By Claudia Ionita
We have all heard about them. The ongoing protests caused by the death of George Floyd at the hand of the police have sparked a serious discussion on racism in the United States. Perhaps one of the more concerning aspects of this current conversation is the realisation of the profound level at which racial discrimination has permeated the fabric of American society. From police brutality to workplace discrimination, it appears that this conflict is omnipresent and incessant in nature, with no clear end in sight. But how did that happen? A possible answer has to do with housing segregation: the deliberate separation of white and black residential areas.
Separate but (un)equal
Starting with the Great Depression and well into the 1950s, middle and working-class black and white individuals found themselves facing one common issue: housing shortage. And what do you do when you have no place to live in? During the Depression only prosperous families had the necessary funds to rent or purchase homes, thus builders couldn’t be persuaded to provide new housing for others in need. This shortage was further exacerbated by the Second World War, as the available construction material was transferred to military purposes. Thus, the lower classes were left with few options: either stay together with relatives in apartments that were too small for their growing families or move to “emergency huts” which had been prepared for returning war veterans. It was President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s series of economic measures, the New Deal which first attempted to solve the issue of housing by encouraging the construction of living projects for civilians who were not engaged in defense work. However, there was a racial component to the program: black Americans were to be either completely excluded from certain housing projects, or if included, then segregated from the white population. This deliberate segregation was implemented through the employment, construction, and jobs agencies created by the New Deal. An example of such an institution was the Public Works Administration (PWA). The goal of the PWA was to diminish the ongoing housing shortage and create jobs in construction. Yet the organisation did not aim for full desegregation and followed instead a neighbourhood composition rule. This meant that the new housing projects would have to reflect the former racial composition of the neighbourhood: residences in white areas could only be sold/rented to whites while those in black areas could only have African-American tenants. Only projects in neighbourhoods that were already mixed could house both whites and blacks. This represented a first attempt at halting the expansion of multiracial communities. In 1937 the PWA came to an end, with Congress transferring to the local level the responsibility of establishing agencies that could provide federal subsidies. The organisation that oversaw these decisions was the newly formed U.S. Housing Authority (USHA). The USHA continued the practice of building racially homogenous communities, with its official manual advising against creating projects for white persons in regions occupied by blacks, highlighting that: “The aim of the authority should be the preservation rather than the disruption of community social structures which best fit the desires of the groups concerned”. Such projects would further enforce existing segregation by shifting the black residents of the cities, who had previously been scattered across town, to live in a single ghetto, separated from the whites.
It’s a gap
With the looming threat of entering World War Two, Congress adopted the Lanham Act in 1940 to finance housing for workers in defense. Projects built under the Lanham Act translated into yet another step towards segregation. In some cities, the government provided war housing only for whites, leaving African-Americans who had served in the military to live in overpopulated slums. In the few instances in which war housing was created for black Americans as well, it was still segregated. By the end of the war, this trinity of programs (the Lanham Act, the USHA, and the PWA) either imposed or solidified racial segregation in all of the metropolitan areas where they had been implemented. The end of the war saw the adoption of The Fair Housing Act (FHA) which set specific conditions under which residential projects could be built. To better understand how these rules impacted segregation, it could be helpful to look at the example of Levittown, a project aimed at easing the housing issue of returning veterans. The founder, William Levitt, built the housing area on speculation. This meant that he did not already have prospective buyers offering his company the money to build homes. Instead, Levitt first built the residences, then looked for customers. He was able to obtain the capital necessary to start building with the help of the FHA and only if he respected its conditions. One of these was not to sell to African-Americans or build in areas close to black neighborhoods. The goal was to prevent the formation of desegregated areas, labeled by the FHA as “inharmonious racial groups”. If white families could buy properties in suburbs such as Levittown without down payments and low-interest mortgages if they were veterans, middle-class black Americans had to make down payments and obtain uninsured mortgages with higher interest rates. In many cases, African-Americans could not even receive mortgages in the first place, as the government refused to insure them. As a consequence, they had to buy their homes on contract, accumulating no equity, and with the possibility of eviction in the case of a missed payment. Thus, it was difficult for black people under such a contract to leave a declining neighbourhood before their properties were paid for in full. If they did, they would lose all that they had invested in that property to date. This inability to build wealth at the same level as white families have contributed to the wealth gap between black and white Americans. Today, African-American incomes are around 60% of white incomes and African-American wealth is at about 10% of white wealth. As most middle-class American families gain their wealth from the equity that they have on their houses, this wealth discrepancy can be attributed to the housing policies adopted throughout the 20th century.
Myth or reality
As black families were concentrated in specific neighborhoods with little possibility of purchasing new residences, their houses started to become overpopulated. Furthermore, local authorities often withdrew public services from black neighbourhoods which lead to an accumulation of garbage and a lack of sewer services. Waste plants and various other polluting factories were placed in such communities in order to prevent the deterioration of white residential areas. The cumulus of such measures resulted in African-American neighbourhoods becoming slum-like, a fact that took a toll on the health of black individuals and the value of their residences. White Americans, in turn, tended to believe that the precarious condition of these neighbourhoods was due to the people inhabiting them, rather than deliberate government actions. Subsequently, whites became reticent at the idea of inhabiting a desegregated space, in fear of bringing decay to their community. These prejudices were further exacerbated through techniques such as Blockbusting, where speculators bought properties in borderline white/black areas, sold them to black families, then persuaded the white families residing in the area to believe that their neighbourhoods were turning into African-American slums and that the values of their properties were about to fall. This would convince the white homeowners to sell their homes in a rush, at less than their worth. These were not the only insidious tactics used in Blockbusting. For instance, black women would be hired to walk with their babies around white homes or black men would be hired to drive around with loud music blasting out of their cars in order to strengthen the idea of impending “African-Americanisation” of white residential projects. It is easy to understand why such techniques of manipulation would work by looking at the concept of rumour theory. According to this theory Rumours are ways of making a collective sense of an ambiguous situation in contexts where there is a perceived threat or people feel an acute need for security. Thus, their aim is to control a potentially threatening situation. The perceived threat of desegregation leads to the spread of rumours regarding African-Americans (violent, poorly educated, almost-beast like individuals) in order to encourage and justify the separation of white and black communities. It is perhaps easier for white Americans to assume that housing segregation came about de facto, due to personal choices and that black citizens are solely at fault for living in precarious neighbourhoods and failing to integrate into white communities instead of facing the truth of de jure imposed segregation.
While progress towards racial equality has been made, the effects of housing segregation can still be felt. While white families could use the wealth generated from appreciating home equity to take care of their elders or finance their children’s education, the same cannot be said about black families. Recent research has also shown that in the US one’s Zip Code can have a tremendous impact on one ’s life, affecting everything from their health to their education (choice of primary school/high school is influenced by address). As can be seen, the consequences of housing segregation are far-reaching. Lack of proper living conditions coupled with little education leads to less favourable future opportunities and a higher crime rate thus perpetuating the cycle of inequality. Racial tensions in the US appear unresolvable because full desegregation of the never took place. As shown by the example of housing segregation, the unresolved problems of the past continue to affect the present and the future.
Sources:
Books
Kushner, D. Levittown: Two Families, One Tycoon, and the Fight for Civil Rights in America's Legendary Suburb. (New York: Walker & Company, 2009.
Rothstein, R. The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. New York, London: Liverlight Publishing Corporation, 2017.
Journal Articles
Adeola, F.O. “Environmental hazards, health and racial inequity in hazardous waste distribution”. Environment and Behavior 26:1 (1994), 99-126.
Dixon, J.C. and Rosenbaum, M.S. "Nice to Know You? Testing Contact, Cultural, and Group Threat: Theories of Anti-Black and Anti-Hispanic Stereotypes". Social Science Quarterly 85: 2 (2004), 257-280.
Kruman, M.W. “Quotas for blacks: The public works administration and the black construction worker.”. Labor History 16, no 1. (1975), 37-51.
Mehlhorn, D. "A Requiem for Blockbusting: Law, Economics, and Race-Based Real Estate Speculation". Fordham Law Review 67: 3 (1998), 1145–1161.
Porter, H.W. “The Lanham Act”. History of Education Journal 3:1. (1951), 1-6
Websites
Horowitz, J.M. Igielnik R. and Kochhar R. “Trends in income and wealth inequality.” AP News. Accessed on: 4 July: https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2020/01/09/trends-in-income-and-wealth-inequality/
Jones, J. Schmitt J., and Wilson, V. “50 years after the Kerner Commission African Americans are better off in many ways but are still disadvantaged by racial inequality.” Economic Policy Institute. Accessed on: 4 July: https://www.epi.org/publication/50-years-after-the-kerner-commission/
Palochko J., Wojcik S.M. and Merlin M. “How ZIP codes determine the quality of a child’s education.” AP News. Accessed on: 4 July: https://apnews.com/1d856cd98d4c491e8443576b3a817740
“Zip code better predictor of health than genetic code.” Harvard School of Public Health. Accessed on: 4 July: https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/features/zip-code-better-predictor-of-health-than-genetic-code/
Laws
Federal Housing Act
Reports
Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University. The Plunder of Black Wealth in Chicago: New Findings on the Lasting Toll of Predatory Housing Contracts, 2019.
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