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Redlining

Housing Segregation and Redlining in America

ghetto, a word that accurately describes a neighborhood where government has not only concentrated a minority but established barriers to its exit. We don’t hesitate to acknowledge that Jews in Eastern Europe were forced to live in ghettos where opportunity was limited and leaving was difficult or impossible. Yet when we encounter similar neighborhoods in this country, we now delicately refer to them as the inner city, yet everyone knows what we mean.

History

until the last quarter of the twentieth century, racially explicit policies of federal, state, and local governments defined where whites and African Americans should live.

Overview

Housing Segregation and Redlining in America: A Short History | NPR

  • federal government refused to insure bank loans made to African Americans for housing

Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal

Fair Labor Standards Act

Agriculture was exempt

prohibited child labor and established minimum wages of about twelve dollars a week in the South, rising to twenty-five cents an hour in 1938. But to pass such economic legislation, Roosevelt needed the votes of southern congressmen and senators, who agreed to support economic reform only if it excluded industries in which African Americans predominated, like agriculture.

Law and Interpretation

The United Services Organization (USO)
  • Private organization
  • benefited from government
  • coordinated its services with the War Department
  • had a congressional charter
  • organized by President Roosevelt (who held the title of honorary chairman)
  • Allowed for and maintained segregated buildings and services

maintained separate black and white clubs in Richmond for military personnel and also operated separate black and white Travelers Aid services for newly arrived war workers. … in 1943, the USO proposed a service center for African Americans on property that was available in a white neighborhood. The local newspaper, the Richmond Independent, protested; a petition drive in opposition to the plan ensued, and the city council prevented the plan from going forward.

Federal Housing Administration (FHA)
  • Private banks shied away from making loads to working-class families unless mortgages were insured (to reduce risk)
  • If building plans adhered to FHA specifications, the federal government guaranteed mortgages to qualified buyers without further property appraisal.
  • one of the federal government’s specifications for mortgages insured in Milpitas (current day Silicon Valley) was an openly stated prohibition on sales to African Americans

As in Rollingwood ten years earlier, one of the federal government’s specifications for mortgages insured in Milpitas was an openly stated prohibition on sales to African Americans.

  • FHA and VA would refuse mortgages for whites wanting to move into black neighborhoods
  • Bank of America and other banks had similar policies

the Federal Housing Administration and Veterans Administration not only refused to insure mortgages for African Americans in designated white neighborhoods like Ladera; they also would not insure mortgages for whites in a neighborhood where African Americans were present. So once East Palo Alto was integrated, whites wanting to move into the area could no longer obtain government insured mortgages. State-regulated insurance companies, like the Equitable Life Insurance Company and the Prudential Life Insurance Company, also declared that their policy was not to issue mortgages to whites in integrated neighborhoods. … The Bank of America and other leading California banks had similar policies, also with the consent of federal banking regulators.

Peninsula Housing Association of Palo
  • A co-op, Wanted to develop adjacent to Stanford campus.
  • the FHA would not insure loans to a cooperative that included African American members
  • In 1950, the association sold its land to a private developer whose FHA agreement specified that no properties be sold to African Americans. The builder then constructed individual homes for sale to whites in “Ladera,” a subdivision that still adjoins the Stanford campus.
Tennesee Valley Authority (TVA)
  • build model village with 500 comfortable homes, only open to whites
  • “Negroes do not fit into the program”
The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC)

established work camps for jobless youth and young adults.These camps were segregated not just in the South but often in the North as well

Public Works Administration (PWA)
  • goal was to alleviate a national housing shortage while creating jobs in construction
  • Of the PWA’s forty-seven projects, seventeen were assigned to African Americans. Six others were segregated by building. The rest were for whites only.
  • In some instances mixed neighborhoods were demolished and separate segregated projects were build to house residents.
  • “intensified the segregation of African American families”

Ickes established a “neighborhood composition rule”: federal housing projects should reflect the previous racial composition of their neighborhoods. Projects in white areas could house only white tenants, those in African American areas could house only African American tenants, and only projects in already-integrated neighborhoods could house both whites and blacks.

the PWA segregated projects even where there was no previous pattern of segregation.

The first PWA project, the Techwood Homes in Atlanta, opened in 1935. It was built on land cleared by demolishing the Flats, a low-income integrated neighborhood adjacent to downtown that had included 1600 families, nearly one-third of whom were African American. The PWA remade the neighborhood with 604 units for white families only. Techwood project not only created a segregated white community, it also intensified the segregation of African American families who, evicted from their homes,

Interpretation of the Law

The Civil Rights Act

residential segregation also violates the Thirteenth Amendment… In 1866, Congress enforced the abolition of slavery by passing a Civil Rights Act, prohibiting actions that it deemed perpetuated the characteristics of slavery. Actions that made African Americans second-class citizens, such as racial discrimination in housing, were included in the ban.

An unfortunate interpretation of the law

In 1883, though, the Supreme Court rejected this congressional interpretation of its powers to enforce the Thirteenth Amendment. The Court agreed that Section 2 authorized Congress to “to pass all laws necessary and proper for abolishing all badges and incidents of slavery in the United States,” but it did not agree that exclusions from housing markets could be a “badge or incident” of slavery. In consequence, these Civil Rights Act protections were ignored for the next century.

The Fair Housing Act

Provided a framework for some enforcement of fair housing practices. It is this law passed into law in 1965, not the Civil Rights Act of 1866, that is used by civil rights groups to challenge discrimitory housing practices.

That’s 99 years since the 13th amendment.

A better interpretation

In 1965 Alfred H. Mayer Company refuses to sell to couple because the man (Joseph Lee) was black. The St. Louis developer was sued. In 1968 the supreme court ruled in Joseph Lee and Barbara Jo Jones’s favor, establishing that housing discrimination is a badge of slavery.

the Supreme Court upheld the Joneses’ claim and recognized the validity of the 1866 Civil Rights Act’s declaration that housing discrimination was a residue of slave status that the Thirteenth Amendment empowered Congress to eliminate

That’s 85 years since the unfortunate interpretation of the law.

“Cool Guys”

Chief Justice John Roberts

Belives racial imbalance in communities wasn’t the result of any government actions

His opinion prohibited school districts in Louisville and Seattle from accounting for a student’s race as part of modest school integration plans.

“The distinction between segregation by state action and racial imbalance caused by other factors has been central to our jurisprudence. . . . Where [racial imbalance] is a product not of state action but of private choices, it does not have constitutional implications.”

Justice Stewart

Echo’s Chief Justice John Roberts in 1974 5–4 vote regarding a civil rights group that sued to desgregate Detroit’s public schools.

The majority reasoned that because government policy in the suburbs had not segregated Detroit’s schools, the suburbs couldn’t be included in a remedy

Justice Anthony Kennedy

“[V]estiges of past segregation by state decree do remain in our society and in our schools. Past wrongs to the black race, wrongs committed by the State and in its name, are a stubborn fact of history. And stubborn facts of history linger and persist. But though we cannot escape our history, neither must we overstate its consequences in fixing legal responsibilities. The vestiges of segregation . . . may be subtle and intangible but nonetheless they must be so real that they have a causal link to the de jure violation being remedied. It is simply not always the case that demographic forces causing population change bear any real and substantial relation to a de jure violation.”

David Bohannon

One of the nation’s leading mass production developers, created create Rollingwood, a new Richmond suburb.

Federal officials approved bank loans to finance construction, requiring that none of Rollingwood’s 700 houses be sold to an African American. The government also specified that each Rollingwood property must have an extra bedroom with a separate entrance to accommodate an additional white war worker. …units for African Americans included many doubled-up families and illegal sublets. By 1947, when Richmond’s black population had increased to 26,000, half still lived in temporary war housing. As the government financed whites to abandon these apartments for permanent homes in suburbs like Rollingwood, vacancies in white projects were made available to African Americans.

Floyd Lowe

president of the California Real Estate Association, set up an office in East Palo Alto to panic white families into listing their homes for sale, a practice known as blockbusting. He and other agents warned that a “Negro invasion” was imminent and that it would result in collapsing property values. Soon, growing numbers of white owners succumbed to the scaremongering and sold at discounted prices to the agents and their speculators. The agents, including Lowe himself, then designed display ads with banner headlines—“Colored Buyers!”—which they ran in San Francisco newspapers. African Americans, desperate for housing, purchased the homes at inflated prices.

Ex-Baltimore Cop on Redlining

Joe Rogan Experience #670 - Michael A. Wood, Jr.

  • 0:11:45 - 0:13:14 Redlining and Prison Industrial Complex in Baltimore
  • 0:18:50 - 0:20:27 Cops are “zoo-keepers”, “keep animals out of the subburbs”, policy makers not looking at ways to impact meaningful change
  • 0:22:16 - 0:22:50 Hard to see brutality when you a cop involved in it, cops need to step back and take responsibility
    • 0:22:16 - 0:22:57 Cop assaulting 14 year old girl, 11 other cops just watching, blue blinders
  • 0:27:09 - 0:30:45 Freddy Gray
  • 0:30:55 - 0:33:59 Police shootings don’t come from military background, want to “hunt”, but out of fear
  • 0:45:10 - 0:47:11 Redlining Going from bad neighborhood to Northwood district (Mt. Washington)
    • would go to “black” neighborhoods to get better numbers
    • hypothetically if there were no crimes, cops would likely make them up
  • 0:47:11 - 0:47:47 Liberal idea of policing, if there’s no crime there’s still other work a police officer could do i.e. cleaning up neighborhood
  • 0:49:00 - 0:50:20 Arrest of weed dealer
  • 0:58:00 - 0:59:38 Blue uniform causes tension
  • 1:00:00 - 1:01:00 Should cops work where they patrol?
  • 1:34:45 - 1:39:00 Ferguson shooting, officers were likely just doing their job, but they still should have been prosecuted given someone was killed, the evidence would have likely got them off. But an inditment never happenend.
  • 1:40:45 - 1:41:34 Tamir Rice was murdered, and not indited
  • 1:58:16 - 2:03:50 Really low standards, cops are bad at shooting their weapon, requirement is 70% at 3 yards
  • 2:11:00 - 2:13:00 Cop pay isn’t high enough to encourage high-quality candidates, 1 good cop could do the job of 4 bad cops
  • 2:14:00 - 2:15:00 Women cops tend to be better detectives, some of them can hold their own just fine
  • 2:18:00 - 2:18:30 Women cops, cont. There’s a need for more women cops
  • 2:18:45 - 2:20:36 Black lives matter

Terms

structural racism

When public policy discrimination and societal discrimination in institutions operate to the disadvantage of African Americans.

private prejudice

white flight

  • Scare white communities into moving

Floyd Lowe, president of the California Real Estate Association, set up an office in East Palo Alto to panic white families into listing their homes for sale, a practice known as blockbusting. He and other agents warned that a “Negro invasion” was imminent and that it would result in collapsing property values. Soon, growing numbers of white owners succumbed to the scaremongering and sold at discounted prices to the agents and their speculators.

real estate steering

  • Steer buyer to or away from neighborhood based of race or religion

Lowe himself, then designed display ads with banner headlines—“Colored Buyers!”—which they ran in San Francisco newspapers. African Americans, desperate for housing, purchased the homes at inflated prices.

bank redlining

Restricting loans based on area (usually “non-white” areas)

Redlining Today

Diversity in the workplace

VOX: American segregation, mapped at day and night

  • Diversity in commercial / work areas is much greater than diversity in residential areas. But not across the same jobs, managers are much more likely to be white.
  • Segregation has gone down very little in the workplace in the past few decades

Modern-day Redlining

Democracy Now!: Modern-Day Redlining

  • 06:55 - 10:50 Aaron Glantz, investigative journalist at Reveal uncovered evidence that African Americans and Latinos continue to be routinely denied conventional mortgage loans, even at rates far higher than their white counterparts, across the country. This is explained in the article Kept out: How banks block people of color from homeownership

Legislation

Additional Reading