GETTING THE FACTS WRONG ABOUT HOUSING DISCRIMINATION

In January, we posted “A Little Light Reading: Our Top Three Books on Understanding Race in America.”  We identified three relatively recent works we consider essential for understanding America’s ongoing racial issues. The Warmth of Other Suns, The Half Has Never Been Told, and The Color of Law explore, respectively, the twentieth century black migration from the South, slavery, and housing discrimination.  We intend to return to those books from time to time, exploring their major points and examining their contributions on America’s racial issues.

  

We start with Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America.  Rothstein proceeds from a simple point aimed at disabusing many Americans of a myth.  Housing segregation was not, he writes, “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.”  This contention leads to the major theme of The Color of Law – that Supreme Court justices, who’ve ducked imposing broad remedies for the consequences of housing discrimination on the ground government didn’t cause the problem, got their facts wrong.

Rothstein highlights two Supreme Court opinions, 33 years apart, in school desegregation cases in which the justices claimed governmental action wasn’t at fault.  In a 1974 Detroit area case, Justice Potter Stewart declined to include white students from suburban areas in a desegregation plan, concluding African American students were concentrated in the city, not spread throughout the suburbs, because of “unknown and perhaps unknowable factors such as in-migration, birth rates, economic changes, or cumulative acts of private racial fears.”  In 2007, Chief Justice John Roberts rejected desegregation plans in Louisville and Seattle for the same reason.  Housing patterns, he determined, resulted from “private choices,” not governmental action, meaning no “constitutional obligation” required the proposed remedies.  Rothstein devotes the remaining 300 or so pages of Color of Law to proving just how wrong both justices got their facts.

Public Housing = Ghetto

Government policy, beginning with the Franklin Roosevelt administration, forced blacks into urban ghettos, “as big a factor as any” in promoting segregated housing.  As World War II approached, the federal government built housing units for workers

involved in defense-related industries.  Federal policy and practice provided this housing either for whites only or in segregated projects.  Despite the fact both blacks and whites worked in defense plants, nearby government subsidized or constructed housing either served only whites or separated black and white workers.

After the war, congressional Republicans opposed to any federal participation in the housing market, gave progressive legislators a choice – accept segregated housing or get no federal housing program at all.  GOP amendments to the housing bills required desegregation, when everyone knew southern Democrats would kill the legislation if it included such amendments.  Northern and eastern Democrats favoring a public housing program backed down and accepted segregated housing.

A little later, federal regulations set strict upper income limits for public housing residents.  These limits forced middle-income tenants out of most public housing, leaving projects poor and mostly African American.  Taken together, these policies assured segregation in public housing projects in the United States, a result that endures today.

Racial Zoning

Local government actions significantly contributed to America’s segregated housing patterns.  In cities like Baltimore, blatant zoning ordinances stopped the development of integrated neighborhoods.  Baltimore’s ordinance, enacted in 1910, forbade blacks from buying houses on blocks where whites constituted a majority of the residents and vice versa.  These ordinances spread to Atlanta, Miami, St. Louis, Richmond, and other places.  The Supreme Court struck them down in a 1917 case originating in Louisville, Kentucky but, as Rothstein shows, many cities ignored the ruling, claiming their laws differed in some way – usually minor – from the Louisville ordinance.  West Palm Beach, Florida, for example, adopted a racial zoning ordinance 12 years after the Supreme Court decision in the Louisville case and it remained in place until 1960.

Promoting the Suburbs

Public housing policy and local ordinances didn’t stop higher income African Americans from buying houses in certain places, given market forces.  The federal government, however, enforced policies that enticed white families to move to single family homes in suburbs and out of apartments located in cities.  The government then made it exceedingly difficult for blacks to follow suit by implementing blatantly

discriminatory Federal Housing Administration (FHA) lending rules.  The FHA underwriting  manual, first issued in 1935, said, “to retain stability [in a neighborhood] it is necessary that properties shall continue to be occupied by the same social and racial classes” and “a change in…racial occupancy generally leads to instability and a reduction in values.” 

The FHA, therefore, in many instances, just wouldn’t approve loans to black buyers. In connection with a single family housing development in one New Jersey community in the early 1940s, the agency flatly stated “no loans will be given to [black] developments.”  The FHA would approve properties only in neighborhoods where “compatibility” existed among residents.  Generally, this meant whites only.  These discriminatory policies remained in effect well into the 1950s and, in some cases, beyond, locking in segregated housing patterns.

In coming posts, we will explore other ways government policies created segregated housing and examine solutions Rothstein proposes.  Many of those are controversial and we don’t agree among ourselves on the wisdom of many of them.  The problem remains though, and not talking about it or the ways of addressing it, won’t make it go away.