Part 2: Segregation was no accident.
By: Lauren Dachille
Tags: BlackLivesMatter, Race, Schools, Racism, American History

*This post is part of a three-part series. Click here to start from the beginning. Note that some posts in this series directly quote offensive racist language and they all describe upsetting historical realities that may be triggering to readers.

Part 2 | Introduction

As of 2016, the net worth of a typical white family was ten times as much as that of the average Black family. Most middle class families today gain the majority of their wealth from home ownership — and while 75% of white households own their homes, only 44% of Black households do. Low-income Black Americans are also more likely to live in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty; 45% of poor black children live in neighborhoods with concentrated poverty, but only 12% of poor white children live in similar neighborhoods. Children in neighborhoods with concentrated poverty experience more social and behavioral problems, have lower test scores, and are more likely to drop out of school. Research suggests that reducing children’s exposure to concentrated poverty can improve their likelihood of upward economic mobility. These massive gaps in wealth and opportunity were created through an intentional, discriminatory web of federal, state and local government housing policies that spanned the 20th century.

From the Great Depression through the post-WWII era, middle class Black and white families faced serious housing shortages; only the wealthy could afford to buy homes or rent new apartments. WWII exacerbated the shortage because the construction industry was focused almost exclusively on military construction. To address the housing shortage, the federal government developed widespread housing projects to create affordable options for middle class families.

Believing that white and Black individuals should be segregated, federal and local housing authorities used public housing to strengthen existing segregation and to create segregation in integrated neighborhoods where there previously was none, advantaging white residents in the process. For its first public housing project in 1935, the federal government’s Public Works Administration (PWA) demolished an integrated Atlanta neighborhood that included 1,600 families — nearly one third of whom were Black — to make room for whites-only public housing. The housing shortage was already exacerbated for Black residents; thus, many of those displaced were forced to double up with relatives or rent units created when other Black families subdivided their homes. Similar patterns persisted nationwide, in cities like Detroit, Chicago, Indianapolis, Toledo, New York, and beyond, where whites-only federal housing projects displaced the Black residents of formerly integrated communities.

Amenities in white public housing projects were far superior to those in Black public housing projects — and this remained true throughout the 20th century. In 1985, investigative journalists from the Dallas Morning News documented a pervasive pattern of government-sponsored racial segregation and inequity. The reporters visited 47 cities to examine a system that provided almost 3.7 million apartments. Almost all of the housing projects the reporters visited that were predominantly occupied by white residents were superior in location, services and amenities compared to those that housed Black and Hispanic residents.

Public housing was also used as a tool to concentrate poverty in the case of Black residents, and to alleviate poverty in the case of white residents. For example, in Miami, white residents eligible for public housing received vouchers to subsidize private apartment rentals in higher-income neighborhoods with access to more resources. Black residents, on the other hand, were concentrated in dilapidated housing projects. This practice did not fade with time; in fact, it wasn’t changed until a 1998 legal settlement required that these vouchers also be offered to Black residents.

In 2010, the National Neighborhood Crime Study found that neighborhoods with more concentrated poverty and segregation, regardless of racial make up, have higher levels of crime, especially violent crime. Said another way, violent crime rates in predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods do not differ from those in white neighborhoods, once we control for segregation and disadvantage. Thus, the government’s active concentration of low-income Black residents into urban areas helps explain why Black people in America are significantly more likely to be victims of violent crime.

Once the government separated Black and white residents within cities, zoning was then utilized to protect white neighborhoods at the expense of Black neighborhoods. Black neighborhoods were zoned by mostly white local officials to permit landfills and polluting facilities, liquor stores, prostitution houses, taverns and night clubs — all of which were prohibited by zoning laws in white neighborhoods. Rather than providing more integrated housing options for Black residents in the face of a housing shortage that was particularly pronounced for them, local officials simply zoned Black neighborhoods for subdivisions, leading to overcrowding.

The use of industrial and toxic waste zoning to protect white neighborhoods and turn Black neighborhoods into slums became common. For example, a 1991 federal court case in Warren County, NC, where half of the population was white and half was Black, looked at the question of where to open the county’s fourth landfill. There were three existing landfills in the County, all in Black neighborhoods. When the town proposed to build a fourth in a white area, residents protested, and the County did not issue a permit. They then issued a permit for a fourth landfill in a Black community, despite those residents’ protests. A federal judge upheld the decision, arguing that there was no way to definitively prove racial intent in the placement of the landfill.

A 1983 analysis by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) concluded that across the nation waste dumps are much more likely to be found in Black communities than in white residential areas. Studies conducted around the same time by the Commission for Racial Justice of the United Churches of Christ found that race was so strong a statistical predictor of where hazardous waste facilities were found across the U.S. that there was only a 1 in 10,000 chance this distribution occurred randomly. In 2018, the EPA released a study, which found that Black people are exposed to about 1.5 times more particulate matter — a known carcinogen and contributor to lung conditions, heart attacks, asthma, low birth weights and high blood pressure — than white people due to the location and magnitude of emissions of polluting factories.

The segregation and degradation of Black urban neighborhoods through racist public housing policy was just the first piece of the puzzle; the federal government followed this up by subsidizing the development of idyllic suburban neighborhoods for white families only. When FDR took office in 1933, home ownership was prohibitively expensive for working and middle class families; this had been exacerbated by the Great Depression. He established two New Deal programs to support home ownership: the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) to support existing, struggling homeowners, and the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) to support first-time home ownership.

The HOLC purchased mortgages subject to foreclosure and issued new mortgages with more manageable terms. They were also amortized, meaning that the borrower could accrue equity before they were fully paid off. To assess risk, the HOLC wanted to know whether a property would maintain its value. They created color coded maps of each metropolitan area, with the riskiest neighborhoods coded red and safer neighborhoods colored green; this guided their decisions on whether to extend mortgages. Black neighborhoods received red coloring, even if they were solid middle class neighborhoods. For example, Ladue, a white suburb of St. Louis, was colored green because it had “not a single negro or foreigner” while a similarly middle class Lincoln Terrace was colored red because it had “little or no value…due to the colored element.” This practice is now known as redlining. Thus, for decades the federal government bailed out white homeowners subject to foreclosure, while leaving Black residents to fend for themselves.

To encourage first-time home ownership, the FHA insured bank mortgages that covered 80% of purchase terms, ensuring that banks would issue loans to prospective homeowners. Before the FHA, homeowners had to put down an average of 58% of a home’s purchase price to secure a mortgage, a nearly impossible prospect for working class families. In order to insure a loan, the FHA had to do its own appraisal — and its appraisal standards included requirements that both the homeowners and the neighborhoods be white. FHA appraisers discouraged banks from making loans in non-white neighborhoods or in urban areas; they also favored mortgages in areas where highways or other barriers physically separated the races, stating in their guidelines: “Natural or artificially established barriers will prove effective in protecting a neighborhood and the locations within it from adverse influences including prevention of the infiltration of lower class occupancy and inharmonious racial groups.” By 1950 the FHA and VA (U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs), which followed the same policies insured half of all mortgages nationwide — mortgages that prospective Black homeowners did not have access to.

These discriminatory practices held true for the thousands of home loans guaranteed to WWII veterans through the GI Bill. These and other benefits of the Bill were systematically denied to the 1.2 million Black veterans who served in the war. In 1947, only two of the more than 3,200 home loans guaranteed by the GI bill across thirteen 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.” From 1944 to 1955, the VA backed 4.2 million home loans under the GI Bill, in total, a $33 billion subsidy of white home ownership in America, driving the growth of the white middle class.

During the years after WWII, FHA and VA programs also drove the rapid growth of suburbs nationwide by funding construction and land acquisition costs for builders such as William Levitt, who built Levittown, and countless other similar developers of suburban communities. Beyond subsidizing development costs, the federal government would also automatically guarantee mortgages in these subdivisions, practically ensuring that the developers would sell the homes they built. The condition, of course, was a requirement that the developers not sell these homes to Black residents. Restrictive covenants were also common in property deeds, requiring that subsequent owners not sell their homes to Black residents. Levittown — one of many American suburbs developed in the mid-20th century through government subsidies — was a massive undertaking, making 17,500 homes available to white families in New York for about $8,000 each, with no down payment. The earliest Levittown houses cost about $29 per month for a mortgage, compared to the going rate of $90 per month for an apartment in the city. Metro areas nationwide were suburbanized by this racist federal program, spanning from Los Angeles to Long Island, allowing white families to leave the urban core and build equity and wealth through home ownership for the first time.

The government justified its actions by arguing that the presence of Black property owners would cause property values to decline. However, in the decades that it upheld these policies, it never presented any evidence that this was the case. On the contrary, numerous studies during that period found that racial integration caused property values to increase because working and middle class Black families were excluded from most suburbs and, due to the resultant Black housing shortage, were therefore willing to pay rates far above fair market value for their homes.

This state-sponsored discrimination was supplemented by pervasive individual acts of discrimination. For example, even after the government stopped encouraging restrictive covenants, many home deeds still maintained them and homeowners’ association agreements sometimes forbade resale of property to Black residents. White mobs often gathered — with the support of local police — to harass any Black resident or family who might move into a previously all-white neighborhood. Racial discrimination in housing continues today; it is estimated that there are over 4 million instances of housing discrimination annually in the rental market alone and discrimination against Black homeowners on various dimensions is well documented. In fact, a 2018 study found that homes in majority-Black neighborhoods are likely to be valued for 23% less than a near-identical home in a white neighborhood, costing Black homeowners $156 billion in cumulative losses.

In 1968, Congress passed the Fair Housing Act, which prohibited private discrimination in housing sales and rentals. The law is now a half century old — and some might think that this would be enough to reverse the damage done by government sponsored segregation over the preceding century. However, by the time the federal government allowed Black Americans into suburbs, the window of opportunity had largely closed. From 1973 through 1980, the average American home price grew 43% and it continued to grow another 8% over the decade that followed. Homes in Levittown that sold to white families in 1948 for $75,000 in today’s dollars now sell, without major remodeling, for upwards of $350,00. While many Black families in the 1940s would have been able to purchase suburban homes without a down payment for $75,000 in today’s dollars, as countless white families did using government subsidies, far fewer families are able to afford an equivalent home today for $350,000 with a 20% down payment. White working class families who bought these homes in 1948 have gained more than $200,000 in wealth over that time. This history of discriminatory housing policy essentially funded the $150,000 wealth gap that exists between the average Black and white families today.

The wealth gap that our government created through discriminatory housing policy will not disappear on its own simply because our government ceases to discriminate going forward. In his book “The Color of Law,” author Richard Rothstein suggests a solution that would provide a subsidy to Black Americans roughly equivalent to that provided to white residents throughout the 20th century, albeit decades late: “Considering that African Americans comprise about 15% of the population of the New York metropolitan area, the federal government should purchase the next 15% of houses that come up for sale in Levittown at today’s market rates, approximately $350,000. It should then resell the properties to qualified African Americans for $75,000 — the price, in today’s dollars, that their grandparents would have paid if permitted to do so. The government should enact this program in every suburban development whose construction complied with the FHA’s discriminatory requirements.”

Beyond their direct impact, discriminatory housing policy and housing segregation are at the root of countless other societal inequities, in part because they allow geography and poverty to be used as a proxy for race, making space for disguised racial discrimination. As one Mississippi official during the Civil Rights Era put it: “What those smart fellows [at the Justice Department] don’t realize is that we can still get to these darkies in a whole lot of subtle ways.” Voter suppression is one pervasive instance of this phenomenon. Georgia, for example, has closed almost one tenth of its polling places since 2012, with the majority of closings occurring in poor counties and those with significant African American populations. Racial gerrymandering (changing where the lines of voting districts are drawn) is also used to concentrate Black voters in singular districts, lowering their overall representation. For example, in 2011, Republicans in North Carolina redrew District voting lines to concentrate Black voters into two districts, diluting their voting strength. This redistricting was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 2017. The makeup of our federal government also leverages geography to disenfranchise voters of color. For example, the geographical makeup of the Senate gives the average Black American 75% as much representation as the average white American, while the Electoral College in presidential elections gives white voters 16% more power than Black voters.

School segregation and inequity is yet another disturbing example of the lingering negative impact of government-sponsored residential segregation. Today, more than half of the nation’s K-12 students are in racially segregated districts, where over 75% of the students are either white or nonwhite. Because schools are funded predominantly on property taxes, education in this country is not a way to escape poverty, but rather a tool to reinforce it. A report released in 2019 found that predominantly white school districts received $23 billion more than nonwhite school districts in state and local funding in 2016, despite serving roughly the same number of children. According to the U.S. Department of Education, Black and Latino students in segregated schools are assigned the least qualified and least experienced teachers. They also have the most limited course offerings, the least access to AP and upper level courses, and the poorest quality facilities.

At the start of the nation’s most notable school desegregation efforts in 1971, the achievement gap between Black and white students was about 40 points. Over a 17 year desegregation effort from 1971 to 1988, that gap was cut in half — and that statistic includes not just the Black students who were bused to better-resourced districts, but all students, meaning that the impact for the limited number of students who were bused was significantly greater. Despite the fact that racially diverse schools have been shown to be beneficial to students of all races and income levels, busing programs were gradually chipped away by courts from the early 1990s onward. Between 1996 and 2016, the number of segregated schools doubled.

In 2010 the Government Accountability Office issued a report noting that many jurisdictions getting federal housing grants were not preparing or updating their fair housing reports, which are required by the Fair Housing Act of 1968. In response the Obama Administration developed a more structured reporting rule in 2015, which required localities to take “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.” The Trump administration rolled back the rule earlier this year.

Part 2 | Materials (3.5 hours)

Listen: 1619 Project Episode 5, Part I (here) (30 mins)

1619 Project Episode 5, Part I (here) (30 mins) Listen: 1619 Project Episode 5, Part II (here) (38 mins)

1619 Project Episode 5, Part II (here) (38 mins) Listen: The Problem We All Live With (here) (59 mins)

The Problem We All Live With (here) (59 mins) Read: Trump’s EPA Concludes Environmental Racism is Real (here) (10 mins)

Trump’s EPA Concludes Environmental Racism is Real (here) (10 mins) Listen or Read: The Case for Reparations (here) (75 mins)

Part 2 | Reflection Questions

What emotions did you feel when reading these materials? What most stuck out to you and why?

A 2010 Gallup survey asked respondents, “On the average, blacks have worse jobs, income and housing than whites. Do you think this is mostly due to discrimination against blacks, or is it mostly due to something else?” 77% of adults and 83% of white adults said “something else.” Do you agree? Why or why not? What accounts for this common response?

Author Richard Rothstein suggests that the federal government address its past discriminatory practices by purchasing 15% of the suburban housing supply and making those homes available to Black residents at the same subsidized rates at which they were sold to white Americans throughout the twentieth century. Do you agree? What do you believe should be done, if anything, to address housing segregation and inequality today?

To what extent do you believe that school segregation is a problem in the US today? What, if anything, do you think should be done to address this? What role can you play?

In policy conversations about programs like welfare and other government subsidies, we often hear politicians and others reference the American Dream and the idea that Americans should be able to lift themselves “by their bootstraps” toward a better life. However, the white middle class was built largely through a multi-billion dollar government subsidy that allowed white Americans to accrue wealth through home ownership. How might this fact play into conversations about the government’s role in social mobility today?

This narrative relies heavily on research by Richard Rothstein in his book The Color of Law. If you would like to learn more about government-sponsored housing discrimination and segregation, you can purchase the book here or from one of these Black-owned bookstores.