Chris Rock: You know what's so sad, man?
You know what's wild?
Martin Luther King stood for nonviolence.
Now what's Martin Luther King?
A street.
And I don't give a f*** where you at in America,
If you on Martin Luther King Boulevard
there's some violence going down.
Gene: That, of course, is Chris Rock’s famous joke
about streets named for Martin Luther King Jr.,
which tend to be in -- let's say distressed areas.
And he’s not wrong, because if you look
at the way housing segregation works in America
you can see how things ended up this way.
Once you see it, you won't be able to unsee it.
OK, let’s look at MLK Boulevard in Baltimore.
I want to show you how to see housing segregation
in schools, in health, in family wealth, in policing.
But first, an explanatory comma.
It’s the 1930s in the wake of the Great Depression.
FDR is president.
He wants to bring economic relief
to millions of Americans
through a collection of federal programs and projects
called The New Deal.
One part of that "new deal"
was The National Housing Act of 1934,
which introduced ideas like the 30-year mortgage
and low, fixed interest rates.
So now you have all these lower-income people
who can afford homes,
but how do you make sure
they don't default on their new mortgages?
Enter the Home Owners Loan Corp.
The HOLC created residential security maps.
And these maps? They're where the term redlining comes from.
Green meant “best area, best people,” aka businessmen;
blue meant “good people,” like white-collar families;
yellow meant a “declining area,” with working class families;
and red meant “detrimental influences, hazardous,"
like “foreign-born” people, “low-class whites,"
and -- most significantly -- “Negroes.”
Again and again on these HOLC maps,
one of the most consistent criteria for redlined neighborhoods
is the presence of black and
brown people.
Let’s be clear.
Studies show that people who lived in redlined areas
were not necessarily more likely to default on their mortgages.
But redlining made it difficult —
if not impossible — to buy or refinance.
So landlords abandon their properties.
City services become unreliable.
In most places, crime increases.
And property values drop.
All of these conditions fester for 30 years
as white people flee to the brand new suburbs
popping up all over the country.
Many of those suburbs institute rules, called covenants,
that explicitly forbid selling homes to black people.
And all of this was perfectly legal.
Now it’s 1968.
And MLK is assassinated.
News Report: Good evening.
The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, 39 years old,
The apostle of nonviolence in the civil rights movement
has been shot to death in Memphis, Tenn.
Martin Luther King was shot and was killed tonight in Memphis, Tenn.
In the aftermath,
Congress passes the Fair Housing Act of 1968.
It's a policy meant to encourage equal housing opportunities
regardless of race, or religion or national origin.
And it offers protections for future homeowners and renters,
but does little to fix the damage already done.
Over the next 50 years,
the Fair Housing Act is rarely enforced.
So you can still see housing segregation and its effects,
in Baltimore and often along any MLK Boulevard in any U.S. city.
Like its effects on wealth.
So homeownership is the major way Americans create wealth, right?
Well, discrimination in housing is the major reason
that black families up and down the income scale
have a tiny fraction of the family wealth that white families do --
even white families with less education and lower incomes.
For almost 30 years, 98 percent of FHA loans
were handed out to white borrowers.
Not only were black neighborhoods redlined,
and not only was the Fair Housing Act selectively enforced, if at all,
but it is still today much harder
for a black person to get a mortgage or home loan
than it is for a white person.
John: Families are fearful of speaking up
about a basic human right
that should be afforded to everyone in the world
but definitely in the richest country in the world.
And housing segregation in schools.
The primary way that Americans pay for public schools
is by paying property taxes.
People who live in more valuable homes
have better-funded local schools,
better-paid teachers, better school facilities and more resources.
Here’s a feedback loop: The better the schools in a neighborhood,
the more those homes in that neighborhood are worth.
And the higher the property values of those homes,
the more money there is for schools.
And so on and so on.
And housing segregation in health.
Because of urban planning that benefited
those richer, whiter neighborhoods,
people of color are more likely
to live near industrial plants that spew toxic fumes;
they're more likely to live
far away from grocery stores with fresh food,
and in places where
the water isn’t drinkable.
They're more likely to live in neighborhoods
with crumbling infrastructure,
and in homes with toxic paint.
Karen: When you're living with rats, roaches,
and things like that -- that's deplorable.
You cannot have that kind of stuff
with children running around in the building.
A building that may be full of lead.
And, not coincidentally,
people of color have higher incidences of certain cancers,
asthma and heart disease.
And housing segregation in policing.
Housing segregation means we are having
vastly different experiences with crime
and vastly different experiences with policing.
Because our neighborhoods are so segregated,
sometimes racial profiling can be camouflaged
as spatial profiling —
where living in certain areas can make you more likely
to be stopped by the police.
And it means people have a lot of unnecessary contact
with the criminal justice system just because of where they live.
Reggie: The problem in our city?
The police and the citizens are fighting.
They keep targeting my brothers and sisters
who don't really have nothing.
And that heavy, aggressive kind of policing
that you see in black neighborhoods in particular
makes people feel like they can’t trust the police.
And when people don’t trust the police,
crimes go unsolved and people have to find
other ways to keep themselves safe.
But, of course, it’s not just Baltimore.
Because housing segregation and discrimination
fundamentally shape the lives of people
in nearly every major American city.
It really is in everything.
To hear more about how race shapes American life,
visit npr.org/codeswitch.
I'm Gene Demby. Be easy.
