Changing Patterns of Race and Housing: A Toledo Study

A study of Negro housing in Toledo, Ohio tested some common assumptions about race and housing and discovered a post-war transition from renter to owner status for the Negro. The study explored the means by which Negro families had financed purchases of homes, the quality of the homes, comparative prices, and the economic status of the Negro families concerned. Some implications of these findings are noted. T he still pervasive sociological image of the relationship betweeln race and housilng stresses in-tensive occupancy by Negroes of deteriorated physical structures; thus, overcrowding and blight produces an association between race and slums, with a host of associated phenomena: crimle anld delinquency (as measured by conventionlal but not necessarily unbiased indices), disease, broken homes, etc. Negro occupancy of the formerly spacious dwellings of high status residelnts leads to intensive subdividing, thus ml-aximizing the probability of the low-income Negro to be a renter in multiple-unit dwellings. Th-e summary report of the recent nationwide analysis of race an-d housing clearlv expresses this perspective: In the larger cities, especially of the North and West, the minorities have typically lived concentrated in the oldest sections of each city, districts abandoned by previous groups, with buildings deteriorated through age and neglect. Continual migration into these areas, together with the poverty of the residents and their exclusion from other * The research reported here was carried out by SEARCH (Social-Economic Clearing House) of Toledo. It was originally conceived by John Field, then secretary of the Board of Community Relations. While the project was designed by the group, analysis of the data has been the responsibility of the author and William Goldner, then of Bowling Green State University. districts, has generated a chronic shortage of housiing available to minority groups. This, in turni, hlas intenisified the slum conditionis through crowdinig anid overuse of buildings. The expansion of minority livinig space has often taken place under conditions that rapidly spread the slum. In recent years, minority groups in many cities have gained entry to some areas of relatively good housinig, but these, in many cases, are adjacent to deteriorating areas, and Ilence are unider the threat of spreading blight.1 Does this Negro housing pattern still prevail ? Or have not such more recent social developments as white migration to the suburbs, urban renewal, improved economic status for the Negro, and government support of home buying (FHA and VA) influenced in any way the relation of race and housing? While this paper does not purport to answer this question, it does provide data that suggest that the familiar pattern of race and housing may be undergoilng some alteration. This is perhaps the most relevant finding of a sample survey conducted in the city of Toledo in the spring of 1955, which developed out of the practical interest of various municipal agencies and their Drofessional Dersonnel in nroblems of race and 1 Where Shall We Live? Report of the Commission on Race and Housing (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1958), p. 4. This content downloaded from 207.46.13.132 on Tue, 05 Jul 2016 04:19:10 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms