Housing Segregation in America: A History
by Marc Dones of the Center for Social Innovation
The first thing that I want to talk about
is from 1917-1948,
and these were racially restrictive covenants.
And this was a housing practice
where, I could put in the deed of my house,
"No black people ever."
Once you look at the deed, right? -
The deed is a living document
of this sort of bricks and mortar, right?
And if you go back far enough
you can find in that deed - No black people.
The next thing I want to talk about is the
Federal Housing Authority, and the practice of red lining.
So, the Federal Housing Authority came into
being in 1934 in response to
a massing housing crisis, and what the
Federal Housing Authority came in to being to do
is create the modern mortgage system.
So, all of the stuff we think about in terms of
let's get a credit score, let's get you know -
this mortgage is backed by somebody?
It's backed by the Federal Housing Authority,
The Federal Housing Authority had in practice
until 1968, something called red lining.
And red lining was this idea that you
could decide which neighborhoods were worth having -
were worth backing mortgages in, right?
And, this is probably a huge shock to you,
but the neighborhoods that they
decided they didn't want to back
mortgages in, were neighborhoods with black people.
And, if there were black folks and white
folks, there was a great term they used
for this called, "dis-harmonious racial mixing."
And, so they would and you can see it, right?
So, you will see inside the red-lining documents, right?
So, the neighborhoods that are zoned red are ranked D,
are neighborhoods that they just would
not back a mortgage in, right? And those are
neighborhoods predominantly of color, and
then you have neighborhoods ranked C, and those
neighborhoods have dis-harmonious racial mixing.
And, what's fascinating is this
was so entrenched in their policy that
an enterprising young white person in
Detroit, Michigan, who could
not get a mortgage year after year,
because of all this dis-harmonious mixing, built a wall!
And the Federal Housing Authority said,
"Good enough," and backed the mortgages
of the white folks on the one side of that wall.
That's how intense this practice was.
In 1948, we have the end racial
covenants, right? They become unenforceable.
And what this means is there was a
Supreme Court case that guided the
State requirement to back these covenants, right?
So, it used to be that you
could, if someone sold a house on your street to a
black person, you could go to the State and say,
"But they had a covenant," and the Supreme Court said
that is not anybody's responsibility, right?
That is not the State's responsibility to enforce that.
However, the lens that they used to do
that breakdown was one that left it up
to the community to police it. So, this is the
birth of a really dangerous period for black folks, right?
Where we start to see the
rampant escalation of burning crosses
on people's lawns, because it was no longer the
State's responsibility to enforce this,
it was the community's responsibility,
and nobody was gonna get in the way of that.
So, then we have something magical,
it was the Federal Fair Housing Act.
It was great. It fixed all the problems,
except it did not.
So, after that, right? We have the
disparate impact of local land use regulations.
So, this has to do with, and
this is a problem that we can see inside
our own communities, right? If you look at
most major cities in America, at a time
when people are trying to move to these
cities for jobs there has been a housing contraction.
So, for example in San Francisco, right?
For every ten jobs that are online,
one unit of housing become available.
That's this disparate impact, right?
And instead, what we have is like a new GAP.
So, and then we also have housing discrimination, right?
And when I say housing discrimination, what
I'm talking about is the real and
persistent impact of people's individual
discriminatory practices. So, in the sense
that if I go - so, I have a strapping tall
boyfriend who is very white, and so if I
ever decide to buy a house, he will do
all that, because he will be shown more houses
and be given better rates, and be
given better closing deals. And I will
walk in at the very end like, "What's up!?"
Because I'm not trying to get involved with that, right?
So, that's housing discrimination, and so
when you talk about the Federal Fair Housing Act, I think
it's really important that we understand,
that it put on the books a lot of
capability that we don't necessarily use.
So, it is this central thing, red lining, right?
That is what we point to, when we talk
about the current landscape of racially
discriminatory housing in America, right?
It is this that created our ghettos, it's red lining
that created our ongoing areas of divestment.
So, when we talk about the
areas, right where, you're like, you know
why can't these blacks get it together.
Black folks have only had access to mortgages since around 1970, right?
So, and when you look at just
that fact alone there cannot be an
expectation or an assumption that there
would be that much of a change in forty years.
