagan’s campaign contributors and GOP lobbyists, such as former Interior Secretary James Watt. Fortunately for Reagan, the “HUD Scandal” wasn’t uncovered until he’d left office.
Reagan didn’t invent the pay-to-play game or the revolving door of top government officials becoming well-paid lobbyists and government contractors. But his hands-off attitude toward government oversight contributed to the deepening culture of corruption in our nation’s capital.
The 1980s saw pervasive racial discrimination by banks, real estate agents and landlords, unmonitored by the Reagan administration. Community groups uncovered blatant redlining by banks. But Reagan’s HUD and Department of Justice failed to prosecute or sanction banks that violated the Community Reinvestment Act, which prohibits racial discrimination in lending. During that time, of the 40,000 applications from banks requesting permission to expand their operations, Reagan’s bank regulators denied only eight of them on grounds of violating CRA regulations.
The declining fiscal fortunes of America’s cities began during the Reagan years. By the end of his second term, federal assistance to local governments had been slashed by 60 percent. Reagan eliminated general revenue sharing to cities, cut funding for public service jobs and job training, almost dismantled federally funded legal services for the poor, cut the antipoverty Community Development Block Grant program and reduced funds for public transit.
These cutbacks had a disastrous effect on cities with high levels of poverty and limited property tax bases, many of which depended on federal aid to provide basic services. In 1980 federal dollars accounted for 22 percent of big city budgets. By the end of Reagan’s second term, federal aid was only 6 percent. The consequences were devastating to urban schools and libraries, municipal hospitals and clinics, and sanitation, police and fire departments—many of which had to shut their doors. Many cities still haven’t recovered from the downward spiral started during the Gipper’s presidency.
The most dramatic cut in domestic spending during the Reagan years was for low-income housing subsidies. In his first year in office, Reagan cut the budget for public housing and Section 8 rent subsidies in half. Congress thwarted his plan to wide out federal housing assistance to the poor altogether, but he got much of what he sought. In the 1980s the proportion of the eligible poor who received federal housing subsidies declined substantially.
Another of Reagan’s enduring legacies is the steep increase in the number of homeless people, which by the late 1980s had swollen to 600,000 on any given night—and 1.2 million over the course of a year. Many were Vietnam veterans, children and laid-off workers.
In early 1984 on “Good Morning America,” Reagan defended himself against charges of callousness toward the poor in a classic blaming-the-victim statement. He said that “people who are sleeping on the grates…the homeless…are homeless, you might say, by choice.”
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Timeline: Here’s what happened when Reagan went after healthcare programs. It’s not good.
“So what happened after Reagan’s budget cuts? A million children lost reduced-price school lunches, 600,000 people lost Medicaid, and a million lost food stamps. Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) could only serve a third of those eligible. WIC provides low-income pregnant women and children with formula and healthy food staples. Nearly 500,000 lost eligibility for Aid to Families with Dependent Children (a less-stringent precursor to TANF). This caused a two-percent increase in the total poverty rate, and the number of children in poverty rose nearly three percent.
Lack of funding meant Public Health Service Hospitals and programs that deployed physicians to rural and urban areas were shut down. More than 250 community health centers were closed. Between 1980 and 1991, 309 rural hospitals and 294 urban hospitals were shuttered. Nearly one million Native Americans lost access to Indian Health Service care when eligibility was narrowed.
“History has taught us that such cuts in health and social service programs can have pervasive negative effects on health,” Williams writes. “Negative effects were soon evident in the health of pregnant women, children, and adults with chronic disease. There was an increase in women receiving no prenatal care. The overall decline in infant mortality slowed, and an increase in infant mortality in poor areas of 20 states was evident between 1981 and 1982. There was also an increase in preventable childhood diseases in poor populations.”
From 1982 to 1987, unintended pregnancy rates increased by nearly 8 percent. The increases were especially pronounced among those living below the poverty line. The uninsured rate skyrocketed. By 1985, 15 percent of the population lacked health insurance. The health of those cut from Medicaid deteriorated.
Under Reagan, life-expectancy-at-birth of black Americans actually decreased. By 1988, a third of Native American deaths were of those younger than 45; Native Americans were 400 percent more likely than the rest of the U.S. population to die of tuberculosis and 438 percent more likely to die of alcoholism-related ailments.
Agencies were also woefully unprepared to tackle the burgeoning threats of HIV and E. coli. By 1988, the Institute of Medicine declared that the American public health system had fallen into disarray. The then-president of the American Public Health Association responded that public health activities had been “inappropriately politicized.”
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Privatization of Public Housing (1960s-present)
- Privatization
- 1968, HUD Act shifted the responsibility to provide public from Fed to the private sector
- Focused building ‘new” homes in white suburbs and “fixing up” dilapidated homes in urban neighborhoods
- Nixon’s New Federalism (States rights)
- Decentralized HUD removing Fed oversight and outsourced programs to real estate brokers and banker
- Caused massive fraud and predatory inclusion of which public housing, not the private sector or Nixon, got most of the blame
- Aftermath was fed focused more on housing vouchers (section 8) instead of building new homes
- Decentralized HUD removing Fed oversight and outsourced programs to real estate brokers and banker
- 1968, HUD Act shifted the responsibility to provide public from Fed to the private sector
Bloomberg: Black Poverty Is Rooted in Real-Estate Exploitation
A new study in Chicago shows how the dream of homeownership was converted into a poverty trap.
The predation didn’t end in the 1960s. It evolved. There was the FHA scandal of the 1970s, in which indiscriminate federal lending and outright corruption enabled speculators to sell inner-city homes to blacks at inflated prices, resulting in widespread foreclosures. There was the subprime boom of the 2000s, in which blacks were steered into inappropriately expensive loans that enriched a whole ecosystem of mortgage-industry professionals, but often left borrowers with nothing but an eviction notice and a bad credit history. In the wake of the subprime bust, investors including private-equity firms have again targeted the same neighborhoods, buying up houses on the cheap and renting them back to black and other minority tenants — sometimes under contracts very similar to those of the 1960s.
- Urban Revitalization Demonstration program (HOPE VI) – 1990s
- Privatized HUD assisted housing projects into mixed redevelopment without a 1:1 public housing replacement rule
- While billions were given away to developers its estimated only 19% of households of HOPE VI were able to return
- Significantly reduced the number of public housing available and residents had little say in process
- Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD) – 2012 – Present
- Transfers public housing to private sector to access more funding
- Issues with right of return, lack of transparency, no long-term guarantee housing will remain affordable after 40 years
- Transfers public housing to private sector to access more funding
- Privatized HUD assisted housing projects into mixed redevelopment without a 1:1 public housing replacement rule
“One explanation for the failure of federal housing policies to actually produce “fair” housing is found in the state’s continued reliance on the private sector as the sole provider of housing in the United States. The federal government long ago abdicated the responsibility of directly producing affordable housing, instead outsourcing the task to private developers—while continuing to provide vast amounts of assistance in the form of guarantees, subsidies, and tax relief. As a result, it has absorbed the real-estate and banking industries’ historic embrace of racial discrimination.” Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Dissent
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Dissent: How Real Estate Segregated America
As the government got more involved in regulating and subsidizing housing, these ideas translated directly into policy. The notorious redlining maps issued by the federal Home Owners’ Loan Corporation in the 1930s, to take one early example, were based on existing maps used by local banks and brokers. It’s not hard to see why: starting in this period, real-estate executives were recruited to develop government housing policies because of their former roles within the private sector. Over time, the real-estate industry, in turn, would seek out former government employees for their valuable connections to the state. With this “revolving door” in place, public and private networks formed an insular feedback loop mostly concerned with maintaining a brisk housing market. The real-estate industry flexed its enormous influence over national policy again and again over the following decades, including when it vociferously—and successfully—lobbied to hobble public housing in the 1940s and 1950s.
But the modern iteration of this destructive public-private apparatus was born with the Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Act of 1968. While the Fair Housing Act is widely recognized as a landmark in U.S. policy, the accompanying HUD Act is virtually unknown today despite its equally seismic shift in American housing policy.
The HUD Act was passed in August 1968, four months after Johnson signed the Fair Housing Act into law. It was a historic piece of legislation that decisively shifted the responsibility to provide housing for poor and working-class people from the federal government to the private sector.
In the years of urban uprisings that roiled the mid-1960s, poor and substandard housing was repeatedly listed as a catalyst of Black rage. For example, a report on the causes of the Black rebellion in Philadelphia in 1964 found that 100 percent of rat bites reported in the city (and the resulting deaths) happened in segregated Black neighborhoods. From lead poisoning to a lack of indoor plumbing to general dilapidation, urban housing occupied by African Americans was overwhelmingly in substandard condition.
The poor quality of Black housing was driven by three factors. It was typically older and used, having filtered down to African Americans who were the newest arrivals in Northern cities. Its already distressed condition was then exacerbated by residential segregation that led to overcrowding, as Black residents were hemmed into a few clustered neighborhoods. Finally, the lack of housing choices available to African Americans removed the pressure from landlords to improve the quality of housing. African Americans were a captured market with nowhere else to turn.
Meanwhile, the government was heavily subsidizing the construction of exclusive suburbs, whose value for upwardly mobile whites was based in large part on their distance from Black neighborhoods and exclusion of Black people. Where white suburban neighborhoods came to be valued as appreciating assets for the households who lived in them, Black urban neighborhoods were prized by the real-estate industry for their extractive value. If the real-estate industry was eager to keep “white neighborhoods” and “black neighborhoods” apart, then, it was not because of prejudice alone—it was because of profit.
The result was African Americans paying more for inferior housing in comparison to whites who were being lured to new suburban developments during this same period. By the mid-1960s, these conditions had reached a breaking point. The 1967–68 urban uprisings—the largest wave of domestic riots in the twentieth century—were the result.
Passed through Congress even as the wreckage of rebellions was still visible, the HUD Act, in tandem with the Fair Housing Act, was intended to transform American cities and suburbs. Unlike Fair Housing, the HUD Act produced no partisan rancor and instead was celebrated by Democrats, Republicans, and of most significance, the real-estate and banking industries. Both parties promoted homeownership as a way to give Black urban residents a stake in society in hopes of quelling the uprisings. But there was also the added motivation of developing a new market. The legislation emphasized “private enterprise” as the cornerstone of urban renewal. The federal government enticed the participation of the real-estate industry and mortgage lenders essentially by paying them to produce housing for low-income people. Its most significant features included a federal mandate to create 26 million units of new and rehabilitated housing within ten years, including 6 million units for low-income residents. It also included a low-income renter program allowing nonprofit organizations to buy residential buildings cheaply with low-interest loans, with the aim of passing the savings onto renters. Finally, Section 235 of the bill created a homeownership program for low-income people through a combination of interest-rate subsidies, a low down payment, and the promise of mortgage insurance from the federal government.
In 1967, a year before the Fair Housing and HUD Acts were signed, a summer of riots had compelled the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) to finally end its three-decade-long practice of redlining urban neighborhoods, while unveiling multiple new initiatives aimed at increasing the rates of homeownership in Black urban areas. A consortium of life insurance companies donated $1 billion to create a mortgage pool for single-family homes and multifamily buildings in areas that would have previously been redlined. This meant that money was finally available, but only to buy within the city—not outside of it. Ending the urban housing crisis required going a step further; it required actively providing African Americans with access to safe, sound, and affordable housing inside and out of cities, especially in areas where they had long been denied it.
The HUD Act’s mandate to produce 6 million units of low-income housing seemed to deliver on this promise, and for this reason was welcomed by many Black buyers and renters. But the legislation also revealed fault lines within the industry. Homebuilders were ecstatic about the new legislation because it put federal muscle behind building new homes, but real-estate brokers demanded a greater percentage of homes be “existing” or used and that more money be allocated toward rehabilitating dilapidated homes in urban neighborhoods. “New” housing was largely located in suburbs and “existing” housing primarily in cities, meaning that a color line would divide the types of housing available. As a result, builders became advocates of fair housing, while real-estate trade groups, hoping to preserve the existing housing in segregated cities, denounced it as “forced integration.” They couched their critique in terms of defending consumer “choice,” including the right to choose one’s own neighbors.
Compounding the problem was the fact that the HUD Act was never really Johnson’s legislation to implement. Within months of being passed, it was inherited by the Nixon administration.
At first, there were signs that Nixon might see the fair housing initiative through. The first director of HUD he appointed was former Michigan Governor George Romney, regarded as a racial liberal who had helped Michigan pass statewide fair housing laws. But Nixon’s political fixation on maintaining his white “silent majority” electoral coalition quickly came into conflict with the objectives of the new housing legislation. Nixon grumbled to his aides about “forced integration” and argued, instead, for a vaguely defined “open society” with “open choices”—including the right to not choose integration.
Meanwhile, senior officials dismissed federal fair housing regulations as red tape that hampered the abilities of business. If there was ever a need for strict oversight and a high-functioning regime of civil rights law enforcement, it was during the initiation of a massive low-income homeownership program directed at African Americans. Instead, the Nixon administration pursued a doctrine of “new federalism”—an analog of states’ rights—which allowed decision-making and oversight of implementation to be deferred to the multiple and new local installations of HUD. Romney’s efforts to decentralize HUD’s operations (largely at Nixon’s behest) by unnecessarily dividing smaller regional offices into even smaller local offices helped to siphon powerful oversight authority away from HUD’s headquarters into the hands of local housing agents. The Nixon administration lauded local control over the dictates of so-called “Washington bureaucrats,” and HUD became a test case not for centralized oversight but for Nixon’s commitment to local control.
This would have real consequences in the implementation of all of the new programs outlined in the HUD Act, but especially when it came to making low-income Black renters into low-income Black homeowners. HUD’s new homeownership program relied on real-estate brokers and mortgage bankers to operate. Brokers held lists of houses for sale and they, in collaboration with mortgage lenders and agents from the FHA, determined which buyers qualified for the low-income homeownership program. In effect, the federal government outsourced the role of its inaugural low-income homeownership program to an industry long predicated on racial segregation.
This is how decades of exclusion of African Americans from much of the housing market gave way to a period of predatory inclusion. The end of FHA redlining meant that capital could flow freely into urban communities, but African Americans could not get out, remaining locked in the cities or segregated suburban neighborhoods. The absence of genuine mobility in the housing market left Blacks still vulnerable to predatory real-estate practices. And with the backing of a federal program, those practices were multiplied exponentially. The Federal Housing Administration, now a subsidiary of HUD, unleashed new money, including the billion dollars from the insurance industry, with the promise to insure any mortgage it was presented with. “For the businessman and the resident of the inner city,” President Johnson stated upon signing the HUD Act, “the vital flow of property insurance will be assured.”
This policy incentivized real-estate speculators to buy distressed urban properties for pennies, invest in minimal maintenance and repair, and then facilitate a home sale for thousands more to someone desperate for housing. With FHA backing, bankers and brokers were on the hunt for potential clients. Government subsidies and mortgage guarantees amplified exploitative real-estate practices. The FHA guarantee encouraged the invigorated home sales through a variety of government-sponsored programs (not just Section 235). The HUD Act had also created a secondary market just for the sale of low-income homes, Ginnie Mae, guaranteeing that every low-income mortgage would be bought, packaged as a security, and then sold to long-term investors. The practice promised an unlimited flow of available cash, making the low-income housing market ripe for plunder.
There was no shortage of people living in American cities desperate to find a place of their own. Speculators preyed upon Black single mothers on welfare who were particularly desperate for housing. In St. Louis, one real-estate broker sent thousands of postcards advertising Section 235 housing to residents of the crumbling Pruitt-Igoe homes in hopes of luring them into buying a house. Real-estate speculators sold thousands of homes with no water heaters, nailed-shut windows, leaking roofs, rat infestations, and worse. Federal subsidies and mortgage guarantees resuscitated urban housing that had been left for dead.
Miserable and dangerous housing conditions in the existing urban market led people to walk away from the homes they had recently purchased, and the numbers of defaults, foreclosures, and FHA insurance payments began to rise. By the end of 1973, 10 percent of Section 235 homes were in foreclosure, along with tens of thousands more in other FHA-assisted low-income homeownership programs. In May of 1974, HUD was in possession of 78,000 single-family homes. Corrupt mortgage lenders quickly foreclosed on new homeowners to cash in on lucrative fees and sprawling closing costs, while real-estate brokers moved in to quickly resell the broken property and start the lucrative process all over again. Almost all of the properties were in cities. In an emergent age of investigative journalism, newspapers from around the country took note of the foreclosures, but more importantly, of the role of HUD in facilitating the sale of junk property to poor people. These were not only scandals, but crimes that had been committed against poor and working-class Blacks and Latinos. In cities as diverse as Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, Seattle, San Jose, and Columbia, South Carolina, real-estate brokers, FHA officials, and mortgage bankers were arrested and indicted for a criminal conspiracy to commit fraud. By 1974, twenty-eight HUD officials had been indicted for their role in the housing scandal along with other mortgage brokers and real-estate brokers. The FBI was conducting another 1,930 active investigations for fraud.
Republican-aligned newspapers like the Chicago Tribune took delight in headlines like “FHA Wastes $4 Billion and Creates City Slums,” but these failures were hardly the result of “big government” alone. Instead, their failure was rooted in a lack of oversight reflecting the deference of federal agents to private-sector profiteers. Where “risk” had once been invoked to keep African Americans locked out of homeownership, the FHA mortgage guarantee now turned it into a get-rich-quick scheme.
Instead of highlighting how the relationship between business and public agencies had undermined the function of government regulators or how Nixon’s doctrine of “new federalism” had left federal regulators ill-equipped to oversee a program ripe for corruption—especially given the history of the real-estate industry’s dealings with African Americans—the narrative turned on the perceived domestic dysfunction of Black families as the root of the problem. Black women’s homemaking skills were called into question, as well as their overall competence as homeowners. Even as federal agents in the FHA were arrested for their role in the HUD-FHA scandal, the nation’s attention was trained on the poor program participants. Nixon officials used the spectacular collapse of low-income homeownership programs and the literal implosion of the Pruitt-Igoe homes in St. Louis (the city began demolishing the complex in 1972, less than twenty years after it was built) as evidence that the government should get out of the business of housing poor and low-income people. The highly visible collapse of the low-income homeownership program also allowed officials to gain support for keeping poor and working-class Black people out of white suburban communities.
In January of 1973, in his last act as HUD Secretary, George Romney announced a national moratorium on the construction or funding of all federally subsidized housing programs, including all of the FHA-assisted low-income homeownership programs. Months later Nixon would tell Congress, “All across America, the Federal Government has become the biggest slumlord in history. . . . Leaders of all political persuasions and from all levels of government . . . agree that the federally subsidized housing approach has failed.” Instead, he suggested, “of the policy alternatives available, the most promising way to achieve decent housing for all of our families at an acceptable cost appears to be direct cash assistance.”
This was the beginning of the federal turn to Section 8 housing vouchers, first issued in 1974. The introduction of vouchers was coupled with a demand from the Nixon administration that the “existing” housing stock be utilized for low-income housing while new construction of low-income housing was to be scaled back. Further cementing the racial division in low-income housing, the Nixon administration secured $3 billion for the construction of new low-income homes. The qualification of new construction all but guaranteed this housing would be placed in suburbs and largely reserved for white residents. With existing housing in the cities for Black renters and new construction in the suburbs for white buyers, Nixon’s segregated vision for housing in the United States was fulfilled. But the destructive role of real estate and mortgage bankers in the operation of the FHA-assisted homeownership programs was essential to the process.
The real-estate industry’s history of racism has made it an unreliable partner in solving the United States’ longstanding shortage of dignified affordable housing. Black families are disproportionately affected by the lack of housing precisely because long-standing racist myths have been used to influence notions of value and community desirability. Government has a long and sullied history of invoking race to shape the housing market as well. But government can be malleable to the demands of political protests and organizing, and changes of political representation can make it even more responsive to the public. Solving the perpetual U.S. housing crisis is complex, but it begins by disconnecting the power of government from the private sector’s insatiable profit motive.
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Neoliberal Movement
- 1980s Neoliberal movement
- Believe in rampant deregulation, privatization, and financialization of the “Public Good”
- Movement to go back to economic liberalism, despite all the lessons learned
- Leaders included Chicago School of Economics, Reagan, Milton Friedman (Reagan advisor), Thatcher
- Spread internationally through Neo-colonialism, Cold War, World Bank, IMF, WTO, trade agreements, etc
- 1980s Neoliberal massive spending cuts
- starved the inner cities of amenities, housing and services
- Reagan Neoliberialism
- Drastically divested HUD, social safety net programs (Medicaid, Social Security, food stamps, etc.), public health programs, education/job training
- While increasing military budget/rich tax breaks (income, capital gains, estate)
- Lowered top tax rate from 70% to 28%, while increasing payroll taxes/starting Social Security Tax
- Cuts were especially focused on programs helping urban settings
- Started a divestment trend that continued for decades
- While increasing military budget/rich tax breaks (income, capital gains, estate)
- Drastically divested HUD, social safety net programs (Medicaid, Social Security, food stamps, etc.), public health programs, education/job training
- Launched epidemic of homelessness, public health crisis and significantly increased income inequality still being felt
- A million children lost reduced-price school lunches, 600,000 people lost Medicaid, a million lost food stamps, WIC could only serve 1/3 of those eligible, 500,000 lost eligibility for Aid to Families with Dependent Children, 250 community health centers, 309 rural hospitals, and 294 urban hospitals were closed, one million Native Americans lost access to Indian Health Service care, increase in infant mortality, increase in preventable childhood diseases, 15% of the population lacked health insurance, life-expectancy-at-birth of black Americans decreased
- Significantly hurt gov agencies ability to handle HIV, E. coli outbreaks and crack epidemic
- 2% increase in the total poverty rate
- 3% increase in number of children in poverty
- Between 1982-85, poorest Americans lost 9% of their wealth
- while the wealthiest gained 9%
- A million children lost reduced-price school lunches, 600,000 people lost Medicaid, a million lost food stamps, WIC could only serve 1/3 of those eligible, 500,000 lost eligibility for Aid to Families with Dependent Children, 250 community health centers, 309 rural hospitals, and 294 urban hospitals were closed, one million Native Americans lost access to Indian Health Service care, increase in infant mortality, increase in preventable childhood diseases, 15% of the population lacked health insurance, life-expectancy-at-birth of black Americans decreased
- Disproportionately felt by people of color
- Life-expectancy-at-birth of black Americans decreased
“Nothing testifies to dog whistle racism’s transformation of American politics over the last half century so much as the recent willingness of 3 out of 5 white voters to support tax cuts for the super-rich, reduced social services for everyone, and a dramatic rollback of all government…dog whistle racism has helped convince many whites, arguably even a majority, that the greatest danger they face comes from a liberal government in hock to minorities, rather than from concentrated wealth and its plutocratic agenda. “ Ian Haney Lopez – Dog Whistle Politics
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Gini Index
- measure of inequality of wealth
- 0 is most equal
- 1 is least equal
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Rachel G. Bratt: What Happened to Public Housing?
A Study Guide for the film DOWN THE PROJECT: THE CRISIS OF PUBLIC HOUSING with commentaries by Rachel G. Bratt, Richard Broadman Public Housing him Project, Cine Research Associates
America’s public housing projects were once considered some of the best housing in the nation. What happened to stigmatize thiis program?
THE PUBLIC HOUSING PROGRAM: A BACKGROUND
by Richard Broadman
The Free Market in Housing and the Alternative Tradition
The free market in housing and real estate is a hallmark of the American system. Americans take pride in owning property and buying, improving, and selling real estate. Many strive to own their own home, and to own a second piece of property as an invest-ment is seen as a sign of “upward mobility.”
But this free market in real estate has also brought decaying buildings. falling property values, and neighborhoods labeled “ghettoes.” In these areas’ landlords are not motivated to invest the money for needed repairs, and profits are often achieved by over-crowding. Historically, these areas existed throughout America’s cities in the era before government intervened in the housing market.
Today these two sides of the housing market remain pan of the American landscape. Despite a half-century of government pro-grams designed to eliminate overcrowding and renew “blighted* areas, places like the South Bronx or Watts remind Americans that there is an underside to the American dream of investment and upward mobility.
The Free Market
The free market in housing and real estate is inseparable from the forces of supply and demand, investment and profitmaking. During much of the development of our cities, regulation of building was scanty and what was built—and how—was determined largely by the possibilities for financial return. Countless exchanges between sellers, builders, and buyers produced the great variety of struc-tures that came to make up each city. Those seeking housing on the free market had to contend with standards and prices determined by the circumstances of past financing and construction as well as present demand.
While would-be rentors had to cope with the legacy of past mar-ket decisions, those speculators building or renovating units in an older, industrialized city often faced an expensive enterprise. Improving old housing could be too expensive to easily ensure profits. The high cost of purchasing vacant land which has been sold and resold at ever higher prices might force a developer to create luxury housing and exclude low- and middle-income people from an opportunity to rent or acquire new housing. When such factors as expensive land, high costs of demolition or renovation, and the high cost of borrowing converge, investors have been unwilling to create homes for any but the wealthiest Americans.
When urban housing was constructed on the free market for poor people, it often lacked the basic amenities that most of us would consider desirable—roominess, light and air, and sturdy construction. In general, the search for profits has meant that good quality housing has gone to well-off people and the poor have gotten older, less well-kept housing or cheaply constructed units.
In the nineteenth century, the failure of the market to produce adequate housing for poor people led to two types of reform movements. One tendency—typified by the efforts of the photographer Jacob Riis—sought the answer in regulating the private market (i.e., making laws that required adequate ventilation, prevented over-crowding, etc.) and in promoting non-profit housing ventures. Other groups, spurred by the protests of the propertyless, backed land reformers like Henry George (calling for sweeping changes in taxation) and demanded systemic change. These two reform traditions carried over into the twentieth century.
Alternative Trends: Public Financing and Planned Development
Public Financing and tire Example of Berlin
One alternative to unplanned speculative development arose in a Europe devastated by World War I. In ruined cities, housing had to be created quickly and in new ways. There were many innovative experiments—built and financed by trade unions or by local or national governments.
Before 1914, Berlin had been plagued by land speculation—it was simply too expensive to buy land for needed construction. During and after the war, in spite of dire housing shortages, there was little building and the market in land remained unstable. Land prices fell and the government seized the opportunity to freeze them and put into effect its own building plans. By the 1930s, the municipal government owned one-third of the city’s land. In the years immediately after the war, two-fifths to four-fifths of all land used for dwellings was in the municipal domain. In 1921, a tax was levied on all buildings built before the war and the funds used to provide mortgages on low-cost housing. Between 1919 and 1931 a devastated Germany used these methods to produce three million dwellings.
Planned Developments in Europe As opposed to the more random nature of development inspired by free market speculative forces, several European nations developed construction programs emphasizing planning for the needs of particular constituents. Sweden, England, Germany, and Austria boasted new planned communities. In addition, the “new architecture” of Walter Gropius and other innovators encouraged functional design and economies of scale. These architects attempted to influence the industrial production of housing in such a way as to mass produce more livable units at lower costs. Both this new design initiative and the concept of public financing of land acquisition and construction came to America during the Great Depression.
America’s Lobbyists: “Public Housers” vs. the Real Estate Lobby
After the stock market crash of 1929 the American financial system collapsed, and with it the production of housing. Houses were foreclosed, rents were uncollectible, and the building trades were struck by massive unemployment. In this situation, private enterprise was incapable of producing housing on a large scale. Special interests in the construction and home finance industry began to lobby to have the old methods of building resuscitated through government sup-port, while reformers saw a chance to intervene with methods based upon European models.
The “Public Housers”
The “public housers” were advocates of government financed and built housing. They were drawn together in 1932 in the National Public Housing Conference (NPHC) and the Labor Housing Conference (LHC). The NPHC leadership was composed largely of well-to-do reformers linked to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. In the tradition of Jacob Riis, they advocated low-income housing construction and slum clearance (the demolition of “sub-standard” housing). The LHC at the outset was inspired by European models of government-sponsored development. They opposed slum clearance because it would reduce the housing stock and minimize the effect of adding new units, as well as being more expensive.
Catherine Bauer was a major figure in the effort to bring new European housing ideas to the United States. She and the other housing activists working with labor claimed that the NPHC position was aimed at bolstering falling private property values rather than creating a new kind of housing system. The LHC organizers called for stronger measures: an end to company housing, a union wage on every construction job, rents on new units to be held to levels wage-earners could afford, demonstration projects in every industri-al center, and enabling legislation for the government to condemn and take land needed for housing. In order to gain New Deal sup-port for public housing, they would ultimately give in on many of these demands. (It should be noted that within this split among the “public housers” were the seeds of the later controversy over the national urban renewal program of the 1950s and 1960s, which authorized the demolition of “slums” that other reformers saw as viable neighborhoods.)
The Real Estate Lobby
Arrayed against the public housers were the representatives of the forces that had created America’s housing stock. Each lobbied for a housing hill that would serve the needs of its constituency. The National Retail Lumber Dealers’ Association, for example, called for the construction of housing made of wood, opposing construction with concrete, masonry, brick or steel. The United States Savings and Loan League (USSLL) represented those credit institutions that financed housing, opposing direct government financing of land acquisition and mortgages. The National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) and the National Association of Real Estate Boards (NAREB) together represented the interests of millions of large and small property owners and developers, and worked to shape a bill that would not create housing that competed with the private market. In addition, the United States Chamber of Commerce represented the business community generally through its many local chapters. These groups formed a broad conservative coalition that advocated public support of the private sector while resisting government interference in general.
These groups espoused the creed of the private market in real estate. They spoke the language of the small entrepreneur, defending property ownership as an inalienable light, ‘end attacking infringements of private property as un-American. The NAHB, NAREB, and Chambers of Commerce were national organizations composed of thousands of local chapters, having ready access to virtually every type of person with an interest in the private market. With strong, clear rhetoric and a well-organized base they represented a massive challenge to the coalition of reformers seeking systemic change.
The Housing Act of 1937 and the “Predestination” of Public Housing: A Series of Compromises
The Public Housers Struggle to Agree on a Bill
The housing reformers were split between the NPHC reformers, radicals like Catherine Bauer, and the American Federation of Labor (AFL) unions that made up their largest base of public support. These groups had first to come to agreement among themselves before a bill could be put forward.
The radicals who initiated the struggle for public housing wanted to put in place new mechanisms for acquiring property and building developments that would effectively remove private profit makers from the process. They wished to enlist labor’s support for legislation that would provide social services—health care and community programs—that would improve working people’s lives. The AFL building trades had developed pragmatic positions on most labor issues and exhibited conservative tendencies when faced with these positions. Labor leaders might believe that housing was part of a broader set of social concerns affecting workers’ lives, but such positions were viewed by the AFL leadership as beyond the scope of the current legislation. Far from demanding a total change in the way the American system produced housing, the union leadership acted, like the members of the conservative coalition, to protect the immediate interests of its constituent membership. As a-result, the 1934 AFL convention recommended that the radical organizers they were working with reduce the scope of the proposed legislation. By 1935, most of the radical provisions had disappeared. The AFL leadership had seen fit, however, to support provisions like the one advocating a union wage on every job. The activists had won on one provision they cared deeply about, though: the bill put forward with labor’s support had no slum clearance provision, which meant that housing in “slum” areas would NOT have to be destroyed to produce new housing units. The radicals considered this critical because their goal was an expansion of the housing stock leading to less crowding, more sanitary living conditions, and a gradual decrease in rents. Though this position was contrary to that of the old-line reformers in the NPHC, it remained part of the original public housing bill because the congressional leadership recognized that labors support was crucial to the bill’s passage.
The Conservative Response Forces a Limited Housing Act
The response of the conservative coalition was another matter. They fought the key provisions of the reformers’ bill and forced through several amendments that greatly affected public housing’s future:
- They insisted on the slum clearance provision that was an anathema to the radicals. “Equivalent elimination,” 1:1 destruction of units for each unit built, was to be included in the legislation. In the NAREB view, expansion of the housing stock in a massive way could lead to falling rents and declining property values.
- They called for—and got—a 4:1 ratio of income to rent. This formula would determine the economic class of people eligible to live in the new housing. (A 4:1 ratio, for example, would necessitate that a family spend one-quarter of its income on rent; a 3:1 ratio, one-third of its income. The latter family would be the poorer group, having to spend more of its income simply for housing.) The homers had called for a 5:1 income/rent ratio, which would permit normal, stable working-class families to live in the housing. In demanding the 4:1 ratio. the conservative coalition was arguing for a poorer client population. They wanted to ensure that public housing tenants would be those least likely to compete for middle-income housing on the private market.
- They worked to prohibit elaborate or expensive design and materials, so that public housing would not be competitive with private housing. This would later cause housing officials to practice “stark economies, squeezing down space, minimizing community facilities, eliminating anything that could be thought of as ‘glamorizing.'” 2
- They demanded that public housing be self-supporting insofar as management and operations were concerned. Real estate interests did not wish to compete with subsidized developments that did not have to pay their own way and at the same time added to the general tax burden. Catherine Bauer, whose familiarity with European housing experiments had stimulated her initial involvement in public housing advocacy in this country, had been aware from the fist of the contradictions inherent in proposing systemic change:
There is no getting around the fact that “modern housing” and much of the framework of contemporary western society are mutually antipathetic. The premises underlying the most successful and forward-pointing housing developments are not the premises of capitalism, of inviable private property, of class distinction, of governments bent on preserving old interests rather than creating new values. And the full implications have as a rule been better understood by the jealous guardians of the old order of things than by the advocates and the direct beneficiaries of housing. In a sense the housing achievement has constituted a world within a world, hampered by all the contradictions and insecurity attendant on such an anomalous position.
The creation of the Housing Act of 1937 was in many ways a working out of this dynamic. After all, it was only the dislocation of the economy caused by the Great Depression that caused the AFL and the conservative coalition to he interested in anything other than “business as usual.” All of these groups wanted to get the system moving again. The idealists of the public housing movement coin-promised first with their allies in labor and then with their opponents from the private sector in order to get a housing program through Congress. Those compromises in turn did much to deter-mine the shape of public housing to come: its intent, its design, its client population, its reception by the public at large, and its long-term future.
The First Years of Public Housing
In the years following the 1937 act some 160,000 units of public housing were built across the country. By the standards of that day they easily fulfilled the requirements of “safe, sanitary, and decent” housing. Compared to units available to people of modest means on the private market they were uniformly clean, well-managed, and had superior sanitary facilities. (A toilet in each apartment and hot and cold running water were not common amenities in the 1930s.) They had low rents that included heat and electricity.
The slum clearance provision caused distress in those communities where public housing was to be built. Whole neighborhoods had to be cleared to conform to the equivalent elimination requirement. Then there was the income limitation, which meant that some displaced families would be making too much money to move into the new housing, while others were excluded because they did not make enough to pay the rent. In addition, there was simply no assurance that displaced families would be priority candidates for the new housing. The particular rules and the level of enforcement depended largely on the local politics of the city or town where the housing was built.
Politics: The Boston Example
In the 1930s and 1940s public housing was considered a political “plum,” coveted by politicians because it provided local employ-ment and new homes cheaply for people in a given ward. Other politicized characteristics included the site selection process, the admission process, and the degree to which the income limitation and other rules would be enforced. The policies of a given project were determined largely by the relative strength of the real estate lobby versus the New Deal-oriented reformers and labor representatives in a given area, as expressed in the makeup of the local housing authority board.
The early years of public housing in Boston provide one example of how the 1937 act was implemented. Boston was home to some of the first projects (the Public Works Administration—PWA—built Old Harbor Village in South Boston in 1935) and the city had the largest number of units per capita built anywhere in the country. That a city the size of Boston had the largest total number of units after New York City indicates its strength in the New Deal political hierarchy. James Michael Curley (then governor) had been an early Roosevelt supporter and congressman John McCormack was a ranking “bread-and-butter” Democrat.
Throughout the period of demolition and construction by both the PWA and the local housing authority, local real estate groups organized protests of people being evicted, placed test cases before the courts, and agitated against the program as “state socialism… making its debut.”3 But in fact only two constituencies seemed to be unhappy with the way the program was working our in Boston—the realtors and those displaced by slum clearance. For the most part people liked the housing and wanted to live in it.
One other political factor was obvious in the implementation of this program in Boston: the income limitations were not enforced. The various political machines holding power in this Democratic city between 1935 and 1950 allowed many ‘over-income” people to reside in the housing, including many who worked for the city. Here the price of holding political power included returning favors to the well-organized wards and building trades that supplied Democratic candidates with votes. Whether Democratic officeholders were con-servative or- liberal made little difference—there were few votes to be had in the 1930s by supporting the 4:1 income limitation in this city, or by opposing the construction of public housing. For Boston those conflicts awaited a later time.
The Housing Act of 1949 and Its Results
During and after World War 11 a fundamental realignment occurred in housing politics. While in the 1930s the driving force was the desire to resuscitate a collapsed system and send people back to work, policymakers of the 1940s were concerned that massive unemployment not reappear when the war came to an end and millions of American troops came home. This position was most clearly espoused by the Committee for Economic Development (CED), formed in 1942 by leaders of major corporations with an interest in long-term planning.4
The conservative lobbies remained on the scene, led by the Chamber of Commerce and, on housing issues, the NAREB. These right-wing groups were consistently against public programs, unions, and the income tax. Supported by small business and sectors of big business, they generally resisted participation in the CED-sponsored planning effort, which they deemed likely to lead to “big government” and big federal budgets.
The pro-housing lobby was still composed of the old reform elements and labor. By 1944 this coalition called for the creation of a housing program that would provide units for the returning veterans as well as jobs building those units. But in other ways their position was very different from that of the Depression era. Rather than seeking a massive government-financed public housing program, pro-housers pushed for a package which would satisfy forces interested in slum clearance and private developments while allowing the old public housing program to continue. In fact pro-housers had become a part of the New Deal administration, and their position was now closely tied to the planning-oriented CED elements.
In the housing plans sponsored by Roosevelt’s New Deal and Truman’s Fair Deal, public housing was to be part of an overall scheme of federally subsidized clearance and housing starts in which the major impetus was the subsidy for private-sector developments. Public housing itself was to be built by private developers, with its bonds sold to private investors, and its client population (as before) those who could not afford to live in private-market housing.
This new vision of postwar housing clearly linked growth in the private housing industry to the nation’s economic wellbeing, with government subsidies provided when needed to get large developments started, insure mortgages, etc. This was a far cry from the original vision of the public housers, who had looked to government landbanking, direct financing, and construction to keep housing costs from spiraling ever upwards.
The Conservative Lobby Attacks the New Housing Bill
The battle for a postwar housing bill lasted several years and was pan of a broader political struggle. Truman’s Fair Deal was opposed by conservative forces which opposed big government, big budgets, the Marshall Plan, a full employment bill, and coexistence with the Communist bloc. The position of the real estate lobby was argued by Joseph McCarthy, among others, who entered the senate in 1946. The fight over the bill was particularly vicious, especially over the public housing clauses, which the right wing attacked as “socialism.” Truman countered with a sustained attack on the real estate lobby, calling for a congressional investigation of its activities. When the act passed in 1949, it was by only five votes.
The legislation bears the marks of this battle. Once again the issue of income limits for housing residents was key. McCarthy forced the insertion of this phrasing:
Every contract shall require that, as between families of equally low income otherwise eligible for admission…the agency shall not discriminate against any such families because their incomes are derived, in whole or in part, from public assistance. In assisting tenants the question of greatest need shall be given due consideration.
In addition, first priority was to be given to families which are to be displaced by any low-rent housing project or by any public slum-clearance project or redevelopment project…
The new emphasis on welfare recipients indicates the degree of compromise forced on the pro-housers. The original intent of idealists like Bauer had been to house the working class and build strong communities based on the European housing model. She had serious doubts about the stability of projects made up largely of a welfare population.
In fact the primary goal of the act had nothing to do with public housing, but “renewal.” Now that there was to be a general plan for each city, public housing was meant to fulfill those roles not profitable for the private sector—relocation housing for poor people uprooted by renewal and units for those incapable of supporting themselves without public assistance. Other measures afforded private developers a profit margin by having the government acquire and clear land and sell it to them, and by guaranteeing 90 percent of the cost of each unit.
It was the real estate lobby that had focused the debate on the public housing issue and determined its client population. On the local level it attacked the site selection process and raised local animosities over the slum clearance provisions in the bill. And the real-tors were successful: organized in every city and town, they were able to limit public housing construction to 84,000 units over two-and-a-half years, 50,000 less than was authorized by the act.
Public Housing in the 1950s and 1960s
The Boston Example: Post-1949
The Housing Act of 1949 opened an era of conflict and decline for the public housing program.
In Boston, the implementation of the act had a profound social impact. Here, as in other cities. early public housing had been generally well received. But after 1949 larger, denser projects were built which were used as a dumping ground for those uprooted by the urban renewal program, and they became linked in the public mind to racial conflict and poverty.
The Boston case is illustrative of how the private sector reacted to this public program and shaped it as part of the postwar dynamic of economic growth.
The initial reaction of the local private forces to the 1949 legislation was negative. The Boston Real Estate Board (BREB) inveighed against public housing as socialistic, costly, and as government interference in the business of real estate. The election of a business-oriented mayor in 1950 (Hynes) led to the enforcement of income limitations in the housing after fifteen years of domination by the more traditional Democratic political machine. As a result, some over-income city employees connected to past administrations were forced out.
But the fact that federal funds were available for public housing construction provided the incentive for massive building by those developers who received the contracts. In this period Columbia Point, Bromley Heath, and Mission Hill Extension were built. These projects were built on cheap land or near the older small projects; and they were high-rise, greatly increasing project density. In their first years they were, like the older units, desirable as inexpensive new homes. They attracted little attention in the midst of the post-war boom in single-family homes spurred by federally underwritten mortgages and loans to veterans. But while the suburbs were growing, Boston proper was not a center of growth that attracted private Investment. Rather it was perceived to be in decline, having lost much of its manufacturing base to the South.
In this setting some Boston leaders began shaping a plan for the “renewal” of the city. Such planning was encouraged as the key to getting federal funds for private development by the housing acts of 1949, 1954, and 1960. As early as 1942 CED planners working with Boston businessmen had identified solutions for a stagnant regional economy (see previous page). These were now brought forward in a modified form and included highway construction and university and medical facility expansion. By the mid-1960s they would reach tangible expression in Route 128, a highway circling Boston’s perimeter and providing access for many new high-tech industries, and an urban renewal plan that provided federal subsidies for the expansion of Boston’s many cultural institutions.
Boston’s major period of redevelopment began in 1960 with the election of John Kennedy as president. It was clear that if a plan was put in place, federal monies would be there to support it. In December, a $90 million program was approved for funding which was intended to affect one-half of the city’s population and one-quarter of its area. It was supported by the whole business community because of the size of the undertaking and the amount of money involved. Even the BREB approved, for here public housing was to have the special role of making private development possible by providing a place to put poor people uprooted by renewal.
By 1963 a specific set of plans was ready which heavily favored university and hospital expansion and residential developments in a number of poor and working-class neighborhoods. As land takings began, public housing was forced to accommodate people from all over the city. Mission Hill, Columbia Point, and other dense developments soon became centers of conflict as stable housing developments attempted to absorb a new and often troubled population. (The story of the racial confrontation this created in one neighbor-hood is depicted in Mission Hill and the Miracle of Boston, another film distributed by Cine Research.) Housing Authority budgets did not keep pace with the new demands for social services’ and repairs. This is the era when project grounds were blacktopped for easy maintenance, when a largely white housing authority staff stopped making repairs, and the more stable families left the projects.
But the effects of urban renewal were much wider. Neighborhood residents across the city reacted vigorously to the spread of conflict around them as well as to the land takings in their area. From Brighton to Mission Hill, neighborhood groups organized against the plan. Elements of the business community split with the BREB for not representing the interest of small property-owners and entrepreneurs. Finally, in 1965, Boston’s “development czar Ed Logue was forced to withdraw some neighborhoods from the plan. But the public’s view of public housing was irrevocable. From this point on locating projects in any Boston neighborhood would be a political impossibility. Other types of projects might be constructed under different formulae, but the neighborhood population was now critically aware of pure ‘public” housing as an invitation to trouble—because it was synonymous with poverty, new populations, and violence.
Public Housing Today
The Issues of Race and Class in Public Housing The politics of race and class are seldom discussed in relation to the public housing program, but they have been an important factor. In the early years there was de facto segregation, with all-black projects being built in black neighborhoods. Projects built after 1950 were sometimes integrated by public housing administrators, as was Columbia Point in Boston. After 1950 the opponents of public housing, who were organized on a town-by-town basis, were able to frustrate the site selection process by raising local fears about the federal government’s intent to integrate new projects. The 1950s had seen the arrival of many southern black migrants who eventually came to live in the big projects of New York, Chicago, Boston, and other major northern cities. With the coming of urban renewal and the use of projects as dumping grounds, the fear of forced integration and the spread of conflict was ampled.5 In many working-class communities residents could be made CO fear the effects of new poor or displaced populations—be they black or white. Sinking property values and racial conflict seemed to come hand in hand with the projects, and real estate lobby spokespeople made constant reference to public housing in these terms. In this way, race and class became the basis of the public housing stigma.
The Public Housing Legacy
It is of course ironic that those who began by opposing public housing have been largely able to shape its destiny. They were able to determine its client population, then made it work for private sector interests as part of the urban renewal plan, and finally stigmatized it by playing on the fears created by these two factors. Never did they acknowledge their own role in the way the program turned out.
In the 1970s and 1980s the real estate lobby continued to push for private sector subsidies like the “turnkey* and other programs. In recent years, private industry operatives have been key in the administration of HUD, which oversees the public housing program. This constituted the death-knell of the old housing reformers’ control of the program, which is dying a slow death through under-funding while the HUD leadership pursues initiatives like the “privatization’. of public housing—selling it to tenants and letting it become part of the private market. But for most public housing there is no easy solution. Many projects are large and continue to bear the stigmas of class and race, and selling units is not easy. Nor has the original problem gone away: these units are still needed to provide safe, sanitary, and decent housing to those whom the private market provides nothing. As homelessness increases through-out the nation, Americans may well ask themselves what happened to the vision of a viable public housing program.
Despite the decline of the public housing program, many projects throughout the country remain desirable. In New York City, a very expensive housing market, public housing is in great demand among poor people and is in good repair. The same may be said of some projects in Boston, like Old Harbor Village, or of projects in smaller cities and towns. But public housing has been stigmatized. Working-class and middle-class people often avoid living near—or even passing through—these developments, and often resent and mistrust the municipal and federal authorities that built these projects in their neighborhoods. This is largely a result of the conflicts and problems engulfing the housing authorities in the major urban areas. These may in turn be attributed to the uses of public housing put forward in its enabling legislation in 1937 and in 1949.
Did the program have to turn out as it did? The conventional wisdom of the 1980s and 1990s might well say yes. We live in an era in which public institutions—like the post office and even the weather service—are under attack from forces seeking privatization, in which -socialism’ and nationalized industries seem discredited. Private enterprise has fostered growth, money, and power for those in the upper tiers of our society.
Yet many Americans have not shared the benefits of these changes, and fear of recession is endemic. And the probability of recession is measured in pan by any decline in housing starts. In these ways the world is not so different from that world in which public housing and other public initiatives were conceived. In Europe and throughout the world public housing programs exist without stigma. Depending on the country, they house people of mixed races and cultures and in a variety of income brackets. Many governments continue to build public housing, with landbanking and government financing as part of the programs. As with all institutions, some of these programs have problems, some are better and some worse. But the fact that their housing is considered a public benefit should lead us to re-evaluate our own views on public housing, and to reconsider both its history and its original vision.
PUBLIC HOUSING: COMMENTS AND OBSERVATIONS
by Rachel G. Bratt
(The following commentary analyzes bow structural characteristics of the public housing program produced unanticpated long-term results and bow the program has worked in recent years.lt is taken from Rachel G. Brats, REBUILDING A LOW-INCOME HOUSING POLICY,Temple University Press, 1989.)
The Background to the Program’s Fiscal Problems
From its inception, the public housing program was aimed at providing housing only for the deserving, temporarily poor—the “submerged middle class.” The program therefore targeted those who could not find decent, affordable housing on the private market, but not the so-called unworthy poor and those with no means to pay rent.
The expectation that tenants should pay their own way expressed itself in the formula the federal government devised for financing public housing. Tenant rents were to cover all operating expenses, independent of debt service. Only the principal and interest on bonds, which. were floated by local authorities to construct the buildings, were paid by the federal government, through annual contribution contracts. Thus the federal government covered the long-term debt financing, while ownership and management were vested in local public agencies. This arrangement worked well during the early years of the program
After World War II, however, the country’s demographic picture began to shift, and so did the population served by public housing. As Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and Veterans Administration (VA) mortgage insurance and guarantee programs became available to vast numbers of new home buyers, and as the interstate highway system took form, most of the submerged middle-class residents of public housing surfaced, to assume full-fledged suburban middle-class status. As a further concession to the private construction industry, the 1949 Housing Act limited public housing to very-low-income people by requiring that the highest rents be 20 percent lower than the prevailing rents for decent housing in the private market, and by authorizing the eviction of above-income families. Publicly provided housing was now available only to the very poor…
But by the 1960s, serious problems with the financing formula had surfaced. Inflation was having an increasing impact on operating costs, while rental income remained static. Starting in 1961, the Public Housing Administration (later merged into HUD) made the first in a series of attempts to alleviate this problem by authorizing additional subsidies up to $120 per year for each elderly household. Within a few years, these subsidies were also provided in behalf of handicapped, displaced, large, and very-low-income families.
During the 1970s, the overall problems facing public housing worsened. Inflation continued to boost operating expenses, and many buildings that were, by then, twenty or more years old, began to show signs of aging and a need for major repairs. At the same time rental incomes were either declining or, at best, keeping up with expenses.
In an effort to insulate tenants from having to make up for operating cost shortfalls, Senator Edward Brooke (R-Mass.) sponsored legislation (known as the Brooke Amendments, 1969-1971) that capped rentals at 25 percent of income and provided additional operating subsidies. Between 1969 and 1972, operating subsidies nationally rose from $12.6 million to $10278 Million. Between 1971 and 1982, operating subsidies jumped more than tenfold, to $1.3 billion. And for fiscal years 1988 and 1989, the Housing and Community Development Act of 1987 authorized a total of more than $3 billion, with an appropriation of $1.45 billion for FY 1988.
Since 1975, operating subsidies have been provided through a mechanism known as the Performance Funding System (PFS). Funding levels under the PFS are set by examining the costs of a sample of housing authorities considered to be well managed and then using these costs to determine reasonable expenses for all authorities. One of the major criticisms of the PFS is that operating subsidies are based on past funding levels of well-managed authorities and do not take into account the actual cost of providing an adequate level of management services.
Thus the original funding formula, by excluding funds for operating and maintenance costs, undermined the public housing program. Despite the assistance provided by operating subsidies, many repair problems worsened to such an extent that very large sums of money were needed to remedy the most physically dilapidated projects. Altogether, the current modernization program, called the Comprehensive Improvement Assistance Program, and its predecessors received $7.9 billion from 1975 to 1986. During the middle years of the Reagan administration, funding declined considerably, with only $707 million expended in 1986, down from $1.26 billion in 1983. With the passage of the Housing and Community Development Act of 1987, the modernization program received a major boost, with an appropriation of $1.7 billion.
The Results of Voluntary Local Participation
The highly polarized nature of the debate surrounding the 1937 Housing Act also helped shape the administrative structure of the public housing program. Administration was to be decentralized, and participation by localities was to be voluntary.
This meant that decisions about public housing—whether to build it and where to locate it—would be made by local officials, who would be under significant pressure from their constituents. The decentralized structure also eliminated the potential for the federal government either to enforce more progressive policies or override local decisions.
The right of local communities not to participate in the public housing program guaranteed that within metropolitan areas, public housing would be most prevalent in large cities. As a result, low-income people, already lacking housing options, were to be restricted still further; the choice to move to the suburbs usually was not available to them. Local control Over the program meant that little or no public housing was built in more affluent areas.
As the program evolved, accommodating increasing numbers of blacks and other minorities, local control over public housing contributed to patterns of racial segregation with white areas effectively keeping out blacks. Large cities, with large minority populations. also served a high percentage of minorities in their developments. As of 1976, 83 percent of public housing tenants in twenty large cities were members of minorities, compared to 61 percent for the overall public housing population.
Thus, opposition by the private homebuilding industry, maintenance and operating fund shortfalls, and class and racial segregation have continuously plagued the public housing program. As early as the 1950s, even some of public housing’s most ardent supporters began to lose heart.
In 1973, President Nixon called a halt to all federally subsidized housing programs. Since then, the program has limped along, with the full impact of the moratorium being felt from 1976 to 1978: With very little new money appropriated during the 1980s, production declined, once the projects that had been in the pipeline during the Carter administration were completed.
The Domination of Private Sector Programs
The history of public housing not only reveals how several key forces and decisions shaped the program but also reflects how the federal government has changed its thinking about its role in subsi-dizing housing for low-income people. Although the public housing program started out with management and ownership resting solely with the local public housing authority, as the program came under attack in the mid-1960s, the private sector was looked to as a way to deal with the nation’s low-income housing needs.
The Section 23 program was authorized in.19.65. Known as the leased-housing program, it served as a prototype for the housing allowance idea and enabled low-income families to rent units in privately-owned housing. The housing authority entered into long-term contracts with landlords and paid the difference between the unit’s market rent and a proportion of the tenant’s income. Over 100,000 units were financed through this program before it was superseded by the Section 8 Existing Housing program in 1974.
The ‘turnkey” form of public housing also was introduced in 1965. Under this program a developer entered into a contract with a local housing authority to construct a project. The developer then sold the project (or “turned the key” over) to the housing authority at the stipulated price. Since 1965, about one-third of all new public housing projects have been built in the turnkey method but it is unclear whether it has reduced either the time or costs of development or improved quality. From the developers’ viewpoint, the turnkey program was enormously popular. In 1968, the president of the National Association of Home Builders suggested that new public housing authorizations be directed primarily at that program. Calling it the first attempt in the 30-year history of public housing to use, for the lowest income brackets, the tremendous resources and productive capacity of the private homebuilding industry,” he cited the turnkey program for exemplifying “the proper role of government in helping private industry to expand into areas not attain-able without such help.’
In addition to these changes, new programs (Section 202, Section 221(d)(3), Section 236, Section 8) were initiated that bypassed public housing completely, in effect subsidizing the entrepreneur to pro-vide private housing.
Thus, while the early history of the public housing program was characterized by staunch opposition by the private sector, over the past two decades private interest groups have evolved into active supporters of most housing subsidy programs. Although they are still opposed to conventional public housing, they are certain to show support for government programs explicitly geared to stimulating the homebuilding industry and providing investment opportunities.
Observations about the Record of Public Housing
- Popular perceptions concerning public housing tenants turn out to be relatively accurate. A majority of residents are nonwhite, with estimates ranging from 62 to 86 percent. White residents tend to be much older than nonwhites, with the latter generally having at least two children. Over three-quarters of all public housing households are headed by single adults, usually an elderly person living alone or a single parent with children. Finally, more than half of all public housing tenants depend on welfare for their income.
- While conventional wisdom assumes low satisfaction levels among public housing tenants, many surveys of public housing resi-dents make clear that the majority of residents report positive feel-ings about their housing.
- Despite its concentration in large cities, public housing is still far more dispersed than many believe. Almost two-thirds of all public housing units are administered by the 2775 housing authorities that operate fewer than 6500 units; the 22 largest public housing authorities administer the remaining one-third of the units. In addition, most public housing developments (54 percent) are relatively small, having fewer than 200 units; most family public housing units (75 percent) are in low-rise buildings (four or fewer storeys); only 7 percent of all family public housing projects are both high-rise and have more than 200 units; and as of 1980, public housing projects were, on average, seventeen years old.
- A 1988 study conducted by Abt Associates under contract to HUD calculated that about $22.2 billion is needed to repair and modernize the public housing stock; of this, $9.3 billion is needed to repair or replace existing architectural, mechanical, and electrical systems and $12.9 billion is needed to upgrade and modernize the public housing stock.
- included in the above estimates is the cost of repairs and modernization for a segment of the public housing stock that may be too distressed to fix. The current number of units in projects that are not economically or socially viable ranges from a HUD estimate of 73,000 with another 95,000 that could fall into this category to an estimate by the Council of Large Public Housing Authorities of some 138,000 units that are facing serious difficulties.
- The conventional wisdom of what constitutes a physically bad project is not borne out by the evidence: Most stereotypical projects do not exhibit severe problems. Although projects with stereotypical characteristics present problems more frequently than the rest of the public housing stock, they represent only a small percentage of all public housing developments.
- By going along with the notion that public housing should provide only minimal accommodations, public housing administrators may have given the opposition its greatest ammunition. Indeed, many public housing projects, overly modest and austere, did evolve into bad housing. The public sector’s quest to provide no-frills housing, combined with the private sector’s unrelenting demand that public housing be different from the rest of the housing stock, undermined the notion that public housing could also be attractive housing.
- Management has a significant impact on the quality of public housing. Since the 1960s, inadequate management has been cited as a serious deficiency of many large housing authorities. Problems have revolved around two broad issues: financial mismanagment, and inadequate or insensitive handling of tenant-related matters.
- Over the years, HUD has instituted a series of programs to encourage better management procedures. Overall, the results of these initiatives have been mixed. Some of the programs were not fully implemented or evaluated, while others were only one-shot efforts. One of the most significant efforts to upgrade management was the National Tenant Management demonstration, a program modeled after tenant management corporations In St. Louis and several other cities.
- Until passage of the Housing and Community Development Act of 1987, HUD did not offer any programs to local housing authorities to support the creation of tenant management corporations. With the passage of this act, Congress authorized HUD to spend some $5 million in fiscal years 1988 and 1989. Although this is a significant step, it is of such a small scale that tenant management will not, at least at this point, become a dominant feature of local housing authorities’ operations.
- The image of public housing as inaccessible to public services and other facilities is frequently accurate. Because public housing in many large cities was developed quite late in their stage of development, much of the best land was often already built upon. In addition, public housing development casts had to fall within prescribed limits, which also put pressure on local housing authorities to acquire the cheapest land available, usually in less desirable locations. But the most important factor contributing to the location of public housing relates to a key administrative aspect of the program discussed earlier, the power of local governments to determine the location of developments. Opposition to proposed projects was usually vehement, as a result, projects tended to be located less in existing neighborhoods than in more out-of-the-way areas. Local city councilors and chief executives were reluctant to antagonize community residents. Therefore, the easiest and most expedient solution often was to build public housing in areas where no one lived or wanted to live. Boston’s notorious Columbia Point public housing project was located on the cite of the former city dump.
- Public housing generally has not furthered the goal of racial integration. In addition to the program’s decentralized administrative structure, which gave local housing authorities the freedom to dis-criminate at will, segregation in public housing was also the policy of the federal government during the early years of the program. The Neighborhood Composition Rule, formulated by Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, stated that housing projects should not alter the racial character of their surrounding neighborhoods. Although housing authorities were permitted to offer units to whites and blacks on an “open occupancy” basis, most authorities chose to provide “separate but equal” housing. As a result of these policies, the earliest public housing projects were built for occupancy either by whites or by blacks. The original plan for Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis was for two segregated projects, Pruitt for blacks and Igoe, across the street, for whites. Segregation patterns in Boston’s public housing were also finely drawn. In 1940, the first project to accept blacks was completely segregated. The second project open to blacks had specific buildings earmarked ‘the colored section.” Notwithstanding this effort and other changes in HUD site selection procedures. years of discriminatory practices have had their effect. At present, public housing, particularly family public housing, is still often segregated. In many cities, such as Boston, predominantly white projects and predominantly black projects may be only a few blocks from one another. It is important to emphasize that in its racially segregating policies, the public housing program was operating within the norms of society. Discrimination in the private market was standard procedure, and public housing did nothing to challenge the system.
- Equity (in the sense of “fairness”) is also cited as a major reason for opposing public housing and the other subsidized production programs in favor of income supplements. For example, the 1982 Report of ibe President’s Commission on Housing pointed out that past housing programs were not equitable ‘because they provide a few fortunate tenants very high-quality housing at a price less than their neighbors pay for lower-quality housing.” Those who wave the banner of equity when assessing rent-subsidized production programs appear to have a misplaced sense of social justice: The benefits of the nation’s largest housing subsidy are enjoyed by households far more affluent than public housing tenants. All homeowners, regardless of income, are entitled to deduct mortgage interest as well as property tax payments from their income for federal tax purposes. The result is that about $40.billion in tax revenues are currently being lost to the federal government, with this amount • expected to increase to over $50 billion by 1993. Even more alarming is that the beneficiaries of this subsidy are those in the upper-income groups. The Low Income Housing Information Service has calculated that about two-thirds of the total homeowners’ subsidy is received by those earning over $50,000 a year. Thus, large’ benefits to public housing tenants are not nearly as large as the savings enjoyed by upper-income households.
- The comparative costs of public housing can be summarized as follows. First, although the comparison is not a fair one because, in the case of public housing, new units are built, and in the housing allowance programs they are not, it is less costly to subsidize a household through the Section 8 Existing Housing program than to subsidize the construction of a new unit of public housing. Second, the cost of subsidizing households in existing public housing units is no higher than the cost of subsidizing households in existing private units through the Section 8 program. Third, although no definitive conclusions can be drawn about the present cost of budding new public housing in comparison to the other types of subsidized housing programs that have been utilized in the past, public housing does emerge in a relatively positive position.
- Another component of the cost issue relates to who owns the housing when the subsidy period terminates. Privately owned subsidized housing is earmarked for low-moderate-income occupancy for limited periods of time. In contrast, local public housing authorities own public housing in perpetuity.
- The vast majority of public housing developments are financially viable. Although operating subsidies and modernization funds have often been -too little” or ‘too late,” they have managed to keep the vast majority of projects running. In a relatively few instances, local housing authorities have abandoned seriously distressed projects. Some notable examples are Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis, Columbia Point in Boston, and America Park in Lynn, Massachusetts. In each of these cases, however, inadequate funding to upgrade the buildings was probably not the major reason for abandoning the low-income projects. Instead, poor location and long-standing social problems may have precluded the continuation of those particular low-income developments.
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Down The Project: The Crisis of Public Housing – PREVIEW
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On the Media: The Scarlet E, Part IV: Solutions (History of Public Housing)
We have an eviction crisis, which is really just one part of a broader housing affordability crisis. Incomes are too low for rents. Rents are too high for incomes. The barriers to home-buying are growing, especially for younger Americans. The wealth gap between black and white Americans is spreading, driven largely by inequalities in housing. The shockwaves from the foreclosure crisis continue. And in some cities, gentrification drives up costs and drives away low-income families.
Luckily enough, there are solutions — quite a few of them, in fact. In this fourth and final episode of The Scarlet E: Unmasking America’s Eviction Crisis, we evaluate the proposals, which range from subtle to significant.
First, a look back on a solution that worked in some places and was allowed to fail in many others. We visit Atlanta, home to the nation’s first public housing projects. We learn how the city has since destroyed or converted all of its public housing. And with the help of Lawrence Vale, author of Purging the Poorest: Public Housing and the Design Politics of Twice-Cleared Communities, we look at one public housing project, in Boston, that continues to thrive.
And then we look at solutions, both proposed and in-play. Again in Atlanta, we meet landlord Marjy Stagmeier, whose unique model improves nearby schools’ performance — and still turns a profit. We speak with sociologist Matt Desmond about the need to fully fund our Section 8 housing voucher program, and to encourage, or compel, landlords to accept voucher-holders. And we touch on the housing proposals from several Democratic candidates for president. Matt wonders whether our federal housing policies — for instance, the mortgage interest deduction — are subsidizing those most in need. We also ask New York City Councilmember Mark Levine and South Carolina legislator Marvin Pendarvis about possible reforms in our housing courts. We hear from Marty Wegbreit, director of litigation for the Central Virginia Legal Aid Society, about how Richmond turned its shame over its high eviction rates into policy. And we consider ways that some cities might increase their affordable housing supply by doing away with restrictive, exclusionary zoning policies.
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Why did we build high-rise public housing projects?
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Back to History of Housing Discrimination Top
Urban Renewal/Urban Removal
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Urban Renewal…Means Negro Removal. ~ James Baldwin (1963)
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“Urban renewal is a process where privately owned properties within a designated renewal area are purchased or taken by eminent domain by a municipal redevelopment authority, razed and then reconveyed to selected developers who devote them to other uses” Wikipedia
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- Urban Redevelopment (1950-60s)
- Fed government gave cities billions of dollars to tear down “blighted” areas (Housing Act of 1949, 1954)
- Would pay for 2/3 of any urban renewal project proposed by any city
- Displaced over 300,000 people between 1955-66 (disproportionately minorities)
- Many of the projects targeted areas that had been redlined in previous decades
- Chance for cities to remove entire communities of color to preserve white-only parts of city
- James Baldwin famously dubbed Urban Renewal “Negro Removal”
- DC Southwest urban renewal was one of the first in the nation
- Fed government gave cities billions of dollars to tear down “blighted” areas (Housing Act of 1949, 1954)
- Federal-Aid Highway Act (1956)
- Fed funds for new highways w/ a focus on connecting suburbs to city
- 9 out of 10 dollars spent came from the federal gov
- Often routed directly through vibrant urban neighborhoods of color
- isolating or destroying many
- Fed funds for new highways w/ a focus on connecting suburbs to city
- Lack of concern for displacement
- Very few cases was there any assistance for displaced people to find new housing
- Eisenhower admin removed language to help w/ moving costs from Highway Act
- Because estimated to be too expensive
- Since over a 100,00 people expected to be displaced every year
- Because estimated to be too expensive
- Consequences to cities beyond displacement
- Increase segregation as communities were displaced
- Many people of color were forced to move into public housing
- While many whites moved to white only suburbs
- Contributed to the degradation of the tax bases of many cities
- Often a net loss of housing as city leaders decided to build offices, malls, instead of replacing housing loss
- Emotional trauma felt by generations of displaced communities of color
- Many people of color were forced to move into public housing
- Increase segregation as communities were displaced
“The benefits of urban renewal often flowed to better-off white suburbanites, who benefited from faster commutes to their city jobs on newly built highways, as well as from new office buildings, shopping centers, and venues for sports and entertainment like New York City’s Lincoln Center” Greg Miller – NAT GEO
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National Geographic: Maps Show How Tearing Down City Slums Displaced Thousands
“In the 1950s and ‘60s, federally funded projects displaced hundreds of thousands of people in American cities.
Bigger circles represent cities where urban renewal displaced more people. In purple cites, the displaced were mostly people of color; in green cities, they were mostly white.
“Urban renewal projects changed the landscape of American cities in the 1950s and ‘60s. The federal government gave cities billions of dollars to tear down blighted areas and replace them with affordable housing. Or at least, that’s what was supposed to happen.
In many places, there was a net loss of housing as city leaders decided instead to build offices or shopping malls, or to expand hospitals and universities. Urban renewal projects displaced more than 300,000 people between 1955 and 1966, and the burden fell disproportionately on people of color, according to a new analysis by the Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond, which has created a new website called Renewing Inequality packed with interactive maps and statistics on urban renewal projects…
…One thing that stood out, Nelson says, is that these projects weren’t limited to big cities: Most were carried out in cities of 50,000 people or fewer, and many were done in even smaller places. “It’s not just Chicago and New York,” he says. “It’s Fairbanks, Alaska, and Coos Bay, Oregon.”…
…In cities like Philadelphia, Detroit, and Atlanta, more than two-thirds of those displaced were people of color. Many of the projects targeted areas that had been redlined in previous decades. Redlining, now used to refer to economic discrimination against neighborhoods predominantly populated by racial or ethnic minorities, was originally the result of a federal program intended to shore up the housing market after the Depression. Local real estate agents and bankers working for the program rated neighborhoods according to the risks they posed to lenders (redlining was also the subject of a previous mapping project by the Digital Scholarship Lab). This project resulted in systematic discrimination because many minority neighborhoods were marked red—hazardous to lenders—which made it difficult or impossible for people living there to get a loan to buy or maintain property. This in turn contributed to the neighborhoods’ decline.
In Atlanta, urban renewal projects in redlined neighborhoods (red areas on the map) displaced mostly non-white residents (purple bars in the chart on the right).
“Redlining created the crisis that urban renewal was created to solve,” says Brent Cebul, an urban historian at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, and a co-author of Renewing Inequality.
These projects often caused new problems for the people they displaced, Cebul says. “If it was an African-American community, they more often than not ended up crowding into other African-American communities,” he says. In neighborhoods in Chicago and Cleveland, for example, schools became so overcrowded that they had to operate on two shifts, with some kids going to school in the morning and others in the afternoon. “Conditions were really intolerable in a lot of these neighborhoods where people ended up,” Cebul says, and many of them became flashpoints in the race riots of the mid- to late-’60s.
The benefits of urban renewal often flowed to better-off white suburbanites, who benefited from faster commutes to their city jobs on newly built highways, as well as from new office buildings, shopping centers, and venues for sports and entertainment like New York City’s Lincoln Center. “The question of what cities are for and who they’re for was really born through the urban renewal projects,” Cebul says.”
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Richard Rothstein : The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
WHILE MANY de jure segregation policies aimed to keep African Americans far from white residential areas, public officials also shifted African American populations away from downtown business districts so that white commuters, shoppers, and business elites would not be exposed to black people.
“Slum clearance” was the way to accomplish this. By the mid-twentieth century, “slums” and “blight” were widely understood euphemisms for African American neighborhoods. Once government had succeeded in preventing black families from joining their white peers in the suburbs, and in concentrating them within a few urban districts, these communities were indeed blighted. In many cases, slum clearance could have been a good idea. Where low-income African Americans were living in squalor, plans to demolish substandard structures and provide new, decent homes in integrated neighborhoods would have been appropriate. But mostly policy makers contemplated no such relocation. Instead, slum clearance reinforced the spatial segregation of African Americans as well as their impoverishment. This, in turn, led to further segregation because the more impoverished African Americans became, the less welcome they were in middle-class communities.
One slum clearance tool was the construction of the federal interstate highway system. In many cases, state and local governments, with federal acquiescence, designed interstate highway routes to destroy urban African American communities. Highway planners did not hide their racial motivations.*
The story of such highway planning begins in 1938, when the federal government first considered aid for interstate highways. Secretary of Agriculture (and subsequently Vice President) Henry Wallace proposed to President Roosevelt that highways routed through cities could also accomplish “the elimination of unsightly and unsanitary districts.” Over the next two decades, the linkage between highway construction and removal of American Americans was a frequent theme of those who stood to profit from a federal road-building program. They found that an effective way to argue a case for highway spending was to stress the capacity of road construction to make business districts and their environs white. Mayors and other urban political leaders joined in, seizing on highway construction as a way to overcome the constitutional prohibition on zoning African Americans away from white neighborhoods near downtowns.
In 1943, the American Concrete Institute urged the construction of urban expressways for “the elimination of slums and blighted areas.” In 1949, the American Road Builders Association wrote to President Truman that if interstates were properly routed through metropolitan areas, they could “contribute in a substantial manner to the elimination of slum and deteriorated areas.” An important influence on national legislation and administration of the highway system was the Urban Land Institute, whose 1957 newsletter recommended that city governments survey the “extent to which blighted areas may provide suitable highway routes.” By 1962 the Highway Research Board boasted that interstate highways were “eating out slums” and “reclaiming blighted areas.
”Alfred Johnson, the executive director of the American Association of State Highway Officials, was the lobbyist most deeply involved with the congressional committee that wrote the 1956 Highway Act. He later recalled that “some city officials expressed the view in the mid-1950s that the urban Interstates would give them a good opportunity to get rid of the local ‘niggertown.’” His expectation did not go unfulfilled.
Hamtramck, Michigan, for example, was an overwhelmingly Polish enclave surrounded by Detroit. The city’s 1959 master plan called for a “program of population loss,” understood to refer to its small number of African American residents. In 1962,with federal urban renewal funds, the city began to demolish African American neighborhoods. The first project cleared land for expansion of a Chrysler automobile manufacturing plant. Then, federal dollars were used to raze more homes to make way for the Chrysler Expressway (I-75) leading to the plant. In advance, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights had warned that the expressway would displace about 4,000 families, 87 percent of whom were African American.
Twelve years later, a federal appeals court concluded that HUD officials knew that the highway would disproportionately destroy African American homes and make no provision for assisting them in finding new lodgings: “The record supports a finding that HUD must have known of the discriminatory practices which pervaded the private housing market [in Hamtramck]and the indications of overt prejudice among some of the persons involved in carrying out the urban renewal projects of the City.” The court-ordered remedy was construction of new housing in the city only for those families who had been displaced, who could still be found, and who had indicated to interviewers that they would be willing to return to Hamtramck. Because the litigation had dragged on, their number was a small share of those who had suffered harm, most of whom had no choice but to move into the Detroit ghetto.
Federal interstate highways buttressed segregation in cities across the country. In 1956, the Florida State Road Department routed I-95 to do what Miami’s unconstitutional zoning ordinance had intended but failed to accomplish two decades earlier: clear African Americans from an area adjacent to downtown. An alternative route utilizing an abandoned railway right of waywas rejected, although it would have resulted in little population removal. When the highway was eventually completed in themid-1960s, it had reduced a community of 40,000 African Americans to 8,000.
In Camden, New Jersey, an interstate highway destroyed some 3,000 low-income housing units from 1963 to 1967. A report by the New Jersey State Attorney General’s office concluded: “It is obvious from a glance at the . . . transit plans that an attempt is being made to eliminate the Negro and Puerto Rican ghetto areas by . . . building highways that benefit whites uburbanites, facilitating their movement from the suburbs to work or back.
In Los Angeles, routing of the Santa Monica Freeway in 1954 destroyed the city’s most prosperous black middle-class area, Sugar Hill. In an all-too-familiar series of events, when the first African American—an insurance company executive—arrived there in 1938, neighborhood association leaders suggested to him that he would be happier if he lived elsewhere. When the executive failed to act on that advice, the group proposed to buy the property from him but then could not raise the funds. By1945, a few middle-class African Americans had settled in Sugar Hill, and the association went to court to apply its restrictive covenant and have them evicted. But anticipating the U.S. Supreme Court’s Shelley ruling by three years, a state judge ruled that enforcement of the covenant would violate the Fourteenth Amendment. After more African Americans bought houses in the area, the Los Angeles City Council rezoned the neighborhood for rentals, over the protests of affluent African Americans who already lived in Sugar Hill. More lower-income black families then moved in. The routing of the Santa Monica Freeway through Sugar Hill succeeded in demolishing the black community where other efforts had failed. African American leaders pleaded that the freeway be shifted slightly north, but the city engineer dismissed their concerns, assuring them that they would have up to five years to find new housing before properties were seized.
In few of these cases did federal or local agencies provide assistance to displaced African Americans in finding adequate and safe new housing. When enacted into law in 1956, the interstate highway program did not impose even a nominal obligation on federal or state governments to assist those whose residences were being demolished. Although the House version of the bill permitted (but did not require) payment of moving costs to tenants in demolished homes, the Eisenhower administration objected. Council of Economic Advisors chairman Arthur Burns warned that compensation would “run up costs” of the highway program, predicting that the system would evict nearly 100,000 people a year as it grew. The Senate then removed language permitting such payments from the final legislation. In 1965, the federal government began to require that new housing be provided for those forced to relocate by future interstate highway construction, but by then the interstate system was nearly complete.
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Matter of Fact: Urban Renewal or Urban Removal?
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Whose Downtown?: Urban Renewal: The Story of Southwest D.C.
Prior to 1950s, Southwest Washington, D.C. was home to a thriving African American community. Many of the District’s African American-owned businesses and residences were located in this area. By 1952, however, white business leaders and members of the federal government began to push for the large-scale clearance of these neighborhoods to make room for new development downtown.[1]
The federal government established the Redevelopment Land Agency and the National Capital Planning Commission to design, monitor, and complete the redevelopment of Southwest D.C. under the District of Columbia Redevelopment Act of 1950. The rationale provided for the urban renewal project included concerns about congestion in the downtown area and preoccupation over unhealthy slum conditions and unsightly dilapidated buildings. The major expansion of the federal government during the New Deal and World War II created pressure to free up residential space for federal employees who worked downtown. Additionally, Title I of the National Housing Act of 1949 stipulated that major urban cities would receive funds in order to renovate blighted areas, including neighborhoods classified as slums or buildings deemed unsafe and uninhabitable. These acts gained judicial support when in 1954, the US Supreme Court ruled that a property could be condemned and taken by the federal government solely to beautify a community for the benefit the general public.[2]
The implementation of the urban renewal project displaced the large number of African Americans living in Southwest D.C. The project leveled 99 percent of buildings in the Southwestern quadrant of the city and forced the 4,500 African American Families who had previously resided in Southwest D.C. to relocate to other areas –mainly to Northeast and Southeast D.C.[3] Of the 5,900 new buildings constructed in the area, only 310 were classified as moderately-priced housing units.[4] The project tore apart the culture and history of historic African American neighborhoods. Following resettlement in other areas of the city, 25% of displaced residents reported not making a single friend in their new neighborhood.[5] While local critics deemed the urban renewal program to be the “Negro Removal Program,” the project had a wide impact on the nation as it became a model for other large cities to emulate.[6]
The urban renewal project targeting Southwest D.C. in the 1950s and 1960s was in some ways a continuation of the alley removal process of the 1920s and 1930s. It is also echoed by recent trends in development and gentrification downtown. Like the African American neighborhoods and slums of the 1950s and 1960s, alley communities were a focus of social reform –they were viewed as unhealthy, immoral, and threatening primarily because their inhabitants were not white.[7] The same language used to motivate a purification of the alleys was used to inspire mass displacement of African Americans from downtown for the urban renewal project.
It is important to view the dispersal and displacement of the city’s homeless residents through the lens of historical prejudice against African Americans — 82 percent of Washington, DC’s homeless population is of African American descent.[8] When the long history of D.C.’s alley communities and the displacement of African American neighborhoods from Southwest is taken into consideration, it becomes clear that the District’s African American residents have a strong historical claim to downtown space.
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Economic Policy Institute: The Making of Ferguson
Urban renewal and redevelopment programs
In 1950, Olivette in St. Louis County annexed a portion of the adjacent unincorporated community of Elmwood Park. Twenty years later, the chairman of the Olivette Land Clearance and Redevelopment Authority asserted that the annexation was needed simply to “straighten” the city’s boundaries. Olivette was an all-white, solidly middle-class community where nearly two-thirds of residences were single-family; apartment dwellers in the balance were socioeconomically similar. Adjacent Elmwood Park, in contrast, was very poor, African American, with 37 dilapidated homes, subject to frequent flooding from the River Des Peres, and without paved roads or sewers. Elmwood Park had been settled after the Civil War by laborers, formerly slaves on nearby farms.
The area was bisected by railroad tracks; Olivette annexed the portion north of the city and south of the tracks, creating a physical boundary between the expanded city and unincorporated Elmwood Park. Olivette was under no legal obligation to notify affected Elmwood Park residents of the annexation, and it did not do so. After the annexation, Olivette provided no services to its new Elmwood Park neighborhood and erected a barbed-wire fence between the neighborhood and the nearest white subdivision. (Even after 1954 when schools were integrated, school buses did not come into the annexed neighborhood, so black children had to walk around the perimeter of the white subdivision, rather than taking a direct route across it, to board their school bus.) Olivette did mail tax bills to the newly annexed residents, but few Elmwood Park homeowners apparently understood the implication of these bills. Most were not aware of the annexation until 1955, when Olivette began to auction off their homes for nonpayment of taxes and other fees.
The actual aim of Olivette officials was almost certainly not to “straighten boundaries” but to force Elmwood Park residents to abandon their homes (or have them seized) so the area could be redeveloped with industry, both to increase Olivette’s tax revenue and to reinforce the barrier between Olivette and the remaining African American community in unincorporated Elmwood Park.
By 1960, however, a decade after the annexation, Olivette had not succeeded in driving most Elmwood Park residents away. Most had scraped up enough money to pay their back taxes. So Olivette applied for and obtained federal urban renewal funds, enabling it to condemn the land and attract industrial development. Olivette then informed Elmwood Park residents that their homes were too dilapidated to rehabilitate and would be demolished. It rezoned Elmwood Park as industrial, condemned the African American residents’ properties, and began charging them rent to live in homes they had previously possessed clear of mortgages.
Although federal urban renewal policy required Olivette to relocate the displaced residents within Olivette, the federal government initially refused to enforce that requirement, and Olivette instead offered housing either in a public housing project being constructed in unincorporated Elmwood Park or in the city of St. Louis. Responding to protests, the government eventually required Olivette to build 10 residential units in the industrial zone, which the city separated from its middle-class areas by a park.60 Most of the original residents of the annexed neighborhood relocated to St. Louis, to the all-black suburb of Wellston, or to a black neighborhood in another suburb, University City. Once constructed, Olivette’s new public housing development in the industrial zone was also all-black, separated from the rest of the city.61
Meanwhile, St. Louis County also declared the unincorporated area of Elmwood Park a redevelopment zone. The homes of 170 black families there were razed in the early 1960s and the county developed industry and more expensive housing, unaffordable to the former residents. The displaced families were given small relocation allowances, inadequate to purchase comparable housing. Many scattered to other black pockets in the county, or to the city of St. Louis’s ghetto. A grand jury later concluded, too late to reverse the hardship, that because of its racial impact, the urban renewal program was “an evasion of responsibility” and nothing more than a “race clearance program.”62
While suburbs with clusters of black residents were designing redevelopment projects that forced African Americans to seek public housing back in the city, St. Louis itself was pursuing urban renewal and redevelopment that forced black residents into nearby suburbs and attracted white middle-class suburbanites back to the city. Beginning in the 1950s, the city’s urban renewal projects condemned and razed slum housing occupied mostly by African Americans and constructed monuments and other institutions in place of those homes. Neighborhoods were razed for the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial (which includes the Gateway Arch), a museum, a sports stadium, interstate highways (including ramps and interchanges) to bring suburban commuters into white-collar city jobs, new industry and hotels for the city, university expansion, and middle-class housing that was unaffordable to former African American residents of the redeveloped areas.63
Cleared land along St. Louis’s riverfront, once home to a mostly black community that was leveled for redevelopment, awaits construction of the Gateway Arch and other memorials. Photo reproduced with permission from the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial archives
Mill Creek Valley, the community at the heart of St. Louis’s African American life, was demolished beginning in 1959, displacing 20,000 residents, 95 percent of whom were black. Some 40 churches were razed as their parishioners scattered to developing ghettos in inner-ring suburbs. The Mill Creek acreage was then used for an expansion of St. Louis University, an expressway, a private market-rate housing project, and a subsidized public-private project.64
In some cases, as was true elsewhere in the country, after African American neighborhoods were demolished, planners’ designs for redevelopment never materialized, and the cleared land remained vacant. One early St. Louis venture, the Kosciusko Urban Renewal Project, demolished an African American neighborhood of 70 blocks and 221 acres in the early 1960s, with plans for attracting new industry. Much of it still remained vacant or with paved-over lots, 50 years later.65
Some federal urban renewal laws required that displaced residents be provided with new housing, but others did not. But even for those laws with such requirements, only about half of the African Americans displaced by urban renewal in St. Louis were offered any relocation assistance. Displaced families, whether on their own or with assistance, mostly relocated to public housing or to apartments adjoining their former ghetto that were as substandard as those from which they had been displaced.66 Soon public housing itself became unavailable, and the St. Louis Housing Authority issued Section 8 rent supplement vouchers to eligible families. From 1950 to 1980, St. Louis assigned 7,900 family residential units either to public housing or to subsidized apartments. Of these, 94 percent were in census tracts where more than 75 percent of the residents were African American.67 As black families moved repeatedly to stay ahead of the urban renewal bulldozers, space in the city itself disappeared, and a wholesale movement to the northern and northwestern suburbs began.
A 1970 staff report of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights faulted the conduct of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), concluding that:
Federal programs of housing and urban development not only have failed to eliminate the dual housing market, but have had the effect of perpetuating and promoting it.… HUD has failed to carry out [its] affirmative obligations [to prevent discrimination] and has permitted its programs to be operated in a discriminatory manner in the St. Louis metropolitan area.… As long as HUD continues to condone the discriminatory activities of the local housing and home finance industry – public and private – there is little hope of relief for black families from the existing system of separate and unequal housing conditions.68
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Further Readings
Fast Company: The Racist Roots Of “Urban Renewal” And How It Made Cities Less Equal
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Predatory Housing Discrimination
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- Predatory Contract Selling/Buying and Renting
- Landlords took advantage of the lack of choices for people of color
- Charge exorbitant rates for renting and owning
- 1954 FHA study estimated that blacks were
- Paid 3x the rates of rent then whites
- Were overcrowded at more than 4x rate of whites
- Sellers often not the previous owner but a middle person who bought homes
- Often in disrepair, to sell quickly
- With agreements that would often:
- Overcharge
- Not hand over the deed until the entire house is paid for
- Have a clause if one payment was missed seller would take back the home
- Seller would keep all payments and deposits, removing all accrued equity
- Before 1968, 85% of all Chicago properties purchased by blacks were on predatory contracts
- 1954 FHA study estimated that blacks were
- Contract Buying Stats
- According to the report, “The Plunder of Black Wealth in Chicago: New Findings on the Lasting Toll of Predatory Housing Contracts.”
- Between 75 percent and 95 percent of homes sold to black families during the 1950s and 1960s were sold on contract.
- The price markup on homes sold on contract was 84%.
- African Americans who bought on contract paid, on average, an additional $587 (in current dollars) more a month than if they had a conventional mortgage.
- Black families in Chicago lost between $3 billion and $4 billion in wealth because of predatory housing contracts during the 1950s and 1960s
- According to the report, “The Plunder of Black Wealth in Chicago: New Findings on the Lasting Toll of Predatory Housing Contracts.”
Bloomber: Black Poverty Is Rooted in Real-Estate Exploitation
A new study in Chicago shows how the dream of homeownership was converted into a poverty trap.
One question is — or should be — central to any assessment of the state of America: Why, more than a century and a half after slavery ended, does the typical black family remain so much poorer than the typical white family?
A new study on housing in Chicago illustrates a big part of the answer: Generation after generation, the U.S. system of real-estate finance has enriched whites at the expense of blacks.
Housing has long played a crucial role in American wealth accumulation: People buy homes with federally subsidized mortgages, build up equity and pass the assets on to their children. But as recently as the 1960s, government policy excluded blacks. In a practice known as redlining, the Federal Housing Administration designated predominantly black neighborhoods as no-go zones for government-insured mortgage loans. The FHA also wouldn’t guarantee loans for new mixed-race developments: The presence of even a single black family was enough to warrant rejection.
Hence, blacks had to find other ways to obtain shelter. One was “contract for deed,” an arrangement usually offered by speculators who bought properties expressly for the purpose. It required a down payment and regular monthly installments from the occupant, but that’s where the similarities to a mortgage ended. The sale price and effective interest rate tended to be wildly inflated. The “buyer” assumed all the responsibilities of a homeowner, including repairs and taxes, while the “seller” retained title, along with the power to evict for missing even a single payment. As a result, families who bought “on contract” didn’t accumulate equity, and faced a long and precarious path to ownership.
Chicago became a hotbed of contract-for-deed transactions in the mid-20th century, as large numbers of blacks — still brutally persecuted in the South — moved to northern industrial cities in the Great Migration. The city also saw one of the country’s largest organized rebellions against the practice: The Contract Buyers League, which filed two federal lawsuits seeking relief from the contracts’ onerous provisions. The lawsuits failed, but for historians their long lists of homes and tenants (cited as evidence) provide a rare and valuable window into what was otherwise a largely undocumented and unregulated phenomenon.
Now, researchers — including Jack Macnamara, who as a young Jesuit seminarian helped organize the League –- have tapped those lawsuits, along with municipal records and the work of other scholars, to come up with an estimate of how much this one predatory practice, in one city, set back black families. Using data on sales and mortgage rates, they calculated how much each family’s payments exceeded what they would have been if the property had been purchased at the prevailing market price with a conventional mortgage loan. They then added it up for all the contract properties they could identify from the years 1950 to 1970.
The outcome: Black families were overcharged somewhere between $3.2 billion and $4 billion (in 2019 dollars). The real estate agents and investors who profited were almost exclusively white, so this represents a direct transfer of wealth from one race to another. Worse, the contracts’ exorbitant terms, along with the lack of equity to borrow against, left black families without the means to invest in their properties, contributing to the physical decline of their neighborhoods.
The predation didn’t end in the 1960s. It evolved. There was the FHA scandal of the 1970s, in which indiscriminate federal lending and outright corruption enabled speculators to sell inner-city homes to blacks at inflated prices, resulting in widespread foreclosures. There was the subprime boom of the 2000s, in which blacks were steered into inappropriately expensive loans that enriched a whole ecosystem of mortgage-industry professionals, but often left borrowers with nothing but an eviction notice and a bad credit history. In the wake of the subprime bust, investors including private-equity firms have again targeted the same neighborhoods, buying up houses on the cheap and renting them back to black and other minority tenants — sometimes under contracts very similar to those of the 1960s.
The investors involved don’t necessarily act with racist intent. They exploit blacks because that’s where the opportunity is. But the effect is the same: Black Americans experience a completely different kind of finance, one that turns the dream of homeownership into a poverty trap. This helps explain why, despite narrowing racial disparities in areas such as education and employment, the gap in net worth remains just as large as it was almost three decades ago.
So if you ever find yourself in a predominantly black neighborhood, wondering why everyone seems so poor, know this: It’s largely because white people, possibly even you or your ancestors, stole from them and their ancestors. The more Americans recognize this deep, tragic flaw in the fabric of our society, the greater the chance that we can find a remedy.
- Blockbusting
- Persuading white owners to sell cheaply from fear of black people moving in
- Houses would then be sold to people of color at a higher price
- Real estate agents would start after the first black family move in
- Would hire black people to walk, drive around playing loud music, call white homes, even organized burglaries
- Did this in full support with National Real Estate Associations and fed and state gov regulators
- “because black contract buyers knew how easily they could lose their homes, they struggled to make their inflated monthly payments. Husbands and wives both worked double shifts. They neglected basic maintenance. They subdivided their apartments, crammed in extra tenants and, when possible, charged their tenants hefty rents… White people observed that their new black neighbors overcrowded and neglected their properties. Over crowded neighborhoods meant overcrowded schools; in Chicago, officials responded by “double-shifting” the students (half attending in the morning, half in the afternoon). Children were deprived of a full day of schooling and left to fend for themselves in the after-school hours. These conditions helped fuel the rise of gangs, which in turn terrorized shop owners and residents alike. In the end, whites fled these neighborhoods, not only because of the influx of black families, but also because they were upset about overcrowding, decaying schools and crime.. But black contract buyers did not have the option of leaving a declining neighborhood before their properties were paid for in full, if they did, they would lose everything they’d invested in that property to date. Whites could leave, blacks had to stay. “Beryl Satter, Family Properties
- Persuading white owners to sell cheaply from fear of black people moving in
A technique used by realtors to have home owners sell their house at cheap prices by instilling fear of a different race or class moving in to the neighborhood, and making money off the homes and properties that are being sold. This technique was mostly used during suburbanization aka “white flight”. A realtor would bring a black family into an all white neighborhood and then spread the news that “negros” are moving in and will ruin the property value. Blockbusting was a catalyst for white flight and helped to control the migration of People of color into the suburbs. Within just a few years a neighborhood could go from one race to another. For further reading: http://www.blackpast.org/aah/blockbusting
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Richard Rothstein : The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
OVER THE next few years, the number of African Americans seeking jobs and homes in and near Palo Alto grew, but no developer who depended on federal government loan insurance would sell to them, and no California state-licensed real estate agent would show them houses. But then, in 1954, one resident of a whites-only area in East Palo Alto, across a highway from the Stanford campus, sold his house to a black family.
Almost immediately Floyd Lowe, president of the California Real Estate Association, set up an office in East Palo Alto to panic white families into listing their homes for sale, a practice known as blockbusting. He and other agents warned that a “Negro invasion” was imminent and that it would result in collapsing property values. Soon, growing numbers of white owners succumbed to the scaremongering and sold at discounted prices to the agents and their speculators. The agents, including Lowe himself, then designed display ads with banner headlines—“Colored Buyers!”—which they ran in San Francisco newspapers. African Americans, desperate for housing, purchased the homes at inflated prices. Within a three-month period, one agent alone sold sixty previously white-owned properties to African Americans. The California real estate commissioner refused totake any action, asserting that while regulations prohibited licensed agents from engaging in “unethical practices,” the exploitation of racial fear was not within the real estate commission’s jurisdiction. Although the local real estate board would ordinarily “blackball” any agent who sold to a nonwhite buyer in the city’s white neighborhoods (thereby denying the agent access to the multiple listing service upon which his or her business depended), once wholesale blockbusting began, the board was unconcerned, even supportive.
At the time, the Federal Housing Administration and Veterans Administration not only refused to insure mortgages for African Americans in designated white neighborhoods like Ladera; they also would not insure mortgages for whites in a neighborhood where African Americans were present. So once East Palo Alto was integrated, whites wanting to move into the area could no longer obtain government-insured mortgages. State-regulated insurance companies, like the Equitable Life Insurance Company and the Prudential Life Insurance Company, also declared that their policy was not to issue mortgages to whites in integrated neighborhoods. State insurance regulators had no objection to this stance. The Bank of America and other leading California banks had similar policies, also with the consent of federal banking regulators.
Within six years the population of East Palo Alto was 82 percent black. Conditions deteriorated as African Americans who had been excluded from other neighborhoods doubled up in single-family homes. Their East Palo Alto houses had been priced so much higher than similar properties for whites that the owners had difficulty making payments without additional rental income. Federal and state housing policy had created a slum in East Palo Alto.
With the increased density of the area, the school district could no longer accommodate all Palo Alto students, so in 1958 it proposed to create a second high school to accommodate the expanding student population. The district decided to construct the new school in the heart of what had become the East Palo Alto ghetto, so black students in Palo Alto’s existing integrated building would have to withdraw, creating a segregated African American school in the eastern section and a white one to the west. The board ignored pleas of African American and liberal white activists that it draw an east-west school boundary to establish two integrated secondary schools.
In ways like these, federal, state, and local governments purposely created segregation in every metropolitan area of the nation. If it could happen in liberal San Francisco, then indeed, it not only could but did happen everywhere. That the San Francisco region was segregated by government policy is particularly striking because, in contrast to metropolitan areas like Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, or Baltimore, northern California had few African Americans before migrants like Frank Stevenson arrived during World War II in search of jobs. The government was not following preexisting racial patterns; it was imposing segregation where it hadn’t previously taken root…
IN ONE respect, however, the FHA’s theories about property values could become self-fulfilling. An African American influx could reduce a neighborhood’s home prices as a direct result of FHA policy. The inability of African American families to obtain mortgages for suburban dwellings created opportunities for speculators and real estate agents to collude in blockbusting. Practiced across the country as it had been in East Palo Alto, blockbusting was a scheme in which speculators bought properties in borderline black-white areas; rented or sold them to African American families at above-market prices; persuaded white families residing in these areas that their neighborhoods were turning into African American slums and that values would soon fall precipitously; and then purchased the panicked whites’ homes for less than their worth.
Blockbusters’ tactics included hiring African American women to push carriages with their babies through white neighborhoods, hiring African American men to drive cars with radios blasting through white neighborhoods, paying African American men to accompany agents knocking on doors to see if homes were for sale, or making random telephone calls to residents of white neighborhoods and asking to speak to someone with a stereotypically African American name like “Johnnie Mae.” Speculators also took out real estate advertisements in African American newspapers, even if the featured properties were not for sale. The ads’ purpose was to attract potential African American buyers to walk around white areas that were targeted for blockbusting. In a 1962 Saturday Evening Post article, an agent (using the pseudonym “Norris Vitchek”) claimed to have arranged house burglaries in white communities to scare neighbors into believing that their communities were becoming unsafe.
Real estate firms then sold their newly acquired properties at inflated prices to African Americans, expanding their residential boundaries. Because most black families could not qualify for mortgages under FHA and bank policies, the agents often sold these homes on installment plans, similar to the one Charles Vatterott developed in De Porres, in which no equity accumulated from down or monthly payments. Known as contract sales, these agreements usually provided that ownership would transfer to purchasers after fifteen or twenty years, but if a single monthly payment was late, the speculator could evict the would-be owner, who had accumulated no equity. The inflated sale prices made it all the more likely that payment would not be on time. Owner-speculators could then resell these homes to new contract buyers.
The full cycle went like this: when a neighborhood first integrated, property values increased because of African Americans’ need to pay higher prices for homes than whites. But then property values fell once speculators had panicked enough white homeowners into selling at deep discounts.
Falling sale prices in neighborhoods where blockbusters created white panic was deemed as proof by the FHA that property values would decline if African Americans moved in. But if the agency had not adopted a discriminatory and unconstitutional racial policy, African Americans would have been able, like whites, to locate throughout metropolitan areas rather than attempting to establish presence in only a few blockbusted communities, and speculators would not have been able to prey on white fears that their neighborhoods would soon turn from all white to all black….
Blockbusting, the subsequent loss of home values when speculators caused panic, the subsequent deterioration ofneighborhood quality when African Americans were forced to pay excessive prices for housing, the resulting identification ofAfrican Americans with slum conditions, and the resulting white flight to escape the possibility of those conditions all had theirbases in federal government policy. Blockbusting could work only because the FHA made certain that African Americans hadfew alternative neighborhoods where they could purchase homes at fair market value.
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WEBZ: Contract Buying Robbed Black Families In Chicago Of Billions
Black families in Chicago lost between $3 billion and $4 billion in wealth because of predatory housing contracts during the 1950s and 1960s, according to a new report released Thursday.
The Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University and the Nathalie P. Voorhees Center at the University of Illinois-Chicago sought to calculate the amount of money extracted from black homeowners on the city’s South and West sides from home contract sales. The report is titled “The Plunder of Black Wealth in Chicago: New Findings on the Lasting Toll of Predatory Housing Contracts.”
Contract buying worked like this: A buyer put down a large down payment for a home and made monthly installments at high interest rates. But the buyer never gained ownership until the contract was paid in full and all conditions were met. Meanwhile, the contract seller held the deed and could evict the buyer. Contract buyers also accumulated no equity in their homes. No laws or regulations protected them.
Home contract sales were a ruthlessly exploitive means of extracting capital from African Americans with no better alternatives in their pursuit of homeownership, the report said. Contract loans were rampant all over the West Side — in East Garfield Park, West Garfield Park and North Lawndale — but also in Englewood on the South Side.
The report concluded:
- Between 75 percent and 95 percent of homes sold to black families during the 1950s and 1960s were sold on contract.
- The price markup on homes sold on contract was 84%.
- African Americans who bought on contract paid, on average, an additional $587 (in current dollars) more a month than if they had a conventional mortgage.
“The takeaway is that we have a history that so many Chicagoans are really not aware of that has really shaped the city and shaped the racial politics of the city. It shaped the economy of the city. In order to move forward and address issues that confront us in terms of poverty and racial discrimination, we have to have a common understanding of what happened in the past,” said Duke University’s Bruce Orenstein, the study’s project director who is doing a documentary series on Chicago’s housing segregation.
That past has roots 100 years ago with white people not understanding that they created black ghettos, he said.
“The scaffolding of segregation gets built after the race riot of 1919 in Chicago. And the main player in the scaffolding are the real estate brokers,” Orenstein said. “The real estate industry wanted to keep black residents and white residents separate. They built a white wall to keep out black residents.”
Home contract sales were prevalent for black homebuyers who had little choice because of racial segregation. Redlining denied black homeowners conventional mortgages that white Americans received backed by the federal government. Meanwhile, white neighborhoods were opened up in the 1950s because the U.S. Supreme Court struck down racially restrictive covenants, which for decades had blocked the access of African Americans to those communities.
But those white homeowners were frightened by black people coming to their neighborhoods. Contract sellers were often realtors who stoked that fear by getting whites to sell their homes below market prices, purchasing them for themselves and then offering them on contract to black families at inflated prices.
“For example, homes in racially changing neighborhoods purchased by a speculator for $12,000, would be resold days or weeks later on contract to a black buyer, for $22,000,” the report states.
More recently, historian Beryl Satter and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates have written groundbreaking accounts of the contract system in Chicago. This new report builds upon other years of research and activism.
In a grassroots effort to protest the contracts, West Side black homeowners organized the Contract Buyers League in the late 1960s. The league filed two federal lawsuits that were instrumental to the research behind the study. The team of 10 researchers (which also included individuals from Roosevelt and Loyola universities) poured over thousands of documents from those lawsuits and other records to come up with the findings.
“Maybe we can get something done about it. The damage that was done and the horror that was created by the dominant culture, which is us — white folks, it’s a pretty depressing experience,” said Jack Macnamara, 81, who was an organizer with the league. “With these numbers and this amount of money legally stolen from the African American community in a very short time of 20 years, that’s a debt that we owe to the African American community and something for which we should make restitution.”
Alfonso Vaca-Loyola was one of the researchers.
“If this paper or this report comes out just to be an academic report, we have failed. This isn’t the culmination of research but the beginning of something much bigger and much more important, which is restitution,” Vaca-Loyola said.
Natalie Moore is a reporter on WBEZ’s Race, Class and Communities desk. You can follow her on on Twitter @NatalieYMoore.
Tipping Point
NY Times: Whose Neighborhood Is It?
“tipping point,” the point at which whites begin to leave a residential locale en masse as African-Americans or other minorities move in.
This phenomenon puzzled Thomas Schelling, a professor emeritus of economics at Harvard and a Nobel Laureate, who was struck by the lack of stable integrated communities. In 1971, he began work on a mathematical theory to explain the prevalence of racial segregation in a paper titled “Dynamic Models of Segregation,” published in the Journal of Mathematical Sociology.
Schelling’s famous thesis has been carefully summarized by Junfu Zhang, an economist at Clark University. Zhang writes:
Schelling’s most striking finding is that moderate preferences for same-color neighbors at the individual level can be amplified into complete residential segregation at the macro level. For example, if every agent requires at least half of her neighbors to be of the same color―a preference far from extreme―the final outcome, after a series of moves, is almost always complete segregation.
In other words, residential segregation can emerge even if initial preferences are very slight.
According to Schelling, Zhang writes,
in an all-white neighborhood, some residents may be willing to tolerate a maximum of 5 percent black neighbors; others may tolerate 10 percent, 20 percent, and so on.
The ones with the lowest tolerance level will move out if the proportion of black residents exceeds 5 percent. If only blacks move in to fill the vacancies after the whites move out, then the proportion of blacks in the neighborhood may reach a level high enough to trigger the move-out of the next group of whites who are only slightly more tolerant than the early movers. This process may continue and eventually result in an all-black neighborhood.
Similarly, an all-black neighborhood may be tipped into an all-white neighborhood, and a mixed-race neighborhood can be tipped into a highly segregated one, depending on the tolerance.
In the years since 1971, scholars have followed up on the Schelling argument with empirical studies.
David Card, a Berkeley economist, working with Alexandre Mas and Jesse Rothstein, both Princeton economists, studied neighborhood change from 1970 to 2000, and found:
Most major metropolitan areas are characterized by a city-specific ‘tipping point,’ a level of the minority share in a neighborhood that once exceeded sets off a rapid exodus of the white population.
The tipping point, Card and his collaborators note, has been slowly but steadily rising, from an 11.9 percent minority share in the period from 1970-80, to 13.5 percent in 1980-90, to 14.5 percent in 1990-2000.
A tipping point in the 13 to 15 percent range means that “a neighborhood can remain stable with a moderate minority share,” according to Card. He and his coauthors conclude “that tipping points are semi-stable, and that neighborhoods can retain an integrated character so long as they remain below the tipping point.”
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CS Monitor: A tale of two towns reveals tipping point for America’s suburbs
A 2012 study by the University of Minnesota even came up with a number for this tipping point: 23 percent. Suburbs that were at least 23 percent nonwhite in 1980 more often than not ended up being mostly minority by 2005, it found.
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Further Reading
Chiacago Reader: The infamous practice of contract selling is back in Chicago
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Back to History of Housing Discrimination Top
Intimidation and Violence
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- Intimidation and Violence
- White communities used intimidation to keep people of color out
- Threats, hostile white block associations, white riots, bombings, arson, lynching, etc
- 1917-21, 58 bombings at Chicago black homes too close to white homes
- 2 people died. No arrests.
- 1950-1965, Over 1000 bombings in LA
- One family with two children died
- 1989, SPLC recorded 130 acts of “move-in” violence against black homes
- White communities used intimidation to keep people of color out
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Richard Rothstein : The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
IN 1952, WILBUR GARY, a building contractor, was living with his family in one of Richmond, California’s, public housing projects. He was an African American navy war veteran, a former shipyard worker, and vice-commander of his American Legion post. The Gary family needed to find a new residence—their apartment complex was slated for demolition because the federal Lanham Act had required government projects for war workers to be temporary. A fellow navy veteran, Lieutenant Commander Sidney Hogan, was moving out of Rollingwood, the suburb just outside Richmond built during World War II with an FHA requirement that the suburb be covered with restrictive covenants. Four years earlier, though, the Supreme Court had ruled that covenants were not enforceable, so Hogan sold his property to Wilbur Gary and his wife.
Nonetheless, the Rollingwood Improvement Association, a homeowners group, insisted that its covenants gave it the right to evict African Americans. The NAACP came to the family’s aid and dared the group to try to enforce the covenant. The neighbors then attempted to buy back the Gary house for nearly 15 percent more than the Garys had paid. They refused the offer.
Soon after the Garys arrived, a mob of about 300 whites gathered outside their house, shouting epithets, hurling bricks (one crashed through the front window), and burning a cross on the lawn. For several days, police and county sheriff deputies refused to step in, so the NAACP found it necessary to organize its own guards. A Communist Party–affiliated civil rights group also provided help. The journalist Jessica Mitford, in her book A Fine Old Conflict, described her participation in the group’s efforts, which included escorting Mrs. Gary and the children to work and school and patrolling nearby streets to alert the Garys to mobs that might be gathering.
Meanwhile, the NAACP pressed California governor Earl Warren, Attorney General Brown, and the local district attorney to step in. They eventually did so, ordering the city police and county sheriff to provide the family with protection. Still, the protests and harassment continued for another month, with continued pleas from Wilbur Gary and civil rights groups for the police to intervene. No arrests, however, were made. The sheriff claimed that he did not have enough manpower to prevent the violence. Yet a single arrest is probably all that would have been required to persuade the mob to withdraw.
AT ABOUT the same time, the Levitt company began to build its second large development, this one in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia. Built post-Shelley, the Pennsylvania project did not have restrictive covenants, but the FHA continued to support Levitt and other developers only if they refused to sell to African Americans. Robert Mereday, the African American trucker who had delivered material to Levitt’s Long Island project, won another contract with the company to deliver sheetrock to the Bucks County site. He settled his family in an African American neighborhood in nearby Bristol. His son, Robert Jr., attended Bristol High School, graduating in 1955. He had a girlfriend there, Shirley Wilson, and he recalls that the Wilson family had attempted to move to Levittown but was rebuffed by the Levitt company despite the negative publicity that the Wilsons’ rejection had generated.
I mention the “flap” (the term Robert Mereday, Jr., uses in recalling the Wilson incident) because such instances were more commonplace than historians can document, and they must have had a profound effect on the awareness within the African American community of how their housing options were limited. It is remarkable that African American families continued to make the attempt to break into white suburban life—as they did at the Levittown in Bucks County.
By the late 1950s, white homeowners wanting to leave that development realized that it would be to their benefit to sell to African Americans who, because they were desperate for housing, would pay more than whites. So it happened that in 1957 an African American veteran, Bill Myers, and his wife Daisy, found a Levittown homeowner willing to sell. Like many Levittown residents, Myers had served in World War II. He was discharged as a staff sergeant and held a steady job as a lab technician in the engineering department of a factory in nearby Trenton, New Jersey. Daisy Myers was a college graduate, and Bill Myers was taking courses toward a degree in electrical engineering. When no bank would provide a mortgage because the Myers family was black, a New York City philanthropist offered to give them a private mortgage, and Bill and Daisy Myers, with their three children, occupied their new home.
A few days later, the U.S. Post Office mail carrier, a federal government employee performing his official duties, noticed that he was delivering mail to an African American family. As he made his rounds, he shouted, “Niggers have moved into Levittown!” As many as 600 white demonstrators assembled in front of the house and pelted the family and its house with rocks. Some rented a unit next door to the Myerses and set up a clubhouse from which the Confederate flag flew and music blared all night. Police arrived but were ineffective. When Mr. Myers requested around-the-clock protection, the police chief told him that the department couldn’t afford it. The town commissioners accused the state police of “meddling” because troopers were dispatched when the police failed to end the harassment. It was a needless worry; the state troopers also declined to perform their duty.
For two months law enforcement stood by as rocks were thrown, crosses were burned, the Ku Klux Klan symbol was painted on the wall of the clubhouse next door, and the home of a family that had supported the Myerses was vandalized. Some
policemen, assigned to protect the African American family, stood with the mob, joking and encouraging its participants. One sergeant was demoted to patrolman because he objected to orders he had been given not to interfere with the rioters.
The district attorney approached Bill Myers and offered to purchase his property for a price substantially above what he had paid. Even though riot leaders were well known, for several weeks the police made no attempt to arrest them or to shutdown the clubhouse. The federal government did not discipline or reprimand the mail carrier. Eventually, the Pennsylvania attorney general prosecuted some of the rioters for harassment and obtained an injunction against its continuation. But Bill and Daisy Myers, feeling constantly under threat, lasted only another four years; in 1961, they sold their Levittown home and returned to the African American neighborhood in York, Pennsylvania, where they had previously lived.
Does the failure of police to protect the Gary and Myers families constitute government-sponsored, de jure segregation? When police officers stood by without preventing the intimidation these families endured, were the African American families’ constitutional rights violated, or were they victims of rogue police officers for whom the state was not responsible? Certainly, we cannot hold the government accountable for every action of racially biased police officers. Yet if these officers’ superiors were aware of racially discriminatory activities conducted under color of law, as they surely were, and either encouraged these activities or took inadequate steps to restrain them, then these were no longer merely rogue actions but expressed state policy that violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantees of due process and equal protection.
If we apply that standard to police behavior in Rollingwood and in Levittown, we must conclude that law enforcement officers conspired to violate the civil rights of the Garys and of the Myerses and that this unremedied conspiracy of government authorities contributed to de jure segregation of the communities for whose welfare they were responsible.
WHAT THE Gary and the Myers families experienced was not an aberration. During much of the twentieth century, police tolerance and promotion of cross burnings, vandalism, arson, and other violent acts to maintain residential segregation was systematic and nation wide.
The attacks on African American pioneers, sanctioned by elected officials and law enforcement officers, could not have been attributable to whites’ discomfort with a lower social class of neighbors. Wilbur and Borece Gary and Bill and Daisy Myers were solidly middle class. Because more affluent communities were closed to them, the African Americans who were victimized by such mob action often had higher occupational and social status than the white neighbors who assaulted them. This circumstance belies the oft-repeated claim that resistance to integration has been based on fears of deteriorating neighborhood quality. Indeed, when African Americans did succeed in moving to previously white neighborhoods, they frequently were “on their best behavior,” giving no cause, or pretext, for complaint, taking pains to make certain that their homes and lawns were better cared for than others on their blocks.
Events in Chicago were only slightly more pervasive than elsewhere. Although most frequent in the post–World War II period, state-sanctioned violence to prevent integration began at the turn of the twentieth century, during the beginnings of the Jim Crow era.
In 1897, white property owners in Chicago’s Woodlawn neighborhood “declared war” on African Americans, driving all African American families from the area with threats of violence, unimpeded by public authority. A decade later in Hyde Park, adjacent to Woodlawn, the Hyde Park Improvement Protective Club organized boycotts of merchants who sold to African Americans and offered to buy out the homes of African Americans who lived in the area. If these tactics were unsuccessful, whites engaged in vandalism, throwing rocks through African Americans’ windows. The leader of the club was a prominent attorney, and the club published a newsletter promoting segregation, so it would not have been difficult for authorities to interfere with the conspiracy, but no measures were undertaken.
From 1917 to 1921, when the Chicago ghetto was first being rigidly defined, there were fifty-eight fire bombings of homes in white border areas to which African Americans had moved, with no arrests or prosecutions—despite the deaths of two African American residents. In one case, explosives were lobbed at the home of Richard B. Harrison, a well-known black Shakespearean actor who had purchased a house in a white neighborhood. The bombs were thrown from a vacant and locked apartment in a building next door. The police did not make a serious attempt to find the perpetrator, failing even to question the building’s occupants, although few possible conspirators could have had access to the apartment.
Nearly thirty of the fifty-eight fire bombings were concentrated in a six-month period in the spring of 1919, leading up to one of the nation’s worst race riots, set off when a white youth stoned an African American swimmer who had drifted toward a public beach area, generally understood to be for whites’ use only. The swimmer drowned, and policemen at the scene refused to arrest the attacker. Subsequent battles between whites and blacks left thirty-eight dead (twenty-three of whom were African American) and poisoned race relations in Chicago for years afterward.
Interracial violence continued unabated. In the first five years after World War II, 357 reported “incidents” were directed against African Americans attempting to rent or buy in Chicago’s racial border areas. From mid-1944 to mid-1946, there were forty-six attacks on the homes of African Americans in white communities adjacent to Chicago’s overcrowded black neighborhoods; of these, twenty-nine were arson-bombings, resulting in at least three deaths. In the first ten months of 1947alone, twenty-six arson-bombings occurred, without an arrest.
In 1951, Harvey Clark, an African American Chicago bus driver and air force veteran, rented an apartment in all-white Cicero, a Chicago suburb. At first, the police forcefully attempted to prevent him, his wife Johnnetta, and two small children from occupying the apartment. They threatened him with arrest and worse if the family did not depart. “Get out of Cicero,” the police chief told the real estate agent who rented the apartment, adding, “Don’t come back . . . or you’ll get a bullet through you.” When Harvey Clark got a court injunction ordering the police to cease interfering with his occupancy and “to afford him full protection from any attempt to so restrain him,” the police ignored it, making no effort, for example, to impede a group of teenagers who were pelting the apartment’s windows with stones. When the Clarks refused to leave, a mob of about 4,000 rioted, raiding the apartment, destroying the fixtures, and throwing the family’s belongings out the window onto the lawn where they were set ablaze. The officers present arrested no one. Time magazine reported that the police “acted like ushers politely handling the overflow at a football stadium.”
Governor Adlai Stevenson mobilized the National Guard to restore order. Although 118 rioters were arrested, a Cook County grand jury did not indict a single one. The grand jury, however, did indict Harvey Clark, his real estate agent, his NAACP attorney, and the white landlady who rented the apartment to him as well as her attorney on charges of inciting a riot and conspiring to lower property values. Thirty-six years later, when an African American family again attempted to live in Cicero, it was met with firebombs and rifle shots. Nobody was convicted of these attacks, either. Cicero’s council president boasted after the clash that “[t]he area is well-secured. ”
In 1953, the Chicago Housing Authority leased apartments to African American families for the first time in its Trumbull Park project in the all-white South Deering neighborhood. Ten years of sporadic mob violence ensued. The African American families required police protection during the entire period. As many as 1200 policemen were deployed to guard African American families on the day a group of them moved in, but little was done to end the attacks by arresting and prosecuting the perpetrators. A neighborhood association, the South Deering Improvement Association, led the violence, but its officers were not charged with any crime. A few bomb throwers were arrested but only after police had passively watched them launch their bombs. They faced only minor charges. An observer concluded that “sympathy for the white rioters on the part of the average policeman . . . [was] extreme.” Addressing a South Deering Improvement Association meeting, the chief of the Chicago Park District Police commiserated with his audience that “it is unfortunate the colored people chose to come out here.” The mob’s attacks were successful. The Chicago Housing Authority fired Elizabeth Wood, its executive director who had authorized the leasing of apartments in previously all-white projects to African Americans.
In 1964, a white civil rights activist in Bridgeport, Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley’s all-white neighborhood, rented an apartment to African American college students. A mob gathered and pelted the apartment with rocks. Police entered the apartment, removed the students’ belongings, and told them when they returned from school that they had been evicted.
Events in Detroit and its suburbs were similar. During the immediate postwar period, the city saw more than 200 acts of intimidation and violence to deter African Americans from moving to predominantly white neighborhoods. Such an epidemic was possible because police could be counted on to stand by, making no effort to stop, much less to prevent, the assaults. In1968, an official of the Michigan Civil Rights Commission reported that “our experience has been that nearly all attempts by black families to move to Detroit’s suburbs have been met with harassment. ”
In the Philadelphia area, the attacks encountered by the Myers family were not unusual. In the first six months of 1955, 213violent incidents ensured that most African Americans remained in the North Philadelphia ghetto. Some incidents involved move-in violence like that experienced by the Myerses; others involved white teenagers defending what they considered a neighborhood boundary that African Americans should not cross. Although in some cases perpetrators might have been difficult to identify, it is improbable that police were incapable of finding a sufficient number to prevent repetitive conflict.
In the Los Angeles area, cross burnings, dynamite bombings, rocks thrown through windows, graffiti, and other acts of vandalism, as well as numerous phone threats, greeted African Americans who found housing in neighborhoods just outside their existing areas of concentration. In 1945, an entire family—father, mother, and two children—was killed when its new home in an all-white neighborhood was blown up. Of the more than one hundred incidents of move-in bombings and vandalism that occurred in Los Angeles between 1950 and 1965, only one led to an arrest and prosecution—and that was because the California attorney general took over the case after local police and prosecutors claimed they were unable to find anyone to charge.
Although the 1968 Fair Housing Act made violence to prevent neighborhood integration a federal crime and the Department of Justice prosecuted several cases, frequent attacks on African Americans attempting to leave predominantly black areas continued into the 1980s. The Southern Poverty Law Center found that in 1985–86, only about one-quarter of these incidents were prosecuted, but the share in which charges were brought grew rapidly from 1985 to 1990, up to 75 percent. That such an increase in the rate of prosecution was possible suggests how tolerant of such crimes police and prosecutors had previously been. Still, the center documented 130 cases of move-in violence in 1989 alone.
During the mid-twentieth century, local police and the FBI went to extraordinary lengths to infiltrate and disrupt liberal and left-wing political groups as well as organized crime syndicates. That they did not act similarly in the case of a nation wide terror campaign against African Americans who integrated previously white communities should be deemed, at the least, complicity in the violence. Had perpetrators been held to account in even a few well-publicized cases, many thousands of others might have been prevented.
Nor can the failure to control mob assaults be blamed on police officers who acted without explicit authorization of their superiors. In recent years we have seen several examples of the choices that confront public officials in analogous situations. When a police officer has killed or beaten an African American man with apparent racial motivation, we now expect that the officer’s superiors will fire him (or her) or, if there is doubt about whether a citizen’s civil rights were violated, will suspend the officer, pending an investigation. If superiors fail to take such measures, we expect still higher authorities to intervene. If they do not, we can reasonably assume that the police officer’s approach fit within the bounds of what his or her superiors consider appropriate response and reflect governmental policy.
IN 1954, Andrew Wade—an African American electrical contractor and Korean War navy veteran—wanted to purchase ahouse in a middle-class African American neighborhood of Louisville, Kentucky, but couldn’t find anything suitable. A friend and prominent left-wing activist, Carl Braden, suggested he look at a white middle-class community instead; Braden and his wife, Anne, then agreed to buy a house for Andrew Wade and his wife, Charlotte. The Wades found a property in Shively, an all-white suburb, which the Bradens bought, signing over the deed.
When the Wades and their child were moving in, a crowd gathered in front, and a cross was burned on an empty lot next door. On the first evening the family spent at home, a rock crashed through its front window with a message tied to it, “Nigger Get Out,” and later that night, ten rifle shots were fired through the glass of its kitchen door. Under the watch of a police guard, demonstrations continued for a month until the house was dynamited. The police guard said he saw nothing. There was one arrest following the Wades’ moving in: of Andrew Wade and a friend for “breach of the peace,” because Mr. Wade had failed to notify the police that the friend would be visiting. The police chief was familiar enough with the bombers to warn Carl Braden that the people responsible for blowing up the Wade property were targeting the Braden home next.
Although the chief acknowledged that both the dynamiter and the cross burners had confessed, the perpetrators were not indicted. Instead, a grand jury indicted Carl and Anne Braden, along with four others whom the jury accused of conspiring to stir up racial conflict by selling the house to African Americans. The formal charge was “sedition.” Charges against the others were dropped, but Carl Braden was sentenced to fifteen years in prison (he eventually won release on appeal), and the Wades went back to Louisville’s African American area.
Such violence in Kentucky did not end in the 1950s. In 1985, Robert and Martha Marshall bought a home in Sylvania, another suburb of Louisville that had remained exclusively white. Their house was firebombed on the night they moved in. A month later, a second arson attack destroyed the house, a few hours before a Ku Klux Klan meeting at which a speaker boasted that no African Americans would be permitted to live in Sylvania. The Marshall family then sued a county police officer who had been identified as a member of the Klan. The officer testified that about half of the forty Klan members known to him were also in the police department and that his superiors condoned officers’ Klan membership, as long as the information did not become public.
Many years ago I read The Wall Between, Anne Braden’s memoir that describes how she and her husband were prosecuted by the state of Kentucky for helping Andrew Wade attempt to live in a white neighborhood. I remembered that account when, in2007, the U.S. Supreme Court prohibited the Louisville school district from carrying out a racial integration plan, on the ground that the segregation of Louisville is “a product not of state action but of private choices.”
State-sponsored violence was a means, along with many others, by which all levels of government maintained segregation in Louisville and elsewhere. The Wades and Marshalls were only two middle-class families confronted with hostile state power when they tried to cross the residential color line. How many other middle-class African Americans in Louisville were intimidated from attempting to live in neighborhoods of their own choosing after hearing of the Wade and Marshall experiences? Did the next generation imbibe a fear of integration from their parents? How long do the memories of such events last? How long do they continue to intimidate?
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Back to History of Housing Discrimination Top
IRS tax Exemptions
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- IRS tax Exemptions
- IRS has the authority to remove tax exemptions
- When an org is contrary to public policy or the public good
- 1967, first time IRS removes tax exemption for recreational facility
- That excluded African Americans
- Most of the time IRS continued to grant exemptions to orgs
- That had policies or actively fought for racial discrimination
- Churches, hospitals, universities, neighborhood associations, etc.
- Same deal with insurance companies
- That had policies or actively fought for racial discrimination
- IRS has the authority to remove tax exemptions
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Richard Rothstein : The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
AS PUBLIC HOUSING packed African Americans into urban projects, and federal loan insurance subsidized white families to disperse into single-family suburban homes, other racial policies of federal, state, and local governments contributed to, and reinforced, the segregation of metropolitan areas. One was the willingness of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to grant tax-exempt status to churches, hospitals, universities, neighborhood associations, and other groups that promoted residential segregation. Another was the complicity of regulatory agencies in the discriminatory actions of the insurance companies and banks they supervised.
The Color of Law does not argue that merely because government regulates a private business, the firm’s activities become state action and, if discriminatory, constitute de jure segregation. Such a claim would eliminate the distinction between the public and private spheres and be inimical to a free democratic society. But because of slavery’s legacy, the Constitution gives African Americans a special degree of protection. The three constitutional amendments—the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth—adopted after the Civil War were specifically intended to ensure that African Americans had equal status. When government regulation is so intrusive that it blesses systematic racial exclusion, regulators violate their constitutional responsibilities and contribute to de jure segregation.
Real estate brokers don’t become government agents simply by dint of their state licensure. But when state real estate commissions licensed members of local and national real estate boards whose published codes of ethics mandated discrimination, acts to establish de jure segregation were committed. Similarly, universities, churches, and other nonprofit institutions cannot be considered state actors simply by dint of their tax exemptions. But we have a right to expect the IRS to have been especially vigilant and to have withheld tax-exempt status when the promotion of segregation by nonprofit institutions was blatant, explicit, and influential.
THE IRS has always had an obligation to withhold tax favoritism from discriminatory organizations, but it almost never acted to do so. Its regulations specifically authorize charitable deductions for organizations that “eliminate prejudice and discrimination” and “defend human and civil rights secured by law.”
The IRS leadership recognized this in 1967 when the agency exercised its authority to withhold the tax exemption of a recreational facility that excluded African Americans. Yet until 1970, sixteen years after Brown v. Board of Education, the IRS granted tax exemptions to private whites-only academies that had been established throughout the South to evade the ruling. It rejected the exemptions only in response to a court injunction won by civil rights groups.
In 1976, the IRS denied the tax exemption of Bob Jones University because the school would not allow interracial dating by its students. The university mounted a court challenge to the IRS action, and when the case reached the Supreme Court the Reagan administration refused to defend the agency. So the Supreme Court appointed an outside lawyer, William T. Coleman, Jr., to make the argument that the government itself should have presented. Coleman’s brief asserted: “Indeed, if [the charitable organization provision of the IRS code] were construed to permit tax exemptions for racially discriminatory schools, the provision would be unconstitutional under the Fifth Amendment. The Government has an affirmative constitutional duty to steer clear of providing significant aid to such schools.”
In its widely noticed 1983 decision, the Court upheld the IRS decision and concluded that “an institution seeking tax-exempt status must serve a public purpose and not be contrary to established public policy.” It did not adopt Coleman’s constitutional argument to make its case, but neither did the Court reject it. In his opinion, Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote that many of those who submitted briefs in the case, including Coleman, “argue that denial of tax-exempt status to racially discriminatory schools is independently required by the equal protection component of the Fifth Amendment. In light of our resolution of this litigation, we do not reach that issue.” But Coleman’s argument was solid, and it implicitly condemned the decades-long passivity of the IRS by confronting how its tax-exemption policy strengthened residential segregation. Support for a ban on interracial dating certainly offended the Constitution, but its national policy significance was trivial in comparison to the IRS’s silence when nonprofit institutions promoted restrictive covenants or engaged in other activities to prevent African Americans from moving into white neighborhoods.
Churches, synagogues, and their clergy frequently led such efforts Shelley v. Kraemer, the 1948 Supreme Court ruling that ended court enforcement of restrictive covenants, offers a conspicuous illustration. The case stemmed from objections of white St. Louis homeowners, Louis and Fern Kraemer, to the purchase of a house in their neighborhood by African Americans, J.D. and Ethel Shelley. The area had been covered by a restrictive covenant organized by a white owners’ group, the Marcus Avenue Improvement Association, which was sponsored by the Cote Brilliante Presbyterian Church. Trustees of the church provided funds from the church treasury to finance the Kraemers’ lawsuit to have the African American family evicted. Another nearby church, the Waggoner Place Methodist Episcopal Church South, was also a signatory to the restrictive covenant; its pastor had defended the clause in a 1942 legal case arising from the purchase of a nearby house by Scovel Richardson, a distinguished attorney who later became one of the first African Americans nationwide appointed to the federal judiciary.
Such church involvement and leadership were commonplace in property owners’ associations that were organized to maintain neighborhood segregation. In North Philadelphia in 1942, a priest spearheaded a campaign to prevent African Americans from living in the neighborhood. The same year a priest in a Polish American parish in Buffalo, New York, directed the campaign to deny public housing for African American war workers, stalling a proposed project for two years. Just south of the city, 600 units in the federally managed project for whites went vacant, while African American war workers could not find adequate housing.
In Los Angeles, the Reverend W. Clarence Wright, pastor of the fashionable Wilshire Presbyterian Church, led efforts to keep the Wilshire District all white. He personally sued to evict an African American war veteran who had moved into the restricted area in 1947. Wright lost the case, one of the few times before Shelley in which a state court held covenants to be unconstitutional. In a widely publicized ruling, the judge said that there was “no more reprehensible un-American activity than to attempt to deprive persons of their own homes on a ‘master race’ theory.” Yet the IRS took no notice; Reverend Wright’s activities didn’t threaten his church’s tax subsidy.
The violent resistance to the Sojourner Truth public housing project for African American families in Detroit was organized by a homeowners association headquartered in St. Louis the King Catholic Church whose pastor, the Reverend Constantine Dzink, represented the association in appeals to the United States Housing Authority to cancel the project. The “construction of a low-cost housing project in the vicinity . . . for the colored people . . . would mean utter ruin for many people who have mortgaged their homes to the FHA, and not only that, but it would jeopardize the safety of many of our white girls,” Reverend Dzink wrote, adding this warning: “It is the sentiment of all people residing within the vicinity to object against this project in order to stop race riots in the future.”
On Chicago’s South Side, signatures on a 1928 restrictive covenant were obtained in door-to-door solicitations by the priest of St. Anselm Catholic Church, the rabbi of Congregation Beth Jacob, and the executive director of the area’s property owners association. Trinity Congregational Church was also party to the agreement. In 1946, the Congregational Church of Park Manor sponsored a local improvement association’s efforts to cancel an African American physician’s home purchase in the previously all-white neighborhood.
On Chicago’s Near North Side, a restrictive covenant was executed in 1937 by tax-exempt religious institutions, including the Moody Bible Institute, the Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the Board of Foreign Missions of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Other nonprofit organizations also participated, including the Newberry Library and the Academy of Fine Arts.
Tax-exempt colleges and universities, some religious-affiliated and some not, also were active in promoting segregation. In Whittier, a Los Angeles suburb, the Quaker-affiliated Whittier College participated in a restrictive covenant covering its neighborhood.
The University of Chicago organized and guided property owners’ associations that were devoted to preventing black families from moving nearby. The university not only subsidized the associations but from 1933 to 1947 spent $100,000 on legal services to defend covenants and evict African Americans who had arrived in its neighborhood. When criticized for these activities, University of Chicago president Robert Maynard Hutchins wrote in 1937 that the university “must endeavor to stabilize its neighborhood as an area in which its students and faculty will be content to live,” and that therefore the university had the “right to invoke and defend” restrictive covenants in its surrounding areas.
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The Religous Right and Tax Exempt Segregation
One of the worst cases of IRS overlooking organziations receiving tax exemption for segregated projects.
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The Rise of the Religious Right
- What is the Religious Right?
- “Christian right or religious right is a term used mainly in the US to label conservative Christian political factions that are characterized by their strong support of socially conservative policies.” Wikipedia
- Informal coalition of evangelical Protestants and Roman Catholics
- Some conservative mainline Protestants, Jews, and Mormons.
Birth of the Religious Right
- 1940-60s – Pasters began mixing religion, patriotism, neo-liberalism
- James W. Fifield Jr – combined anti-new deal and capitalism with religion
- Billy Graham – combined anti-communism and patriotism with religion
- 1950s “Under God” inserted on currency, pledge of allegiance, gov buildings
- 1950-60s – Private religious “white only” schools spread across nation
- Way to escape desegregation
- Also a growing source of recruitment and revenue
- Tax-exempt status remained a matter of contention for many years
- Way to escape desegregation
Jerry Falwel
- Segregationist
- “The true Negro does not want integration…. He realizes his potential is far better among his own race…integration will destroy our race eventually” Falwel about the 1954 Brown vs Board of Education decision
- Anti-civil rights
- Publicly denounced the 1964 Civil Rights Act as “civil wrongs”
- Enlisted with J. Edgar Hoover to distribute FBI propaganda against MLK Jr.
- “[I question] the sincerity and intentions of some civil rights leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Mr. James Farmer, and others, who are known to have left-wing associations. It is very obvious that the Communists, as they do in all parts of the world, are taking advantage of a tense situation in our land, and are exploiting every incident to bring about violence and bloodshed…” Jerry Falwel
- Began many white only church academies
- including Liberty University
“The most pervasive mistake I have made was in believing that because our cause was just, we could be sure that the white ministers of the South, once their Christian consciences were challenged, would rise to our aid. I felt that white ministers would take our cause to the white power structure. I ended up, of course, chastened and disillusioned. As our movement unfolded, and direct appeals were made to white ministers, most folded their hands — and some even took stands against us.” Martin Luther King Jr., 1965
Nation: Agent of Intolerance
“Decades before the forces that now make up the Christian right declared their culture war, Falwell was a rabid segregationist who railed against the civil rights movement from the pulpit of the abandoned backwater bottling plant he converted into Thomas Road Baptist Church. This opening episode of Falwell’s life, studiously overlooked by his friends, naïvely unacknowledged by many of his chroniclers, and puzzlingly and glaringly omitted in the obituaries of the Washington Post and New York Times, is essential to understanding his historical significance in galvanizing the Christian right. Indeed, it was race–not abortion or the attendant suite of so-called “values” issues–that propelled Falwell and his evangelical allies into political activism.
As with his positions on abortion and homosexuality, the basso profondo preacher’s own words on race stand as vivid documents of his legacy. Falwell launched on the warpath against civil rights four years after the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision to desegregate public schools with a sermon titled “Segregation or Integration: Which?”
“If Chief Justice Warren and his associates had known God’s word and had desired to do the Lord’s will, I am quite confident that the 1954 decision would never have been made,” Falwell boomed from above his congregation in Lynchburg. “The facilities should be separate. When God has drawn a line of distinction, we should not attempt to cross that line.”
Falwell’s jeremiad continued: “The true Negro does not want integration…. He realizes his potential is far better among his own race.” Falwell went on to announce that integration “will destroy our race eventually. In one northern city,” he warned, “a pastor friend of mine tells me that a couple of opposite race live next door to his church as man and wife.”
As pressure from the civil rights movement built during the early 1960s, and President Lyndon Johnson introduced sweeping civil rights legislation, Falwell grew increasingly conspiratorial. He enlisted with J. Edgar Hoover to distribute FBI manufactured propaganda against the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and publicly denounced the 1964 Civil Rights Act as “civil wrongs.”
In a 1964 sermon, “Ministers and Marchers,” Falwell attacked King as a Communist subversive. After questioning “the sincerity and intentions of some civil rights leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Mr. James Farmer, and others, who are known to have left-wing associations,” Falwell declared, “It is very obvious that the Communists, as they do in all parts of the world, are taking advantage of a tense situation in our land, and are exploiting every incident to bring about violence and bloodshed.”
Falwell concluded, “Preachers are not called to be politicians, but soul winners.”
Then, for a time, Falwell appeared to follow his own advice. He retreated from massive resistance and founded the Lynchburg Christian Academy, an institution described by the Lynchburg News in 1966 as “a private school for white students.” It was one among many so-called “seg academies” created in the South to avoid integrated public schools.
For Falwell and his brethren, private Christian schools were the last redoubt. Rather than continue a hopeless struggle against the inevitable, through their schools they could circumvent the integration entirely. Five years later, Falwell christened Liberty University, a college that today funnels a steady stream of dedicated young cadres into Republican Congressional offices and conservative think tanks. (Tony Perkins is among Falwell’s Christian soldiers.)
In a recent interview broadcast on CNN the day of his death, Falwell offered his version of the Christian right’s genesis: “We were simply driven into the process by Roe v. Wade and earlier than that, the expulsion of God from the public square.” But his account was fuzzy revisionism at best. By 1973, when the Supreme Court ruled on Roe, the antiabortion movement was almost exclusively Catholic. While various Catholic cardinals condemned the Court’s ruling, W.A. Criswell, the fundamentalist former president of America’s largest Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, casually endorsed it. (Falwell, an independent Baptist for forty years, joined the SBC in 1996.) “I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person,” Criswell exclaimed, “and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed.” A year before Roe, the SBC had resolved to press for legislation allowing for abortion in limited cases.
While abortion clinics sprung up across the United States during the early 1970s, evangelicals did little. No pastors invoked the Dred Scott decision to undermine the legal justification for abortion. There were no clinic blockades, no passionate cries to liberate the “pre-born.” For Falwell and his allies, the true impetus for political action came when the Supreme Court ruled in Green v. Connally to revoke the tax-exempt status of racially discriminatory private schools in 1971. At about the same time, the Internal Revenue Service moved to revoke the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University, which forbade interracial dating. (Blacks were denied entry until 1971.) Falwell was furious, complaining, “In some states it’s easier to open a massage parlor than to open a Christian school.”
Seeking to capitalize on mounting evangelical discontent, a right-wing Washington operative and anti-Vatican II Catholic named Paul Weyrich took a series of trips down South to meet with Falwell and other evangelical leaders. Weyrich hoped to produce a well-funded evangelical lobbying outfit that could lend grassroots muscle to the top-heavy Republican Party and effectively mobilize the vanquished forces of massive resistance into a new political bloc. In discussions with Falwell, Weyrich cited various social ills that necessitated evangelical involvement in politics, particularly abortion, school prayer and the rise of feminism. His pleas initially fell on deaf ears.
“I was trying to get those people interested in those issues and I utterly failed,” Weyrich recalled in an interview in the early 1990s. “What changed their mind was Jimmy Carter’s intervention against the Christian schools, trying to deny them tax-exempt status on the basis of so-called de facto segregation.”
In 1979, at Weyrich’s behest, Falwell founded a group that he called the Moral Majority. Along with a vanguard of evangelical icons including D. James Kennedy, Pat Robertson and Tim LaHaye, Falwell’s organization hoisted the banner of the “pro-family” movement, declaring war on abortion and homosexuality. But were it not for the federal government’s attempts to enable little black boys and black girls to go to school with little white boys and white girls, the Christian right’s culture war would likely never have come into being. “The Religious New Right did not start because of a concern about abortion,” former Falwell ally Ed Dobson told author Randall Balmer in 1990. “I sat in the non-smoke-filled back room with the Moral Majority, and I frankly do not remember abortion ever being mentioned as a reason why we ought to do something.”
As the Christian right gradually transmuted its racial resentment into sexual politics, Liberty University began enrolling nonwhite students and Thomas Road Baptist Church integrated. In the irony of ironies in 2006, at Justice Sunday III, a rally for the confirmation of Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito, a man who belonged to a white-only “eating club” at Princeton University, Falwell haltingly rose to sing “We Shall Overcome.” Beside him stood Martin Luther King Jr.’s niece, Alveda King, an evangelical antiabortion activist.”
The Rise of the Religious Right
1970s – Jerry Falwell, Bob Jones, Pat Robertson, James Robison join Religious Right
- Myth that Roe vs Wade (1973) cause it all
- Few Evangelicals (outside of Catholics) cared about the subject in the 70’s.
- The Southern Baptist Convention expressed support for laws liberalizing abortion access in 1971
- Criswell supported Roe vs Wade , believed life began at birth, not conception
- The denomination did not adopt a firm pro-life stance until 1980
- Many Catholic leaders failed to recruit Evangelical leaders to Religious Right before 1978
- Few Evangelicals (outside of Catholics) cared about the subject in the 70’s.
- Motivation came from protecting tax emption status for segregated private church schools
- Jerry Falwell preached adamantly against desegregation early in his church
- Started white only Christian schools as a way to continue segregated schools
- 1971 Supreme Court Green v. Connally revoked tax-exemption of segregated schools
- A federal court forced the Carter administration to propose tougher enforcement rules in 1978
- Falwell first sermon against abortion was 1978 (months after Carter enforcement and 5 years after Roe v Wade)
- Jerry Falwell preached adamantly against desegregation early in his church
- Abortion as a political strategy
- The issue of racial segregation wasn’t a motivating issue for evangelicals
- Religious Right leaders used the issue of “abortion” and later “family values” instead
- Rallied Evangelicals to vote for Reagan to overturn Roe vs Wade and protect family values
- Reagan wasn’t very religious or prolife, but believed in tax exemption and talked a “religious good game”
- Evangelical ministers launched a massive wave of activism in Southern pews in support of the Reagan campaign
- Rallied Evangelicals to vote for Reagan to overturn Roe vs Wade and protect family values
- 1982 Reagan banned the IRS from denying schools tax exemption based on racial discrimination
- He never took outlawing abortion seriously despite this campaign promises
- 1983, the Supreme Court overruled Reagan and banned tax exemptions for schools that racially discriminate
- Motivated by 1980 success, Religious Right movement worked to get GOP elected on all levels
- Late 80’s religious activists like Stephen Hotze spread nationally propaganda like 1990, “Restoring America” video
- which included instructions for taking control of Republican precinct and county organizations
- Religious nationalists began to purge traditional Republicans from the region’s few GOP institutions
- Late 80’s religious activists like Stephen Hotze spread nationally propaganda like 1990, “Restoring America” video
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Politico: The Real Origins of the Religious Right
One of the most durable myths in recent history is that the religious right, the coalition of conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists, emerged as a political movement in response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling legalizing abortion. The tale goes something like this: Evangelicals, who had been politically quiescent for decades, were so morally outraged by Roe that they resolved to organize in order to overturn it.
This myth of origins is oft repeated by the movement’s leaders. In his 2005 book, Jerry Falwell, the firebrand fundamentalist preacher, recounts his distress upon reading about the ruling in the Jan. 23, 1973, edition of the Lynchburg News: “I sat there staring at the Roe v. Wade story,” Falwell writes, “growing more and more fearful of the consequences of the Supreme Court’s act and wondering why so few voices had been raised against it.” Evangelicals, he decided, needed to organize.
Some of these anti- Roe crusaders even went so far as to call themselves “new abolitionists,” invoking their antebellum predecessors who had fought to eradicate slavery.
But the abortion myth quickly collapses under historical scrutiny. In fact, it wasn’t until 1979—a full six years after Roe—that evangelical leaders, at the behest of conservative activist Paul Weyrich, seized on abortion not for moral reasons, but as a rallying-cry to deny President Jimmy Carter a second term. Why? Because the anti-abortion crusade was more palatable than the religious right’s real motive: protecting segregated schools. So much for the new abolitionism.
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Today, evangelicals make up the backbone of the pro-life movement, but it hasn’t always been so. Both before and for several years after Roe, evangelicals were overwhelmingly indifferent to the subject, which they considered a “Catholic issue.” In 1968, for instance, a symposium sponsored by the Christian Medical Society and Christianity Today, the flagship magazine of evangelicalism, refused to characterize abortion as sinful, citing “individual health, family welfare, and social responsibility” as justifications for ending a pregnancy. In 1971, delegates to the Southern Baptist Convention in St. Louis, Missouri, passed a resolution encouraging “Southern Baptists to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.” The convention, hardly a redoubt of liberal values, reaffirmed that position in 1974, one year after Roe, and again in 1976.
When the Roe decision was handed down, W. A. Criswell, the Southern Baptist Convention’s former president and pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas—also one of the most famous fundamentalists of the 20th century—was pleased: “I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person,” he said, “and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed.”
Although a few evangelical voices, including Christianity Today magazine, mildly criticized the ruling, the overwhelming response was silence, even approval. Baptists, in particular, applauded the decision as an appropriate articulation of the division between church and state, between personal morality and state regulation of individual behavior. “Religious liberty, human equality and justice are advanced by the Supreme Court abortion decision,” wrote W. Barry Garrett of Baptist Press.
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So what then were the real origins of the religious right? It turns out that the movement can trace its political roots back to a court ruling, but not Roe v. Wade.
In May 1969, a group of African-American parents in Holmes County, Mississippi, sued the Treasury Department to prevent three new whites-only K-12 private academies from securing full tax-exempt status, arguing that their discriminatory policies prevented them from being considered “charitable” institutions. The schools had been founded in the mid-1960s in response to the desegregation of public schools set in motion by the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954. In 1969, the first year of desegregation, the number of white students enrolled in public schools in Holmes County dropped from 771 to 28; the following year, that number fell to zero.
In Green v. Kennedy (David Kennedy was secretary of the treasury at the time), decided in January 1970, the plaintiffs won a preliminary injunction, which denied the “segregation academies” tax-exempt status until further review. In the meantime, the government was solidifying its position on such schools. Later that year, President Richard Nixon ordered the Internal Revenue Service to enact a new policy denying tax exemptions to all segregated schools in the United States. Under the provisions of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which forbade racial segregation and discrimination, discriminatory schools were not—by definition—“charitable” educational organizations, and therefore they had no claims to tax-exempt status; similarly, donations to such organizations would no longer qualify as tax-deductible contributions.
On June 30, 1971, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia issued its ruling in the case, now Green v. Connally (John Connally had replaced David Kennedy as secretary of the Treasury). The decision upheld the new IRS policy: “Under the Internal Revenue Code, properly construed, racially discriminatory private schools are not entitled to the Federal tax exemption provided for charitable, educational institutions, and persons making gifts to such schools are not entitled to the deductions provided in case of gifts to charitable, educational institutions.”
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Paul Weyrich, the late religious conservative political activist and co-founder of the Heritage Foundation, saw his opening.
In the decades following World War II, evangelicals, especially white evangelicals in the North, had drifted toward the Republican Party—inclined in that direction by general Cold War anxieties, vestigial suspicions of Catholicism and well-known evangelist Billy Graham’s very public friendship with Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. Despite these predilections, though, evangelicals had largely stayed out of the political arena, at least in any organized way. If he could change that, Weyrich reasoned, their large numbers would constitute a formidable voting bloc—one that he could easily marshal behind conservative causes.
“The new political philosophy must be defined by us [conservatives] in moral terms, packaged in non-religious language, and propagated throughout the country by our new coalition,” Weyrich wrote in the mid-1970s. “When political power is achieved, the moral majority will have the opportunity to re-create this great nation.” Weyrich believed that the political possibilities of such a coalition were unlimited. “The leadership, moral philosophy, and workable vehicle are at hand just waiting to be blended and activated,” he wrote. “If the moral majority acts, results could well exceed our wildest dreams.”
But this hypothetical “moral majority” needed a catalyst—a standard around which to rally. For nearly two decades, Weyrich, by his own account, had been trying out different issues, hoping one might pique evangelical interest: pornography, prayer in schools, the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, even abortion. “I was trying to get these people interested in those issues and I utterly failed,” Weyrich recalled at a conference in 1990.
The Green v. Connally ruling provided a necessary first step: It captured the attention of evangelical leaders , especially as the IRS began sending questionnaires to church-related “segregation academies,” including Falwell’s own Lynchburg Christian School, inquiring about their racial policies. Falwell was furious. “In some states,” he famously complained, “It’s easier to open a massage parlor than a Christian school.”
One such school, Bob Jones University—a fundamentalist college in Greenville, South Carolina—was especially obdurate. The IRS had sent its first letter to Bob Jones University in November 1970 to ascertain whether or not it discriminated on the basis of race. The school responded defiantly: It did not admit African Americans.
Although Bob Jones Jr., the school’s founder, argued that racial segregation was mandated by the Bible, Falwell and Weyrich quickly sought to shift the grounds of the debate, framing their opposition in terms of religious freedom rather than in defense of racial segregation. For decades, evangelical leaders had boasted that because their educational institutions accepted no federal money (except for, of course, not having to pay taxes) the government could not tell them how to run their shops—whom to hire or not, whom to admit or reject. The Civil Rights Act, however, changed that calculus.
Bob Jones University did, in fact, try to placate the IRS—in its own way. Following initial inquiries into the school’s racial policies, Bob Jones admitted one African-American, a worker in its radio station, as a part-time student; he dropped out a month later. In 1975, again in an attempt to forestall IRS action, the school admitted blacks to the student body, but, out of fears of miscegenation, refused to admit unmarried African-Americans. The school also stipulated that any students who engaged in interracial dating, or who were even associated with organizations that advocated interracial dating, would be expelled.
The IRS was not placated. On January 19, 1976, after years of warnings—integrate or pay taxes—the agency rescinded the school’s tax exemption.
For many evangelical leaders, who had been following the issue since Green v. Connally, Bob Jones University was the final straw. As Elmer L. Rumminger, longtime administrator at Bob Jones University, told me in an interview, the IRS actions against his school “alerted the Christian school community about what could happen with government interference” in the affairs of evangelical institutions. “That was really the major issue that got us all involved.”
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Weyrich saw that he had the beginnings of a conservative political movement, which is why, several years into President Jimmy Carter’s term, he and other leaders of the nascent religious right blamed the Democratic president for the IRS actions against segregated schools—even though the policy was mandated by Nixon, and Bob Jones University had lost its tax exemption a year and a day before Carter was inaugurated as president. Falwell, Weyrich and others were undeterred by the niceties of facts. In their determination to elect a conservative, they would do anything to deny a Democrat, even a fellow evangelical like Carter, another term in the White House.
But Falwell and Weyrich, having tapped into the ire of evangelical leaders, were also savvy enough to recognize that organizing grassroots evangelicals to defend racial discrimination would be a challenge. It had worked to rally the leaders, but they needed a different issue if they wanted to mobilize evangelical voters on a large scale.
By the late 1970s, many Americans—not just Roman Catholics—were beginning to feel uneasy about the spike in legal abortions following the 1973 Roe decision. The 1978 Senate races demonstrated to Weyrich and others that abortion might motivate conservatives where it hadn’t in the past. That year in Minnesota, pro-life Republicans captured both Senate seats (one for the unexpired term of Hubert Humphrey) as well as the governor’s mansion. In Iowa, Sen. Dick Clark, the Democratic incumbent, was thought to be a shoo-in: Every poll heading into the election showed him ahead by at least 10 percentage points. On the final weekend of the campaign, however, pro-life activists, primarily Roman Catholics, leafleted church parking lots (as they did in Minnesota), and on Election Day Clark lost to his Republican pro-life challenger.
In the course of my research into Falwell’s archives at Liberty University and Weyrich’s papers at the University of Wyoming, it became very clear that the 1978 election represented a formative step toward galvanizing everyday evangelical voters. Correspondence between Weyrich and evangelical leaders fairly crackles with excitement. In a letter to fellow conservative Daniel B. Hales, Weyrich characterized the triumph of pro-life candidates as “true cause for celebration,” and Robert Billings, a cobelligerent, predicted that opposition to abortion would “pull together many of our ‘fringe’ Christian friends.” Roe v. Wade had been law for more than five years.
Weyrich, Falwell and leaders of the emerging religious right enlisted an unlikely ally in their quest to advance abortion as a political issue: Francis A. Schaeffer—a goateed, knickers-wearing theologian who was warning about the eclipse of Christian values and the advance of something he called “secular humanism.” Schaeffer, considered by many the intellectual godfather of the religious right, was not known for his political activism, but by the late 1970s he decided that legalized abortion would lead inevitably to infanticide and euthanasia, and he was eager to sound the alarm. Schaeffer teamed with a pediatric surgeon, C. Everett Koop, to produce a series of films entitled Whatever Happened to the Human Race? In the early months of 1979, Schaeffer and Koop, targeting an evangelical audience, toured the country with these films, which depicted the scourge of abortion in graphic terms—most memorably with a scene of plastic baby dolls strewn along the shores of the Dead Sea. Schaeffer and Koop argued that any society that countenanced abortion was captive to “secular humanism” and therefore caught in a vortex of moral decay.
Between Weyrich’s machinations and Schaeffer’s jeremiad, evangelicals were slowly coming around on the abortion issue. At the conclusion of the film tour in March 1979, Schaeffer reported that Protestants, especially evangelicals, “have been so sluggish on this issue of human life, and Whatever Happened to the Human Race? is causing real waves, among church people and governmental people too.”
By 1980, even though Carter had sought, both as governor of Georgia and as president, to reduce the incidence of abortion, his refusal to seek a constitutional amendment outlawing it was viewed by politically conservative evangelicals as an unpardonable sin. Never mind the fact that his Republican opponent that year, Ronald Reagan, had signed into law, as governor of California in 1967, the most liberal abortion bill in the country. When Reagan addressed a rally of 10,000 evangelicals at Reunion Arena in Dallas in August 1980, he excoriated the “unconstitutional regulatory agenda” directed by the IRS “against independent schools,” but he made no mention of abortion. Nevertheless, leaders of the religious right hammered away at the issue, persuading many evangelicals to make support for a constitutional amendment outlawing abortion a litmus test for their votes.
Carter lost the 1980 election for a variety of reasons, not merely the opposition of the religious right. He faced a spirited challenge from within his own party; Edward M. Kennedy’s failed quest for the Democratic nomination undermined Carter’s support among liberals. And because Election Day fell on the anniversary of the Iran Hostage Crisis, the media played up the story, highlighting Carter’s inability to secure the hostages’ freedom. The electorate, once enamored of Carter’s evangelical probity, had tired of a sour economy, chronic energy shortages and the Soviet Union’s renewed imperial ambitions.
After the election results came in, Falwell, never shy to claim credit, was fond of quoting a Harris poll that suggested Carter would have won the popular vote by a margin of 1 percent had it not been for the machinations of the religious right. “I knew that we would have some impact on the national elections,” Falwell said, “but I had no idea that it would be this great.”
Given Carter’s political troubles, the defection of evangelicals may or may not have been decisive. But it is certainly true that evangelicals, having helped propel Carter to the White House four years earlier, turned dramatically against him, their fellow evangelical, during the course of his presidency. And the catalyst for their political activism was not, as often claimed, opposition to abortion. Although abortion had emerged as a rallying cry by 1980, the real roots of the religious right lie not the defense of a fetus but in the defense of racial segregation.
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The Bob Jones University case merits a postscript. When the school’s appeal finally reached the Supreme Court in 1982, the Reagan administration announced that it planned to argue in defense of Bob Jones University and its racial policies. A public outcry forced the administration to reconsider; Reagan backpedaled by saying that the legislature should determine such matters, not the courts. The Supreme Court’s decision in the case, handed down on May 24, 1983, ruled against Bob Jones University in an 8-to-1 decision. Three years later Reagan elevated the sole dissenter, William Rehnquist, to chief justice of the Supreme Court.
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How The Religious Right Became A Political Force | AJ+
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Further Readings
NPR: Evangelical: Religious Right Has Distorted the Faith
Slate: It Wasn’t Abortion That Formed the Religious Right. It Was Support for Segregation.
Politico: The Real Origins of the Religious Right
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Back to History of Housing Discrimination Top
Wealth Suppression Housing Discrimination
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Richard Rothstein : The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
“UNTIL LONG after emancipation from slavery, most African Americans were denied access to free labor markets and were unable to save from wages. This denial of access was another badge of slavery that Congress was duty bound to eliminate, not to perpetuate.
Following the Civil War, and intensifying after Reconstruction, a sharecropping system of indentured servitude perpetuated aspects of the slave system. After food and other living costs were deducted from their earnings, sharecroppers typically owed plantation owners more than their wages due. Local sheriffs enforced this peonage, preventing sharecroppers from seeking work elsewhere, by arresting, assaulting, or murdering those who attempted to leave, or by condoning violence perpetrated by owners.
In many instances, African Americans were arrested for petty and phony offenses (like vagrancy if they came to town when off work), and when they were unable to pay fines and court fees, wardens sometimes sold prisoners to plantations, mines, and factories. Douglas Blackmon, in his book Slavery by Another Name, estimates that from the end of Reconstruction until World War II, the number enslaved in this way exceeded 100,000. Mines operated by U.S. Steel alone used tens of thousands of imprisoned African Americans. The practice ebbed during World War II, but it wasn’t until 1951 that Congress fulfilled its Thirteenth Amendment obligation and explicitly outlawed the practice.
Some African Americans managed to escape to the North early in the twentieth century, yet others were forcibly prevented or intimidated from doing so. But during World War I, when immigration of unskilled Europeans was sharply curtailed,northern manufacturers sent recruiters south. They frequently traveled in disguise, pretending, for example, to be insurance salesmen, to avoid capture by sheriffs. During this time, more than 600,000 African Americans left the South, mostly to seek work in the North and Midwest. Historians call this the First Great Migration.
World War II then spurred the Second Great Migration, from 1940 to 1970, when more than four million African Americans made the journey. Thus most African Americans could not begin to accumulate capital for home purchases until fairly recently, well after European immigrant groups were able to participate in the wage economy. And when African Americans who left he South entered a northern labor market, federal, state, and local governments collaborated with private employers to ensure that they were paid less and treated worse than whites.
IN THE 1930s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt could assemble the congressional majorities he needed to adopt New Deal legislation only by including southern Democrats, who were fiercely committed to white supremacy. In consequence, Social Security, minimum wage protection, and the recognition of labor unions all excluded from coverage occupations in which African Americans predominated: agriculture and domestic service. State and local governments behaved similarly…
THE CREATION of racial ghettos was self-perpetuating: residence in a community where economic disadvantage is concentrated itself depresses disposable income, which makes departure more difficult. Restricting African Americans’ housing supply ledto higher rents and home prices in black neighborhoods than for similar accommodations in predominantly white ones. If African Americans had access to housing throughout metropolitan areas, supply and demand balances would have kept their rents and home prices at reasonable levels. Without access, landlords and sellers were free to take advantage of the greater demand, relative to supply, for African American housing.
This exploitation persisted throughout the twentieth century and was well understood by economists and social welfare experts. African Americans, of course, understood it as well. In his autobiography Langston Hughes described how, when his family lived in Cleveland in the 1910s, landlords could get as much as three times the rent from African Americans that they could get from whites, because so few homes were available to black families outside a few integrated urban neighborhoods. Landlords, Hughes remembered, subdivided apartments designed for a single family into five or six units, and still African Americans’ incomes had to be disproportionately devoted to rent. Four decades later little had changed. In its 1947 brief to the Supreme Court in Shelley v. Kraemer, the U.S. government cited half a dozen studies, each of which demonstrated that“[c]olored people are forced to pay higher rents and housing costs by the semi-monopoly which segregation fosters.” In 1954,the FHA estimated that African Americans were overcrowded at more than four times the rate of whites and were doubled up at three times the rate of whites because of the excessive rents they were forced to pay.
A Chicago Department of Public Welfare report in the mid-1920s stated that African Americans were charged about 20percent more in rent than whites for similar dwellings. It also observed that in neighborhoods undergoing racial change, rents increased by 50 to 225 percent when African Americans occupied apartments that formerly housed whites. The limited supply of housing open to African Americans gave property owners in black neighborhoods the opportunity to make exorbitant profits.”
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- After Reconstruction failed
- Majority Southern black people stuck in different forms of slavery
- Sharecropping, vagrancy laws, convict leasing, black codes, Jim Crow, etc
- More debt than wealth was accrued in these systems
- Many didn’t escape these systems till 1950-60s
- Sharecropping, vagrancy laws, convict leasing, black codes, Jim Crow, etc
- Majority Southern black people stuck in different forms of slavery
- Black people who “escaped” to North and West
- Face significant economic barriers
- Discrimination in hiring, at work, unions, pay, benefits, banking, etc.
- Typically paid more for rent, homes, property tax, insurance, etc.
- Higher risk of eviction, foreclosure, arrest, violence, etc.
- Often forced into ghettos, concentrating poverty
- Which decreases jobs, public services, schools, property value, etc.
- Increase crime, police brutality, displacement, etc.
- Excluded from gov programs like FHA, VA, labor laws, etc.
- Lack of home equality to borrow from
- 1934-68 – 98% of home loans, the number one way to accrue generational equity, were only given to white people
- Created a middle class for white people while leaving people of color in post depression poverty
- Face significant economic barriers
- Contract Buying Stats
- According to the report, “The Plunder of Black Wealth in Chicago: New Findings on the Lasting Toll of Predatory Housing Contracts.”
- Between 75 percent and 95 percent of homes sold to black families during the 1950s and 1960s were sold on contract.
- The price markup on homes sold on contract was 84%.
- African Americans who bought on contract paid, on average, an additional $587 (in current dollars) more a month than if they had a conventional mortgage.
- Black families in Chicago lost between $3 billion and $4 billion in wealth because of predatory housing contracts during the 1950s and 1960s
- According to the report, “The Plunder of Black Wealth in Chicago: New Findings on the Lasting Toll of Predatory Housing Contracts.”
- Lack of generational wealth
- 1989 data shows:
- 6% of black households inherited wealth from the previous generations
- average inheritance was $42,000
- 24% (4x as much) white households inherited wealth
- Average inheritance was $145,000
- 6% of black households inherited wealth from the previous generations
- 1989 data shows:
- The advantages of homeownership over the last century, help white families:
- Accrue wealth faster
- Pay for higher education
- Avoid debt
- Better health statistics
- Live in neighborhoods that have more opportunities, more employment, safer, better schools, etc
“seventy years ago, many working and lower middle class African American families could have afforded suburban single-family homes that cost about $75,000 (in today’s currency) with no down payment. Millions of whites did so. But working and lower-middle class African American families cannot now buy homes for $350,000 and more with down payments of 20 percent, or $70,000 The Fair Housing Act of 1968 prohibited future discrimination, but it was not primarily discrimination (although this still contributed) that kept African Americans out of most white suburbs after the law was passed. It was primarily unaffordability…the advantages that FHA and VA loans gave the white lower-middle class in the 1940s and 50s has become permanent.” Richard Rothstein – Color of Law
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EPI: The Making of Ferguson
Public labor market policy contributing to segregation
This report has described the public – federal, state, and local – housing policies that contributed to the residential segregation of Ferguson and the entire St. Louis metropolitan area. Without these policies, we would not be confronted with the racial inequality and conflict we continue to experience today. While it is beyond the scope of this report to fully explore the nonhousing public policies contributing to residential segregation, labor market and employment policy has had such a direct impact on housing that it warrants brief mention here.
If state-sponsored labor and employment discrimination reduced the incomes of African Americans relative to whites in St. Louis, the ability of African Americans to afford housing in middle-class suburbs would have suffered, even in the absence of specific housing discrimination. And, indeed, public labor and employment policy did play such a role.
Defense plants like McDonnell Douglas were, by the 1970s, mostly welcoming to black workers, but this was a relatively late development. During World War II, St. Louis was the site of a large arms and ammunition industry. The St. Louis Small Arms Ammunition Plant alone employed 40,000 workers.89 At first, this federally controlled plant would not hire African Americans except as janitors, landscape gardeners, or other service workers, but after civil rights demonstrations at the plant in 1942, the plant agreed to hire blacks for production work – but only on a separate, segregated production line. In 1944, the plant finally agreed to integrate its production lines, but by then, the war was nearly over.90
The federal government also had a role in other industries’ treatment of black workers. For example, while the United Auto Workers union at the Chrysler plant in the St. Louis suburb of Fenton was unusually hospitable to black workers, unions in other industries denied membership and thus jobs to African Americans. In St. Louis (and elsewhere) these whites-only unions nonetheless were recognized as exclusive bargaining agents by the federal government. This had an especially big impact in the construction trades, which offered numerous jobs during the suburban housing boom but excluded African American workers. Eventually the National Labor Relations Board concluded that it was violating the Constitution when it certified unions that denied membership to black workers, but it did not make such a ruling until the suburban housing boom was mostly complete.
The lower incomes of African Americans today cannot be understood in isolation from the history of pervasive housing segregation. By keeping black families out of the better-off suburbs, segregation not only deprived them of the opportunity to build wealth through rising home equity, but contributed to (and was reinforced by) what urban scholars term the “spatial mismatch” between the neighborhoods where African Americans mostly lived, and the better suburban jobs they had difficulty accessing. After World War II and accelerating in the 1950s and 1960s, industrial corporations nationwide relocated facilities from city to suburb, or established new suburban plants. This phenomenon can be seen in the trajectory of employment opportunities in the city of St. Louis. From 1951 to 1967, the number of jobs in the city of St. Louis declined by 20 percent, while those in suburban St. Louis County increased by 400 percent.91
For black workers who were able to commute to work in the suburbs, higher commuting costs reduced incomes relative to incomes of whites. From 1959 to 2009, Chrysler operated its assembly plant in suburban Fenton. Black workers living in the St. Louis ghetto and unable to live near the plant spent up to an hour, each way, commuting. But many more black workers were simply unable to take jobs at the Chrysler plant because they could not get there. In the 1960s, Chrysler made a special effort to recruit black workers for a training program for production jobs. The program’s retention rate was only 40 percent, mostly because of absenteeism due to transportation difficulties.92 Today, the town of Fenton remains 96 percent white, less than 0.5 percent black.
We now understand that, for both races, intergenerational income mobility – the ability of adult children to do better than their parents – is quite limited, which means we are still paying a price for these labor market practices. Contemporary conditions in Ferguson are but one illustration.
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Back to History of Housing Discrimination Top
Richard Rothstein Color of Law List of De Jure Discrimination
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“In the twentieth century, federal, state, and local officials did not resist majority opinion with regard to race. Instead, they endorsed and reinforced it, actively and aggressively.
- If government had declined to build racially separate public housing in cities where segregation hadn’t previously taken root, and instead had scattered integrated development throughout the community, those cities might have developed in a less racially toxic fashion, with fewer desperate ghettos and more diverse suburbs.
- If the federal government had not urged suburbs to adopt exclusionary zoning laws, white flight would have been minimized because there would have been fewer racially exclusive suburbs to which frightened homeowners could flee.
- If the government had told developers that they could have FHA guarantees only if the homes they built were open to all, integrated working-class suburbs would likely have matured with both African Americans and whites sharing the benefits.
- If state courts had not blessed private discrimination by ordering the eviction of African American homeowners in neighborhoods where association rules and restrictive covenants barred their residence, middle-class African Americans would have been able gradually to integrate previously white communities as they developed financial means to do so.
- If churches, universities, and hospitals had faced loss of tax-exempt status for their promotion of restrictive covenants, they most likely would have refrained from such activity.
- If police had arrested, rather than encouraged, leaders of mob violence when African Americans moved into previously white neighborhoods, racial transitions would have been smoother.
- If state real estate commissions had denied licenses to brokers who claimed an “ethical” obligation to imposes segregations, those brokers might have guided the evolution of interracial neighborhoods.
- If school boards had not placed schools and drawn attendance boundaries to ensure the reparations of black and white pupils, families might not have had to relocate to have access to education for their children.
- If federal and state highway planners had not used urban interstates to demolish African American neighborhoods and forced their resistant deeper into urban ghettos, black impoverishment would have lessened, and some displaced families might have accumulated the resourced to improve their housing and its location.
- If government had given black same labor-market rights that other citizens enjoyed, black working-class families would not have been trapped in lower-income minority communities, from lack of funds to live elsewhere.
- If the fed government had not exploited the racial boundaries it had created in metropolitan areas, by spending billions on tax breaks for single-family suburban homeowners, while failing to spend adequate funds on transportation networks that could bring African Americans to job opportunities, the inequality on which segregation feeds would have diminished.
- If federal programs were not, even to this day, reinforcing racial isolation by disproportionately directing low-income African Americans who receive housing assistance into the segregated neighborhoods that government had previously established, we might see many more inclusive communities.
Undoing the effects of de jure segregation will be incomparable difficult. To make a start, we will first have to contemplate what we have collectively done and on behalf of our government, accept responsibility. “ Richard Rothstein – Color of law
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Back to History of Housing Discrimination Top
Fair Housing Act of 1968
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History: Fair Housing Act
The Fair Housing Act of 1968 prohibited discrimination concerning the sale, rental and financing of housing based on race, religion, national origin or sex. Intended as a follow-up to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the bill was the subject of a contentious debate in the Senate, but was passed quickly by the House of Representatives in the days after the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. The Fair Housing Act stands as the final great legislative achievement of the civil rights era.
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Nikole Hannah-Jones: Living Apart: How the Government Betrayed a Landmark Civil Rights Law
LBJ Tries to Change Minds in the ’60s
When the 1960s brought protests in the South against Jim Crow laws, civil rights leaders found an unlikely ally in the White House.
President Lyndon B. Johnson brushed aside the Southern leaders of his own party, pushing through landmark legislation that outlawed discrimination in voting, employment, public accommodations and public education.
One issue remained beyond the reach of Johnson’s legendary persuasive skills: housing.
The president had contemplated introducing fair housing legislation as early as 1964, but his staff advised against it.
Johnson persisted, arguing that residential segregation was the wellspring of all other racial inequities. Just as Congress was passing some of the most far-reaching civil rights laws since Reconstruction, Northern ghettos erupted. In the three years before King’s assassination, African Americans took to the streets in more than 100 cities. The rioting prompted Johnson to press harder for legislation to undo the nation’s segregated housing patterns.
In 1966, he turned for help to Mondale, a 38-year-old senator from Minnesota not long into his first term. A former majority leader, Johnson held personal relationships with the Senate’s most powerful figures. But housing was so toxic an issue, the president couldn’t find anyone else to lead the fight.
“I was young and I thought I could do anything,” said Mondale, now grayer but still an optimist. “I was a bit flattered that I’d get a bill that was so important.”
With the help of co-sponsors Mondale and Edward Brooke of Massachusetts, then the only African American in the Senate, Johnson proposed a bill to ban discrimination in the sale or rental of housing. It went nowhere.
Mondale understood why his liberal colleagues were discomfited by the measure. If it came to the floor, pressure from constituents would force them to vote against it, making them look like hypocrites.
“A lot of civil rights was about making the South behave and taking the teeth from George Wallace,” Mondale said, referring to the famously racist governor of Alabama who ran for president in 1964, 1968, 1972 and 1976. “This came right to the neighborhoods across the country. This was civil rights getting personal.”
Johnson, who had considered the 1966 housing bill his most devastating political defeat, did not back down. In the summer of 1967, Mondale called a black veteran to testify. Decorated for his service in Vietnam, Carlos Campbell had been appointed to a job in the Pentagon. Standing rigid in a crisp white uniform, he told the Senate housing and urban affairs subcommittee how he and his wife were unable to rent an apartment in the white neighborhoods near his new post in Arlington, Va., even with the help of the Defense Department’s housing office.
“Up until the spring of 1965 I was largely convinced that our racial problems were rapidly diminishing and that education, professional credibility, and financial integrity were the necessary vehicles for obtaining full rights as a citizen,” Campbell said. Once off the military base, he said, he’d been forced to “re-examine my philosophy.” The man who had, in his own words, been entrusted with “safeguarding the nation’s most delicate secrets” told senators that he had been turned away from more than 36 apartments because of his race.
“I remember old Dick Russell, that old segregationist, said, ‘I am for segregation, but how do we tell black Americans who have fought and died for us that they have to go back in the box?’” Mondale said. “That was always the Achilles’ heel, and this helped bring that to the front.”
Minds were slowly changing. But the bill died again.
Two developments revived it.
Johnson had asked a blue-ribbon panel to study the riots and make recommendations on how to prevent such violence in the future.
The Kerner Commission’s searing conclusion — that the United States was “moving toward two societies, one black, one white — separate and unequal” — is enshrined in the history books.
What is less well-remembered was the basis for that finding. The commission blamed housing segregation for the riots. “What white Americans have never fully understood — but what the Negro can never forget — is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto,” the panel wrote. “White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.” The report called for a federal fair housing law.
Days later, on April 4, 1968, an assassin killed King on the balcony of a Memphis motel. Black communities again exploded in riots.
Washington, D.C., which had recently become majority black, was among the hardest hit. Mondale recalled flying over the nation’s capital in a helicopter thinking, “By God, it looks like Vietnam.”
“You could see the fires from the Capitol and the whole place seemed to be in flames,” he said. “The city was locked down, the Capitol was under guard, and nobody knew what was going to happen. The nation came close to pulling apart.”
Many lawmakers shared Mondale’s fear that the horrific conditions of the nation’s ghettos had set the stage for a cycle of deepening violence and confrontation.
Johnson used the shock following King’s assassination to his advantage, urging Congress to pass the long-delayed housing bill as a tribute to the slain leader.
The housing legislation, Mondale said, had been the most filibustered bill in history. But when lawmakers took up the bill this time, “They didn’t dare,” Mondale recalled. “They didn’t dare hold it up.”
Just six days after King died, Congress passed Title VIII of the 1968 Civil Rights Act, commonly known as the Fair Housing Act. As the votes in the House were tallied — 250-171 — armed National Guardsmen ringed the Capitol to protect Congress from the rioters in burning slums just a few blocks away.
Johnson signed the bill into law April 11. “We have passed many civil rights pieces of legislation,” he said. “But none is more important than this.”
The law banned racial discrimination in the sale or rental of housing, block busting (in which real estate agents move a black family into a white neighborhood and use it to frighten white homeowners into selling, turning the neighborhood from white to black), racial steering (in which real estate agents steer home seekers to racially distinct neighborhoods), and intimidation and coercion.
Then it went a step further. The law required federal officials to do everything possible to “affirmatively further” fair housing. This odd turn of phrase, which was not further defined, distinguished the housing law from almost all other civil rights legislation. It didn’t just ban discrimination. It charged the government to act to bring about “integrated and balanced living patterns,” according to Mondale’s statements at the time.
To accomplish this, the law directed HUD to create a civil rights office that would enforce the new law. According to Brooke, the intent was to enable the government to “withhold funds or defer action” to dismantle segregation.
By including this provision, lawmakers were acknowledging that previous statutes and presidential orders addressing housing discrimination had been ignored. President Kennedy had signed an executive order in 1962 banning discrimination in federally subsidized housing. Nothing changed. The 1964 civil rights law banned racial discrimination by any agency that received federal money. It, too, made no difference.
Mondale and the bill’s floor managers made concessions to secure the law’s passage that weakened HUD’s enforcement powers.
One key compromise limited HUD’s ability to punish discriminatory landlords and real estate agents. The original draft envisioned a mounting schedule of fines. The final version gave HUD only the authority to seek voluntary settlements. If landlords refused, the agency could do nothing but inform those complaining of discrimination to file private lawsuits. Moreover, by capping damages for successful claims at $1,000, the act made such lawsuits thoroughly impractical.
Mondale viewed the law as a first step, envisaging a succession of bills that would address weaknesses in the Fair Housing Act.
From the start, HUD was whipsawed by conflicting mandates. Cobbled together from agencies that just a few years earlier had openly pushed segregation, HUD was supposed to transform itself into a force for civil rights. Not surprisingly, the agency’s predominant focus remained on creating housing as fast as possible.
“For 40 years we tried to get interest in enforcement,” Mondale said. “There have been many times that I have been disappointed with federal enforcement of this law.”
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- Outlawed housing discrimination
- Declared “legal” housing discrimination unconstitutional
- Prohibits
- Racial steering, Racial covenants, Blockbusting, Redlining, intimidation, coercion, etc.
- Many old and new discriminatory practices still continued regardless
- Didn’t address past discrimination
- By 1968 houses in white neighborhoods were no longer affordable
- Creating economic segregation
- 1934-1968 – 98% of home loans were only given to white people
- By 1968 houses in white neighborhoods were no longer affordable
“seventy years ago, many working and lower middle class African American families could have afforded suburban single-family homes that cost about $75,000 (in today’s currency) with no down payment. Millions of whites did so. But working and lower-middle class African American families cannot now buy homes for $350,000 and more with down payments of 20 percent, or $70,000 The Fair Housing Act of 1968 prohibited future discrimination, but it was not primarily discrimination (although this still contributed) that kept African Americans out of most white suburbs after the law was passed. It was primarily unaffordability…the advantages that FHA and VA loans gave the white lower-middle class in the 1940s and 50s has become permanent.” Richard Rothstein – Color of Law
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Fair Housing Act Directive to HUD
- Directed HUD to “affirmatively further” fair housing
- George Romney only head of HUD to try to do this with “Open Communities”
- Pressured white communities to
- build more affordable housing and end discriminatory zoning practices
- By rejecting HUD grants for projects from communities that fostered segregated housing
- Pressured white communities to
- Was stopped and dismissed by Nixon
- George Romney only head of HUD to try to do this with “Open Communities”
“I realize that this position will lead us to a situation in which blacks will continue to live for the most part in black neighborhoods and where there will be predominately black schools and predominately white schools.” Nixon, 1972 “eyes only” memo
- Since then HUD has given over $137 billion to over 1,200 communities
- HUD has only rejected 2 grants due to violating the Fair Housing Act
- Despite evidence of discrimination and lack of addressing it in most communities that receive HUD grants
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Nikole Hannah-Jones: Living Apart: How the Government Betrayed a Landmark Civil Rights Law
“A few months after Congress passed a landmark law directing the federal government to dismantle segregation in the nation’s housing, President Nixon’s housing chief began plotting a stealth campaign.
The plan, George Romney wrote in a confidential memo to aides, was to use his power as secretary of Housing and Urban Development to remake America’s housing patterns, which he described as a “high-income white noose” around the black inner city.
The 1968 Fair Housing Act, passed months earlier in the tumultuous aftermath of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, directed the government to “affirmatively further” fair housing. Romney believed those words gave him the authority to pressure predominantly white communities to build more affordable housing and end discriminatory zoning practices.
Romney ordered HUD officials to reject applications for water, sewer and highway projects from cities and states where local policies fostered segregated housing.
He dubbed his initiative “Open Communities” and did not clear it with the White House. As word spread that HUD was turning down grants, Nixon’s supporters in the South and in white Northern suburbs took their complaints directly to the president.
Nixon intervened immediately.
“Stop this one,” Nixon scrawled in a note on a memo written by John Ehrlichman, his domestic policy chief.
In a 1972 “eyes only” memo to Ehrlichman and H.R. Haldeman, another aide, Nixon explained his position. “I am convinced that while legal segregation is totally wrong that forced integration of housing or education is just as wrong,” he wrote.
The president understood the consequences: “I realize that this position will lead us to a situation in which blacks will continue to live for the most part in black neighborhoods and where there will be predominately black schools and predominately white schools.”
Romney, the former governor of Michigan and father of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, held his ground. Notations and memos in his private papers show that he viewed the blighted black ghettos as a root cause of the inner-city riots of the 1960s. “Equal opportunity for all Americans in education and housing is essential if we are going to keep our nation from being torn apart,” he wrote in talking points he drew up for a meeting with the president.
Romney’s stance made him a pariah within the administration. Nixon shut down the program, refused to meet with his housing secretary and finally drove him from the Cabinet.
Over the next four decades, a ProPublica investigation shows, a succession of presidents — Democrat and Republican alike — followed Nixon’s lead, declining to use the leverage of HUD’s billions to fight segregation.
Their reluctance to enforce a law passed by both houses of Congress and repeatedly upheld by the courts reflects a larger political reality. Again and again, attempts to create integrated neighborhoods have foundered in the face of vehement opposition from homeowners.
“The lack of political courage around these issues is stunning,” said Elizabeth Julian, a former senior HUD official. “The failures of fair housing are not just by HUD but by the country.”
Nixon’s vision for America largely came to pass and the costs have been steep. More than 20 years of research has implicated residential segregation in virtually every aspect of racial inequality, from higher unemployment rates for African Americans, to poorer health care, to elevated infant mortality rates and, most of all, to inferior schools.
HUD’s largest program of grants to states, cities and towns has delivered $137 billion to more than 1,200 communities since 1974. To receive the money, localities are supposed to identify obstacles to fair housing, keep records of their efforts to overcome them, and certify that they do not discriminate.
ProPublica could find only two occasions since Romney’s tenure in which the department withheld money from communities for violating the Fair Housing Act. In several instances, records show, HUD has sent grants to communities even after they’ve been found by courts to have promoted segregated housing or been sued by the U.S. Department of Justice. New Orleans, for example, has continued to receive grants after the Justice Department sued it for violating that Fair Housing Act by blocking a low-income housing project in a wealthy historic neighborhood…
Present and former officials in HUD’s Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity said their attempts to enforce the 1968 law were met with indifference or opposition from the agency’s senior officials.
The office has the smallest staff and budget of HUD’s four major programs. Several officials in key positions said they had never been trained to enforce the law’s requirement to “affirmatively further” fair housing. In most cases, HUD does not even check the paperwork filed by cities and states about their efforts to deal with segregation and other issues that stymie integrated housing; it simply writes checks.
“People say integration has failed,” said Julian, an assistant secretary for fair housing during the Clinton administration. “It hasn’t failed because it’s never been tried.”
“
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Modern Housing Discrimination
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Media Matters: What you need to know about housing discrimination
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An annual report released by the National Fair Housing Alliance Wednesday highlights the impact this segregation has had on fair housing, as well as the ways in which current policies and practices continue to reinforce and perpetuation segregation and inequality. The 108-page report, “The Case for Fair Housing,” compiles data from a large swath of fair housing organizations and government agencies to provide a contemporary snapshot of housing discrimination.
Here are some of the most striking findings from the report.
There were 28,181 complaints of housing discrimination in 2016. These complaints took many forms: a college denying a student of a reasonable accommodation requests; denial of mobile home rentals to African-American applicants; discriminatory concentration of affordable housing; refusal to rent to people with mental disabilities; housing discrimination on social media platforms and sites like Airbnb; discriminatory targeting of predatory lending against borrowers refinancing their mortgages; or discriminatory maintenance and marketing of bank-owned, post-foreclosure properties.
This number is likely way low. Most people don’t report racial, ethnic or religious housing discrimination. NFHA estimates that more than 4 million cases of housing discrimination occur each year.
Most complaints made are about accessibility barriers and other disability issues. While the report focused mostly on black/white segregation, more than half of the complaints involved discrimination based on disability, followed by nearly 20 percent based on racial discrimination and 8.5 percent based on discrimination against families with kids. NFHA also notes that disability is often easier to detect than other types of discrimination.
Housing discrimination impacts renters the most. More than 90 percent of all housing discrimination occurred during rental transactions, even though renters are often in greater need of affordable housing than homeowners.
The majority of the complaints — 70 percent — were addressed by local, private fair housing organizations. Fair Housing Assistance Program agencies processed 25 percent of complaints, HUD processed 4.8 percent, and the DOJ processed only .14 percent. Local leaders and agencies in Chicago, Houston, St. Louis and elsewhere are working to tackle this problem, but are low on funding and support. It’s essential, NFHA says, for congress and the federal government to increase funding for local fair housing efforts, and for the philanthropic community to get more involved in solving housing discrimination. HUD and other government agencies also need to more aggressively enforce the Fair Housing Act.
Housing discrimination isn’t getting better. If anything, it’s getting worse. 2016 saw an uptick in housing-related hate activity, and since last fall there has also been an increase in hate crimes involving people who were harassed in their neighborhoods or at home.
The report highlights a few things holding the country back on making progress on fair housing, including a need for more advocacy, and that many prospective funders feel that its in conflict with their mission or corporate agenda to focus on fair housing. Another issue is simply apathy.
Part of the problem is that many of those who regard themselves as unaffected by inequities do not care that there are inequities. Some may believe they are insulated from inequities because of their wealth, race, religion, family status, or lack of a disability. But all communities do better — all people do better — when others do better. Increased opportunity for all does not mean decreased opportunities for others.
NFHA’s recommendations are mostly aimed at the federal government, including: create an independent fair housing agency; strengthen the Fair Housing Initiatives program; improve equal access to credit; and reestablish the President’s Fair Housing Council. Ultimately, NFHA argues, addressing fair housing is one of the most important steps the country can take toward becoming a more just and inclusive society.
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Modern Forms of Housing Discrimination
- Race Neutral discrimination
- Affordability
- “70 years ago, many working and lower middle class African American families could have afforded suburban single-family homes that cost about $75,000 (in today’s currency) with no down payment. Millions of whites did so. But working and lower-middle class African American families cannot now buy homes for $350,000 and more with down payments of 20 percent, or $70,000 The Fair Housing Act of 1968 prohibited future discrimination, but it was not primarily discrimination (although this still contributed) that kept African Americans out of most white suburbs after the law was passed. It was primarily unaffordability…the advantages that FHA and VA loans gave the white lower-middle class in the 1940s and 50s has become permanent.” Richard Rothstein – Color of Law
- Exclusionary zoning
- 1917 SCOTUS Buchanan v. Warley, outlawed racial ordinances
- Although many racial ordinances continued illegally for many decades up to 1960s
- Or found other legal exclusionary zoning like
- Prohibiting multi-family units/single family unit only in white communities
- Excluded poor people but disproportionately were people of color
- Still used today
- Created zoning where polluting industries, negative commercial (liquer stores, etc), waste (including toxic)
- Could only be built in black communities (Industrial and toxic zoning)
- 1921, President Hardy created commission to help cities create zoning ordinances
- Helped advise many cities to use zoning to segregated races
- Excluded poor people but disproportionately were people of color
- Prohibiting multi-family units/single family unit only in white communities
- 1917 SCOTUS Buchanan v. Warley, outlawed racial ordinances
- Affordability
Wikipedia: Exlusionary Zoing
“Exclusionary zoning is the use of zoning ordinances to exclude certain types of land uses from a given community.[1] As of the 2010s, exclusionary zoning ordinances are standard in almost all communities. Exclusionary zoning was introduced in the early 1900s, typically to prevent racial and ethnic minorities from moving into middle- and upper-class neighborhoods. Municipalities use zoning to limit the supply of available housing units, such as by prohibiting multi-family residential dwellings or setting minimum lot size requirements. These ordinances raise costs, making it less likely that lower-income groups will move in. Development fees for variance (land use), a building permit, a certificate of occupancy, a filing (legal) cost, special permits and planned-unit development applications for new housing also raise prices to levels inaccessible for lower income people.
Exclusionary zoning is done to safeguard the individual’s property value, reduce traffic congestion, and exclude unalike groups. Exclusionary land-use policies exacerbate social segregation by deterring any racial and economic integration, decrease the total housing supply of a region and raise housing prices. As well, regions with much economic segregation channel lower income students into lower performing schools thereby prompting educational achievement differences. A comprehensive survey in 2008 found that over 80% of United States jurisdictions imposed minimum lot size requirements of some kind on their inhabitants.[2] These ordinances continue to reinforce discriminatory housing practices throughout the United States.”
- Discriminatory Credit Scoring
- Studies found proprietary credit score algorithms have discriminatory impact on borrowers of color
- Credit scoring model does not factor consumer data on rent, utility, and cellphone bill payment
- Which disproportionately hurts minorities, young people and first-time homebuyers
- “Our current credit scoring systems have a disparate impact on people and communities of color.These systems are rooted in our long history of housing discrimination and the dual credit market that resulted from it.Moreover, many credit scoring mechanisms include factors that do not just assess therisk characteristics of the borrower; they also reflect the riskiness of the environment in which a consumeris utilizing credit as well as the riskiness of the types of product a consumer uses.” NFHA: Discriminatory Effects of Credit Scoring on Communities of Color
The Guardian: Credit scores in America perpetuate racial injustice. Here’s how
In response to aggressive marketing by the “big three” multinational credit bureaus – Equifax, Experian and TransUnion – employers, landlords and insurance companies now use credit reports and scores to make decisions that have major bearing on our social and economic opportunities. These days, your credit history can make or break whether you get a job or apartment, or access to decent, affordable insurance and loans.
Credit reports and scores are not race neutral. Rather, they embed existing racial inequities in our credit system and economy – to the point that a person’s credit information serves as a proxy for race.
For decades, banks have systematically redlined black and Latino neighborhoods, refusing to make conventional loans or locate branches in non-white and lower-income areas, notwithstanding laws that obligate banks to meet the credit needs of all communities they serve, consistent with safe and sound banking operations. Thanks to financial services deregulation and the advent of asset-backed securitization, a multi-billion dollar “fringe” financial system has filled the void, characterized by high-cost, destabilizing products and services, from payday loans to check-cashers – which banks typically also own or finance.
People and communities of color have been disproportionately targeted for high-cost, predatory loans, intrinsically risky financial products that predictably lead to higher delinquency and default rates than non-predatory loans. As a consequence, black people and Latinos are more likely than their white counterparts to have damaged credit.
This firmly-entrenched two-tiered financial system has had devastating consequences for entire neighborhoods of color. Starting in the 1990s, financial institutions began flooding historically-redlined neighborhoods with predatory mortgages that ultimately led to the meltdown of the global economy. Waves of foreclosures hammered neighborhoods of color for more than a decade before the crash and black and Latino Americans bore the brunt of the ensuing foreclosure crisis, recession and spiking unemployment. Droves of people turned to high-rate credit cards to cover even basic expenses, contributing to the consumer debt crisis and spawning a bottom-feeding debt-buying industry that purchases old debts on the cheap and then uses the courts to extract judgments disproportionately from people and communities of color. These judgments are then listed in their credit reports, which also brings down their credit scores, in turn limiting a whole range of opportunities.
Although Wall Street is no longer pumping toxic mortgages into black and Latino neighborhoods, people and neighborhoods of color continue to reel from the foreclosure crisis, which many predict is far from over. Meanwhile, racially discriminatory and subprime auto lending are on the rise, payday lenders continue to extract billions of dollars from low-wage workers, and student loan debt has surpassed the trillion dollar mark. One in five Americans has unpaid medical debt, with more than half of all African-Americans and Latinos carrying medical debt on their credit cards. By definition, people who take payday loans and have uninsured medical debt are struggling, and are likely to miss payments. Missed payments translate into decreased credit scores.
This information – unpaid medical and credit card debt, student loans, and mortgages, as well as foreclosures, bankruptcies, debt collection judgments, wage garnishments – appears on people’s credit reports and lowers their credit scores. And the credit bureaus make humongous profits by selling this information about all of us.
In New York City, a coalition of labor, community and civil rights groups recently won the strongest ban on employment credit checks in the country. It’s a major economic justice victory, but we know it’s just a first step. We knocked down this discriminatory barrier because there is no demonstrated connection between a person’s credit history and his or her likely job performance or character. Credit checks can also block applicants with no or “thin” credit histories, including many students and immigrants. Rather, using credit information to make hiring decisions – or to rent apartments, set insurance terms, or extend credit – is a clear way to perpetuate inequality, poverty and segregation.
Credit reports and scores are mirrors of our manifestly two-tiered financial system, and more broadly our system of racial wealth inequality and unequal opportunity. In our culture, indebtedness – and certainly failure to pay one’s debts – is deeply entwined with concepts of morality. The insidious notion that our credit history speaks to our reliability as human beings is largely taken for granted.”
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- Racial Steering, modern redlining, racist landlords
- Estimated 4 million housing discrimination experiences a year
Reveal: For people of color, banks are shutting the door to homeownership
“Fifty years after the federal Fair Housing Act banned racial discrimination in lending, African Americans and Latinos continue to be routinely denied conventional mortgage loans at rates far higher than their white counterparts.
This modern-day redlining persisted in 61 metro areas even when controlling for applicants’ income, loan amount and neighborhood, according to a mountain of Home Mortgage Disclosure Act records analyzed by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting.
The yearlong analysis, based on 31 million records, relied on techniques used by leading academics, the Federal Reserve and Department of Justice to identify lending disparities.
It found a pattern of troubling denials for people of color across the country, including in major metropolitan areas such as Atlanta, Detroit, Philadelphia, St. Louis and San Antonio. African Americans faced the most resistance in Southern cities – Mobile, Alabama; Greenville, North Carolina; and Gainesville, Florida – and Latinos in Iowa City, Iowa…
The analysis – independently reviewed and confirmed by The Associated Press – showed black applicants were turned away at significantly higher rates than whites in 48 cities, Latinos in 25, Asians in nine and Native Americans in three. In Washington, D.C., the nation’s capital, Reveal found all four groups were significantly more likely to be denied a home loan than whites.
- Devaluation of black homes
- Black homes undervalued by $48,000 on average
- Amounting to $156 billion in cumulative losses
- Black homes undervalued by $48,000 on average
- Reverse redlining
- Subprime loans
- POC 2.8x more likely to be denied for a regular loan
- POC 2.4x more likely to receive a subprime loan
- Foreclosures of 2008
- POC 2x as likely to enter foreclosure during the 2008 recession
- Subprime loans
Ta-Nehisi Coates: The Case for Reparations
In 2010, Jacob S. Rugh, then a doctoral candidate at Princeton, and the sociologist Douglas S. Massey published a study of the recent foreclosure crisis. Among its drivers, they found an old foe: segregation. Black home buyers—even after controlling for factors like creditworthiness—were still more likely than white home buyers to be steered toward subprime loans. Decades of racist housing policies by the American government, along with decades of racist housing practices by American businesses, had conspired to concentrate African Americans in the same neighborhoods. As in North Lawndale half a century earlier, these neighborhoods were filled with people who had been cut off from mainstream financial institutions. When subprime lenders went looking for prey, they found black people waiting like ducks in a pen.
“High levels of segregation create a natural market for subprime lending,” Rugh and Massey write, “and cause riskier mortgages, and thus foreclosures, to accumulate disproportionately in racially segregated cities’ minority neighborhoods.”
Plunder in the past made plunder in the present efficient. The banks of America understood this. In 2005, Wells Fargo promoted a series of Wealth Building Strategies seminars. Dubbing itself “the nation’s leading originator of home loans to ethnic minority customers,” the bank enrolled black public figures in an ostensible effort to educate blacks on building “generational wealth.” But the “wealth building” seminars were a front for wealth theft. In 2010, the Justice Department filed a discrimination suit against Wells Fargo alleging that the bank had shunted blacks into predatory loans regardless of their creditworthiness. This was not magic or coincidence or misfortune. It was racism reifying itself. According to The New York Times, affidavits found loan officers referring to their black customers as “mud people” and to their subprime products as “ghetto loans.”
“We just went right after them,” Beth Jacobson, a former Wells Fargo loan officer, told The Times. “Wells Fargo mortgage had an emerging-markets unit that specifically targeted black churches because it figured church leaders had a lot of influence and could convince congregants to take out subprime loans.”
In 2011, Bank of America agreed to pay $355 million to settle charges of discrimination against its Countrywide unit. The following year, Wells Fargo settled its discrimination suit for more than $175 million. But the damage had been done. In 2009, half the properties in Baltimore whose owners had been granted loans by Wells Fargo between 2005 and 2008 were vacant; 71 percent of these properties were in predominantly black neighborhoods.
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For many Americans, housing discrimination is a fact of life. Redlining and other policies and practices have contributed to a widening in the black-white homeownership rate gap over the past century, despite legal protections that apply by race and 11 other legally protected designations.
Zillow teamed up with the National Fair Housing Alliance (NFHA) to survey 10,000 adults in the largest 20 metro areas nationwide about housing discrimination. The Zillow Housing Aspirations Report (ZHAR) survey conducted in October 2018 found that roughly one in four adults believe that over the course of their lives, they’ve been treated differently in their search for housing due to illegal discrimination.
NFHA President and CEO Lisa Rice works every day to combat housing inequality and discrimination. Zillow Research had a conversation with Lisa on her insights about some of the eye-opening results gleaned from the ZHAR survey.
Zillow Research (ZR): In this survey, 27 percent of Americans said they believe they’ve been treated differently in their search for housing because of their status in a protected group – which, applied to the U.S. population, would mean about 68 million adults. Does that seem high, low or about right to you?
Lisa Rice (LR): It is not surprising at all that more than roughly one in four of surveyed adults believe they have experienced a form of housing discrimination in their lifetimes.
In 2004, NFHA commissioned John Simonson, an economist with the Center for Applied Public Policy at the University of Wisconsin, to project the level of discrimination experienced by people of color who are either attempting to rent an apartment or purchase a home. He projected that roughly 4 million people who fit this category experience illegal discrimination each year.
When you add together the additional protected classes – people with disabilities, people experiencing barriers based on their gender, religious affiliation or national origin, families with children, etc., it is not difficult to see how this number could easily reach the 68 million that resulted from the ZHAR survey. In fact, the 68 million projection might seem low.
ZR: What forms of discrimination do people typically experience around housing now? Has that changed over the decades?
LR: The largest category of official fair housing complaints is disability status. That has changed over time. Historically, race-based complaints made up the largest complaint category; it is now the second-largest basis for complaints. But it is important to note that only about 28,000 total discrimination complaints get reported each year. With an estimated 68 million believing they have experienced housing discrimination, that means that the vast majority of fair housing violations do not get reported. This is in large part because most discrimination is hard to detect. Or when people believe they’ve experienced discrimination, they don’t know where to go for help.
ZR: Does discrimination look different depending on what protected class someone is in? For example, how would people searching for housing experience discrimination by skin color versus gender versus disability status versus Social Security income or disability insurance?
LR: Discrimination can take on different forms — making it really hard for someone to recognize that they are experiencing unfair treatment.
- Real estate agents can refuse to return phone calls.
- Loan officers can steer borrowers to higher cost loan products.
- Landlords can give false information about the availability or cost of a unit.
- Insurers can tell prospective customers that they don’t meet eligibility requirements.
- Appraisers can artificially deflate property values.
- Property managers can deny a request to install a wheelchair ramp.
- Lenders can deny a woman’s application because she is on maternity leave or not allow a person to use their SSI income.
- Single mothers, especially women of color, who are the head of their households are disproportionately impacted by landlords who use aggressive eviction techniques.
- Victims of domestic violence, who tend to be women, can be negatively affected by Zero Tolerance policies.
So discrimination does not always look the same – even for the same groups of people.
ZR: What might account for the perceived differences by age, with younger people being more likely to say they were treated differently?
LR: Younger people account for the largest percentage of moves and in 2017 were 19 percent more likely than those aged 35 to 54 to move. Younger people were 32 percent more likely to move than those aged 55 and up. It may just be that because younger people are moving at higher rates, they are more likely to be exposed to discriminatory barriers in the housing market. Moreover, compared to previous generations like the Baby Boomers and Generation Xers, millennials are the most racially and ethnically diverse generation and consumer base. If past practices are any indication of current consumer experiences, it stands to reason that this group will see more instances of discrimination.
ZR: Black respondents are far more likely (26 percent) to say they’ve been treated differently because of race than Asians (19 percent), Hispanics (16 percent) and whites (3 percent). Does that fit with the reality you see, and if so, why do you think that is?
LR: Recent news accounts describing how African Americans are targeted with violent or discriminatory treatment highlight what these consumers face in many areas, including the housing market. Studies show that African Americans are more likely to face discrimination in employment, housing, health, criminal justice and other sectors.
Additionally, African Americans and other people of color may be more likely to be impacted by systemic barriers. For example, African Americans are more likely to live in a neighborhood with little access to traditional banks, creating another potential barrier to quality credit. Indeed, 46 percent of African Americans versus 19 percent of Asians and 18 percent of whites access credit from non-traditional, more high-cost lenders. This is largely because mainstream banks have a history of redlining communities of color, and non-traditional lenders such as check cashers and subprime lenders have a long history of targeting these same consumers. Moreover, due to the racial wealth gap in America, young people of color are disproportionately impacted by student debt crisis.
These types of systemic barriers have far-reaching implications and affect things like your credit or insurance score and are a partial explanation of why African Americans feel more impacted by discrimination.
ZR: One of the most striking survey results is that 30 percent of blacks consider discrimination a barrier to owning a home, far higher than any other group surveyed. That was historically true because of redlining, racial covenants and other racist behaviors in the market. What is happening now to keep black people out of homeownership? What barriers do they face that people in other racial and ethnic groups do not?
LR: The historical barriers that were designed to deny housing opportunities to African Americans and create residential segregation are still with us today. We are more segregated today than we were 100 years ago. Communities of color still have less access to the amenities and services that people need to thrive. African Americans and Latinos were disproportionately impacted by the foreclosure crisis and these communities still have not fully recovered. In fact, the homeownership rate for African Americans is where it was 50 years ago when the Fair Housing Act was passed. Homeownership gains made by African Americans were wiped out as a result of these consumers being targeted by subprime lenders. The United States has a 200-plus year history of implementing government-sponsored policies that deliberately discriminated against African Americans.
But our government has never done anything to rectify the harm it caused to communities of color. The challenge is that the explicit biases built into our housing and finance systems are today manifested implicitly in the way we assess borrower risk and price consumers for accessing housing and housing related services. African Americans still face outright discrimination but they are also disproportionately credit invisible and more likely to have deflated credit scores. The widespread discrimination in our lending and housing markets is something this nation must face and effectively address if housing equality and broader economic justice is to become a reality.
ZR: What should be done to expand equal housing opportunities? Is there a role for the housing industry to play? Is there a role for government to play?
LR: Answering this question is not easy because, as described, housing discrimination has a long history in our country. There have been many players, and problems still persist. The ZHAR survey results represent real people who are struggling with accessing housing – a basic life need. There is a role for everyone to play in ameliorating this problem. People who believe they are experiencing discrimination should contact their local fair housing organization. These groups are extremely helpful. The housing industry can educate itself about fair housing laws, partner with fair housing organizations, examine policies and procedures to ensure they are non-discriminatory, hire diverse staff, and provide consistent customer service to all consumers. Local, state, and federal governments can take their obligation to affirmatively further fair housing seriously by partaking in comprehensive fair housing planning that connects with local Consolidated Plans, supporting fair housing agencies, educating the public about equal housing opportunities, and enforcing and bolstering fair housing laws and regulations.
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Further Readings
Ta-Nehisi Coates: The Case for Reparations
Borrking Institute: The devaluation of assets in black neighborhoods
Balitmore Sun: Wells Fargo agrees to pay $175M settlement in pricing discrimination suit
Naitonal Fiar housing Alliance: Discriminatory Effects of Credit Scoring on Communities of Color
The Root: A New Lawsuit Against a Virginia Apartment Complex Shows How Modern Day Redlining Works
NPR: Proposed Rule Could Evict 55,000 Children From Subsidized Housing
City Paper: Doctors Blame D.C.’s High Asthma Rates in Part on Poor Housing
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Racist Banking, Subprime Loans, and Reverse Redlining
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Racist Banking Policies Keeping Black Americans From Prospering | Racist American History
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Making Change: The Untold History of Black Banking in America
“Professor Mehrsa Baradaran is the author of The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap, a history of black-owned and black-oriented banks in the United States. It’s not a happy story.
Subprime Loans and Reverse Redlining
- Subprime loans
- Designed for those with bad or non-existing credit histories
- Offer less favorable terms for borrowers than prime loans.
- Because there’s more risk to lenders, subprime loans typically cost the borrower more
- Reverse-redlining
- Banks and financial institutions, like Wells Fargo and Countrywide, that once ignored minorities
- Are now targeting them to make money from risking subprime loans
- Mortgage brokers got kickbacks for locking borrowers into subprime loans
- Banks and financial institutions, like Wells Fargo and Countrywide, that once ignored minorities
- In 2006 at the height of the housing boom:
- Blacks were 2.8x more likely to be denied for a regular loan
- Latinos were 2x more likely
- Blacks and Latinos were 2.4x more likely to receive a subprime loan than white applicants
- Black/ Latino families making more $200,000 were more likely to be given a subprime loan
- Than a white family making less than $30,000
- “As the early-2000s housing bubble was peaking, African Americans were 50% more likely than their white peers to receive a subprime loan. Those loans, it is widely understood today, were more expensive and carried higher interest rates. The terms of these loans increased the probability of their failure, and their concentration in Black neighborhoods promised not just to ruin an individual’s credit but to undermine the stability of entire communities. The real-estate industry created the idea that Black homeowners posed a risk to the housing market and then profited from financial tools promoted as mitigating that risk.” Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Dissent
- Black/ Latino families making more $200,000 were more likely to be given a subprime loan
- Blacks were 2.8x more likely to be denied for a regular loan
- Black families were 2x as likely to enter foreclosure during the 2008 recession than whites
- “Not only did the crisis wipe out decades’ worth of hard-won financial gains for African Americans, but it stole their homes as well. In 2010 almost half a million African Americans were at risk of foreclosure, and by 2014 more than 240,000 had lost their homes. This historic collapse in Black homeownership is an important part of why the wealth gap between Black and white Americans is larger today than it has been in decades. In 2007, right before the crash, the median white family had eight times the wealth of the median Black family. By 2013, that figure had risen to eleven times, and it has tapered off only slightly since.” Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Dissent
“In 2000, 41 percent of all borrowers with subprime loans would have qualified for conventional financing with lower rates, a figure that increased to 61 percent in 2006. By then, African American mortgage recipients had subprime loans at three times the rate of white borrowers. Higher-income African Americans had subprime mortgages at four times the rate of higher-income whites. Even though its own survey in 2005 revealed a similar racial discrepancy, the Federal Reserve did not take action. By failing to curb discrimination that its own data disclosed, the Federal Reserve violated African Americans’ legal and constitutional rights.
In 2010, the Justice Department agreed that “[t]he more segregated a community of color is, the more likely it is that homeowners will face foreclosure because the lenders who peddled the most toxic loans targeted those communities.
The consequences of racially targeted subprime lending continue to accumulate. As the housing bubble collapsed, African American homeownership rates fell much more than white rates. Families no longer qualify for conventional mortgages if they previously defaulted when they were unable to make exorbitant loan payments; for these families, the contract buying system oft he 1960s is now making its return. Some of the same firms that exploited African Americans in the subprime crisis are now reselling foreclosed properties to low- and moderate-income households at high interest rates, with high down payments, with no equity accumulated until the contract period has ended, and with eviction possible after a single missed payment” Richard Rothstein, Color of Law
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Impact of foreclosed homes isn’t limited to owner
- Foreclosures
- The effects multiply and spread out such as:
- Depressing property values in entire communities
- Less attractive to homebuyers
- Hurts the quality of schools and other public institutions
- Which depresses home values further and destroys local economies
- Starts a reinforcing cycle of dysfunction
- The effects multiply and spread out such as:
- Banks like Wells Fargo/US Bank/Bank of America
- Accused of repeatedly neglecting foreclosed minority homes while maintaining white foreclosed homes
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“In 2010, the Justice Department filed a discrimination suit against Wells Fargo alleging that the bank had shunted blacks into predatory loans regardless of their creditworthiness. This was not magic or coincidence or misfortune. It was racism reifying itself. According to The New York Times, affidavits found loan officers referring to their black customers as “mud people” and to their subprime products as “ghetto loans.”
“We just went right after them… Wells Fargo mortgage had an emerging-markets unit that specifically targeted black churches because it figured church leaders had a lot of influence and could convince congregants to take out subprime loans.” Beth Jacobson, a former Wells Fargo loan
“In 2011, Bank of America agreed to pay $355 million to settle charges of discrimination against its Countrywide unit. The following year, Wells Fargo settled its discrimination suit for more than $175 million. But the damage had been done. In 2009, half the properties in Baltimore whose owners had been granted loans by Wells Fargo between 2005 and 2008 were vacant; 71% of these properties were in predominantly black neighborhoods.”” Ta–Nehisi Coates – The Atlantic
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White Ignorance and Resentment: Rick Santelli blames housing bubble on those who lost homes
“Rick Santelli’s target wasn’t the trillions of dollars in cash infusions and loan guarantees that George W Bush gifted to the mega banks…rather, he was incensed about Obama’s proposal to create a modest fund to help individual homeowners make their mortgage payments and stay in their homes” Ian Haney Lopez – Dog Whistle Politics
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Further Reading
AP: Kept out: How banks block people of color from homeownership
CNN: Wells Fargo accused of preying on black and Latino homebuyers in California
In These Times: Wells Fargo Shows Exactly How Structural Racism Works
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The Historic Fog of Housing Discrimination
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- School Textbooks
- American: Reconstruction to the 21st Century
- Very common used American history textbooks
- Says this on segregation/housing discrimination
- “African Americans found themselves forced into segregated neighborhoods.” That’s it!
- American: Reconstruction to the 21st Century
- The Americans
- Another very common used American history textbooks
- A number of New Deal programs concerned housing and home mortgage problems. The Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) provided government loans to homeowner who faced foreclosure because the could meet their loan payments. In addition, the 1934 National Housing Act created the Federal Housing Administration (FHA). This agency continues to furnish loads for home mortgages and repairs today”
- No mention of any housing discrimination or segregation
- Another very common used American history textbooks
- Unites States History: Reconstruction to the Present
- Another very common used American history textbooks
- “ In the North, too, African Americans faced segregation and discrimination. Even where there were no explicit laws, de facto segregation, or segregation by unwritten custom or tradition, was a fact of life. African Americans in the North were denied housing in many neighborhoods.”
- No mention of any de jure segregation spelled out in the FHA’s Underwriting Manual
- Supreme Court Decisions
- 1992 Justice Anthony Kennedy decision on a case involving school segregation
- “The vestiges of segregation… may be subtle and intangible but nonetheless they must be so real that they have a casual link to the de jure violation being remedied. It is simply not always the case that demoprahic forces causing population change bear any real and substantial relation to a de jure violation” Justice Anthony Kennedy
- 2007 Chief Justice John Roberts decision on a case involving school segregation
- He ruled because neighborhoods in Louisville and Seattle had been segregated by private choices, he concluded, school districts should be prohibited from taking purposeful action to reverse their own resulting segregation.
- 1992 Justice Anthony Kennedy decision on a case involving school segregation
- Legacy of misinformation
- 2014 YouGov and Huffington Post poll revealed
- 75% of white Americans opposed reparations in all forms.
- 68% of White Americans said that the legacy of slavery is either a “minor factor” or “no factor at all” in today’s wealth gap.
- 64% of whites thought the same of Jim Crow
- “Until Americans overcome this collective amnesia it is pointless to debate specific proposals for reparations” Ta-Nehisi Coates – The Atlantic
- 2014 YouGov and Huffington Post poll revealed
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Richard Rothstein : The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
“Racial segregation in housing was not merely a project of southerners in the former slaveholding Confederacy. It was a nationwide project of the federal government in the twentieth century, designed and implemented by its most liberal leaders. Our system of official segregation was not the result of a single law that consigned African Americans to designated neighborhoods. Rather, scores of racially explicit laws, regulations, and government practices combined to create a nationwide system of urban ghettos, surrounded by white suburbs. Private discrimination also played a role, but it would have been considerably less effective had it not been embraced and reinforced by government.
Half a century ago, the truth of de jure segregation was well known, but since then we have suppressed our historical memory and soothed ourselves into believing that it all happened by accident or by misguided private prejudice. Popularized by Supreme Court majorities from the 1970s to the present, the de facto segregation myth has now been adopted by conventional opinion, liberal and conservative alike.
A turning point came when civil rights groups sued to desegregate Detroit’s public schools. Recognizing that you couldn’t desegregate schools if there were few white children in Detroit, the plaintiffs argued that a remedy had to include the white suburbs as well as the heavily African American city. In 1974, by a 5–4 vote, the Supreme Court disagreed. The majority reasoned that because government policy in the suburbs had not segregated Detroit’s schools, the suburbs couldn’t be included in a remedy. Justice Potter Stewart explained that black students were concentrated in the city, not spread throughout Detroit’s suburbs, because of “unknown and perhaps unknowable factors such as in-migration, birth rates, economic changes, or cumulative acts of private racial fears.” He concluded: “The Constitution simply does not allow federal courts to attempt to change that situation unless and until it is shown that the State, or its political subdivisions, have contributed to cause the situation to exist. No record has been made in this case showing that the racial composition of the Detroit school population or that residential patterns within Detroit and in the surrounding areas were in any significant measure caused by governmental activity.”
Most disturbing about Justice Stewart’s observation was that the civil rights plaintiffs did offer evidence to prove that residential patterns within Detroit and in the surrounding areas were in significant measure caused by governmental activity. Although the trial judge agreed with this argument, Justice Stewart and his colleagues chose to ignore it, denying that such evidence even existed.*
This misrepresentation of our racial history, indeed this willful blindness, became the consensus view of American jurisprudence, expressed again in a decision written by Chief Justice John Roberts in 2007. His opinion prohibited school districts in Louisville and Seattle from accounting for a student’s race as part of modest school integration plans. Each district permitted students to choose which school they would attend, but if remaining seats in a school were limited, the district
admitted students who would contribute to the school’s racial balance. In other words, black students would get preference for admission to mostly white schools, and white students would get preference for mostly black ones.
The chief justice noted that racially homogenous housing arrangements in these cities had led to racially homogenous student bodies in neighborhood schools. He observed that racially separate neighborhoods might result from “societal discrimination ”but said that remedying discrimination “not traceable to [government’s] own actions” can never justify a constitutionally acceptable, racially conscious, remedy. “The distinction between segregation by state action and racial imbalance caused by other factors has been central to our jurisprudence. . . . Where [racial imbalance] is a product not of state action but of private choices, it does not have constitutional implications.” Because neighborhoods in Louisville and Seattle had been segregated by private choices, he concluded, school districts should be prohibited from taking purposeful action to reverse their own resulting segregation.
Chief Justice Roberts himself was quoting from a 1992 opinion by Justice Anthony Kennedy in a case involving school segregation in Georgia. In that opinion Justice Kennedy wrote: “[V]estiges of past segregation by state decree do remain in our society and in our schools. Past wrongs to the black race, wrongs committed by the State and in its name, are a stubborn fact of history. And stubborn facts of history linger and persist. But though we cannot escape our history, neither must we overstate its consequences in fixing legal responsibilities. The vestiges of segregation . . . may be subtle and intangible but nonetheless they must be so real that they have a causal link to the de jure violation being remedied. It is simply not always the case that demographic forces causing population change bear any real and substantial relation to a de jure violation.
”The following pages will refute this too-comfortable notion, expressed by Justice Kennedy and endorsed by Chief Justice Roberts and his colleagues, that wrongs committed by the state have little causal link to the residential segregation we see around us. The Color of Law demonstrates that racially explicit government policies to segregate our metropolitan areas are not vestiges, were neither subtle nor intangible, and were sufficiently controlling to construct the de jure segregation that is now with us in neighborhoods and hence in schools. The core argument of this book is that African Americans were unconstitutionally denied the means and the right to integration in middle-class neighborhoods, and because this denial was state-sponsored, the nation is obligated to remedy it…
…ONLY IF we can develop a broadly shared understanding of our common history will it be practical to consider steps we could take to fulfill our obligations. Short of that, we can make a start. Several promising programs are being pursued in some jurisdictions. Civil rights and fair housing organizations in most cities advocate and, in many cases, help to implement reformst hat begin to ameliorate the worst effects of de jure segregation. While we attempt to build public and political support for the more far-reaching remedies, we should advance the presently possible reforms as well. We might begin with high school and middle school curricula. If young people are not taught an accurate account of how we came to be segregated, their generation will have little chance of doing a better job of desegregating than the previous ones.
One of the most commonly used American history textbooks is The Americans: Reconstruction to the 21st Century. A thousand-page volume, published by Holt McDougal, a division of the publishing giant Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, it lists several well-respected professors as authors and editors. The 2012 edition has this to say about residential segregation in the North: “African Americans found themselves forced into segregated neighborhoods.” That’s it. One passive voice sentence. No suggestion of who might have done the forcing or how it was implemented.
The Americans also contains this paragraph: “A number of New Deal programs concerned housing and home mortgage problems. The Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) provided government loans to homeowners who faced foreclosure because they couldn’t meet their loan payments. In addition, the 1934 National Housing Act created the Federal Housing Administration (FHA). This agency continues to furnish loans for home mortgages and repairs today.” The authors do not mention that an enduring legacy of the HOLC was to color-code every urban neighborhood by race sot hat African Americans would have great difficulty getting mortgages. That the FHA suburbanized the entire nation on a whites-only basis is overlooked. The textbook does acknowledge that “a number of” New Deal agencies—the truth is that it was virtually all—paid lower wages to African Americans than to whites but fails to refer to the residential segregation imposed by the government’s public housing projects.
United States History: Reconstruction to the Present, a 2016 textbook issued by the educational publishing giant Pearson, offers a similar account. It celebrates the FHA’s and VA’s support of single-family developments and gives Levittown as an example of suburbanization without disclosing that African Americans were excluded. It boasts of the PWA’s bridge, dam, power plant, and government building projects but omits describing its insistence on segregated housing. Like The Americans, it employs the passive voice to avoid explaining segregation: “In the North, too, African Americans faced segregation and discrimination. Even where there were no explicit laws, de facto segregation, or segregation by unwritten custom or tradition, was a fact of life. African Americans in the North were denied housing in many neighborhoods.”
This is mendacious. There was nothing unwritten about government policy to promote segregation in the North. It was spelled out in the FHA’s Underwriting Manual, in the PWA’s (and subsequent agencies’) racial designation of housing projects, in congressional votes on the 1949 public housing integration amendment, and in written directives of federal and state officials.
With very rare exceptions, textbook after textbook adopts the same mythology. If middle and high school students are being taught a false history, is it any wonder that they come to believe that African Americans are segregated only because they don’t want to marry or because they prefer to live only among themselves? Is it any wonder that they grow up inclined to think that programs to ameliorate ghetto conditions are simply undeserved handouts?”
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Richard Rothstein: The Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated the United States
Racial segregation characterizes every metropolitan area in the United States and bears responsibility for our most serious social and economic problems — it corrupts our criminal justice system, exacerbates economic inequality, and produces large academic gaps between white and African American schoolchildren. We’ve taken no serious steps to desegregate neighborhoods, however, because we are hobbled by a national myth that residential segregation is de facto — the result of private discrimination or personal choices that do not violate constitutional rights. In truth, however, residential segregation was created by racially explicit and unconstitutional government policy in the mid-20th century, including the racially explicit federal subsidization of whites-only suburbs in which African Americans were prohibited from participating. Only after learning the history of these policies can we be prepared to undertake the national conversations necessary to remedy our unconstitutional racial landscape.
Such a national conversation is now possible. Without minimizing the terrible dangers of today’s resurgent white supremacist activity, we also should take hope from the reaction to it: a widespread willingness to confront, in many cases for the first time, the history of African American subjugation. Our previous failure, even refusal to do so, has impeded our ability to eliminate the racial caste conditions that permeate U.S. society.
Not to be underestimated is the wave of Confederate monument removals across the South, and the acknowledgement that these monuments were erected not after the Civil War to commemorate the misguided heroism of Confederate soldiers, but rather during the Jim Crow and post-Brown v. Board of Education eras, for the purpose of celebrating slavery and its residues in second-class citizenship. Who could have imagined, even a few years ago, that a white elected politician in the South, presiding over the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue, would proclaim that Confederate monuments celebrated a system “where hundreds of thousands of souls were bought, sold, and shipped up the Mississippi River to lives of forced labor of misery, of rape, of torture.”
Speaking to his fellow citizens in New Orleans of how we mis-celebrate our history, Mayor Mitch Landrieu continued:
America was the place where nearly 4,000 of our fellow citizens were lynched, 540 alone in Louisiana; where the courts enshrined “separate but equal”; where Freedom Riders coming to New Orleans were beaten to a bloody pulp. So when people say to me that the monuments in question are history, well, what I just described is real history as well, and it is the searing truth.
And it immediately begs the questions, why there are no slave ship monuments, no prominent markers on public land to remember the lynchings or the slave blocks; nothing to remember this long chapter of our lives; the pain, the sacrifice, the shame. . . all of it happening on the soil of New Orleans. So for those self-appointed defenders of history and the monuments, they are eerily silent on what amounts to this historical malfeasance, a lie by omission. There is a difference between remembrance of history and reverence of it.
Recognition of historic wrongs is an essential predicate of the resolve to correct them. As another Southern white politician, Joseph Riley Jr., mayor of Charleston, South Carolina from 1975 to 2016, recently put it, only after we “acknowledge the burden so many were forced to bear, and set the table for a deeper inquiry into the past we all share, [can] we begin to heal the wounds of racial injustice, bridge the gulf that divides us still and come together at last around a common understanding of who we truly are as American people.”
My recent book, The Color of Law, has become relevant only because of this new willingness to confront the reality of our racial history — as a first step toward remedy. It tells a “forgotten history of how our government segregated America,” resulting in the concentration of African Americans in segregated neighborhoods in every metropolitan area of the nation, not only in the South, but in the North, Midwest, and West as well. The book explains that the Constitution requires knowledge of this history before we can enact policies to integrate our communities.
That’s because the Supreme Court has made a distinction between de facto and de jure segregation. De facto segregation is racial concentrations that result from private prejudice, discriminatory practices of rogue real estate agents, personal choices to live with same-race neighbors, or income differences that have kept low-income families from moving to middle-class communities. De jure segregation, in contrast, results not from private activity but from government law and policy that violated the Fifth, Thirteenth, and Fourteenth amendments to the federal constitution.
The Supreme Court has said that if segregation is de facto, there is little we can do to correct it. What happened by accident can only be undone by accident. But if segregation has been created de jure, by government’s explicit racial policies, not only are we permitted to remedy it, we are required to do so.
We share a national myth that residential segregation is de facto. It is a myth embraced not only by conservatives, but by liberals as well. It is perpetuated by our standard high school history curriculum, in which commonly used textbooks routinely describe segregation in the North as de facto, mysteriously evolved without government direction. Yet, as The Color of Law recounts, the myth is false. Federal, state, and local governments deliberately segregated residential areas of every metropolitan area of the nation, designed to ensure that African Americans and whites would have to live separately.
For example, the federal government purposefully placed public housing in high-poverty, racially isolated neighborhoods to concentrate the black population. And it created a whites-only mortgage insurance program to shift the white population from urban neighborhoods to exclusively white suburbs. The Internal Revenue Service granted tax exemptions for charitable activity to organizations that openly enforced neighborhood racial homogeneity. Government-licensed realtors, with the open support of state regulators, enforced a “code of ethics” that prohibited the sale of homes to African Americans in white neighborhoods. In thousands of cases, police forces organized and supported mob violence to drive black families out of homes on the white side of racial boundaries. Federal and state regulators sanctioned the refusal of the banking, thrift, and insurance industries to make loans to homeowners in other-race communities.
By the time the federal government reversed its policy of subsidizing segregation in 1962, and by the time the Fair Housing Act banned private discrimination in 1968, the residential patterns of major metropolitan areas were set. White suburbs that had been affordable to the black working class in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s were now no longer so, both because of the increase in housing prices (and whites’ home equity) during that period, and because other federal policies had depressed black incomes while supporting those of whites. At the beginning of the New Deal the National Recovery Act established industrial wages at lower levels for industries where black workers predominated; later, Social Security and Fair Labor Standards legislation excluded from coverage occupations in which African Americans predominated, for example, agriculture and domestic service. It was not until 1964 that the National Labor Relations Board for the first time refused to certify a union’s exclusive bargaining status because it openly refused to represent black workers.
I’ve summarized some of these policies on Terry Gross’s radio program, Fresh Air. But my articles and The Color of Law are not the only sources for correcting the de facto myth. Ta-Nehisi Coates, for example, in “The Case for Reparations” and other articles in The Atlantic, also tells part of this story. Several scholars have done the same.
We promote the myth of de facto segregation by mis-teaching our young people about our past. When I was researching The Color of Law, I examined high school history textbooks that were commonly in use during the early years of this decade, and was shocked by their mendacity in describing racial history. For example, in the more than 1,200 pages of the widely used high school textbook The Americans, a single paragraph was devoted to 20th-century “Discrimination in the North.” That paragraph included one sentence on residential segregation, stating that “African Americans found themselves forced into segregated neighborhoods,” with no further explanation of how this happened or how public policy was responsible.
Another widely used high school textbook, Pearson’s United States History, also attributed segregation to mysterious forces: “In the North, too, African Americans faced segregation and discrimination. Even where there were no explicit laws, de facto segregation, or segregation by unwritten custom or tradition, was a fact of life. African Americans in the North were denied housing in many neighborhoods.” The passive voice construction — “were denied” — is not just bad writing, it hides who exactly denied housing to African Americans.
The popular high school textbook History Alive! also teaches a distorted view by suggesting that segregation was only a problem in the South. “Even New Deal agencies,” it says, “practiced racial segregation, especially in the South,” failing to explain that the New Deal’s Public Works Administration initiated the nationwide civilian public housing program by demolishing integrated neighborhoods even in the North to build segregated projects in their place, or that the New Deal’s Federal Housing Administration denied loan guarantees to developers of suburbs wherever the danger of “infiltration” of “incompatible racial groups” was present.
Such indoctrination of today’s high school students minimizes the possibility of progress toward equality when these students become our country’s leaders. As New Orleans’ Mayor Landrieu put it, referring to the South’s glorification of Confederate leaders, “We justify our silence and inaction by manufacturing noble causes that marinate in historical denial.” This is equally true of the de facto myth we have manufactured about how our nation became segregated. The next generation will do no better a job than our generation has done of progressing toward a better future, unless we teach our young people a less-sanitized version of the past.
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The People’s School of DC 