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Residential Segregation by Jeffrey M. So liberals in Congress fought against the integration amendment led by civil rights opponents [resulting in a] housing program that permitted segregation.
When the civilian housing industry picked up in the s, the federal government subsidized mass production builders to create suburbs on conditions that those homes in the suburbs be sold only to whites. No African-Americans were permitted to buy them and the FHA often added an additional condition requiring that every deed in a home in those subdivisions prohibit resale to African —Americans.
Eventually, we had a situation everywhere in the country where there were large numbers of vacancies in the white projects and long waiting lists for the black projects. The situation became so conspicuous that the government and local housing agencies had to open up all projects to African-Americans. How did the Supreme Court decision in Buchanan v.
Warley set the U. In the early 20th century, a number of cities, particularly border cities like Baltimore, St.
Louis, and Louisville, Kentucky, passed zoning ordinances that prohibited African-Americans from moving onto a block that was majority white. In , the Supreme Court found in Buchanan v. Warley that such ordinances were unconstitutional, but not for racial reasons.
The Court found it unconstitutional because such ordinances interfered with the rights of property owners. As a result, planners around the country who were attempting to segregate their metropolitan areas had to come up with another device to do so. In the s, Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover organized an advisory committee on zoning, whose job was to persuade every jurisdiction to adopt the ordinance that would keep low-income families out of middle-class neighborhoods.
Jurisdictions began to adopt zoning ordinances that were exclusive on economics, but the true purpose was, in part, to exclude African-Americans. So they developed ordinances that for example, prohibited apartment buildings from being built in suburbs that had single-family homes. Or they required single-family homes to have large setbacks and be set on multiple acres, all as an attempt to make the suburb racially exclusive.
Even though the Buchanan decision was handed down in , many cities continued to have racial ordinances in flagrant violation of the decision. Some cities adopted ordinances that prohibited African-Americans from living on a block that was majority white. For one thing, when these practices of public segregation were most virulent, many African-Americans could afford to live in white suburbs.
Large subdivisions developed with FHA support like Levittown, New York, were built on conditions that they be all white. They cost twice the national median income and were easily affordable to African-Americans as well as whites, but only working-class whites were permitted to buy into those homes. In the next several generations, those homes sell for seven-to-eight times the median national income — unaffordable to working-class families.
So the segregation that took place when the homes were first built created a permanent system that locked African-Americans out of it as appreciation grew. White families gained in home equity, in wealth, from the appreciation of their homes. African-Americans who were forced to live in apartments and not be homeowners gained none of that appreciation. That enormous difference is almost entirely attributable to unconstitutional federal housing policy in the midth century.
How did reverse-redlining impact the African-American community in the financial crisis of ? Because homes are typically the largest financial asset for most Americans, segregated markets significantly reduce the accumulated wealth of blacks.
This phenomenon—on top of the penalties endured during the historical legacy of slavery and Jim Crow—helps explain why the black—white wealth gap is so much larger than the black—white income gap. While median income for black households is 59 percent that of white households, black median household net worth is just 8 percent of white median household net worth. The segregation-driven wealth gap imposes enormous burdens on African Americans.
Racial residential segregation also means that African Americans are more likely to be steered toward high-poverty neighborhoods, further contributing to the opportunity gap. Typically, families with higher levels of income have access to more-affluent neighborhoods, which tend to have more amenities, and, in particular, higher-performing public schools.
Yet persistent racial residential segregation and the wealth gap it creates means even middle-class black families are more likely to live in concentrated poverty, and thus are more likely to send their children to high-poverty schools than are low-income whites. Even middle-class black families are more likely to live in concentrated poverty, and thus are more likely to send their children to high-poverty schools than are low-income whites.
Some students can use public school choice policies to circumvent residential segregation to attend integrated magnet or charter schools outside their neighborhood, but most cannot.
Seventy-five percent of American students attend a neighborhood public school—that is, they are simply assigned to the school nearest their homes.
On the National Assessment of Educational Progress NAEP given to fourth graders in math, for example, low-income students attending schools that are more affluent scored roughly two years of learning ahead of low-income students in high-poverty schools.
Because of racial residential segregation, low-income African Americans are much less likely to be afforded the opportunity to attend socioeconomically integrated schools. That is to say, less than one in five poor black children had access to a predominantly middle-class school, compared to almost half of poor white children. Would outcomes for African Americans improve if residential racial segregation were reduced? Because levels of black—white segregation vary across the country, it is possible for researchers to examine different outcome levels for African Americans in communities with higher or lower levels of black—white segregation.
Scholars have found that African Americans in moderately segregated metropolitan areas have much better employment levels, earnings, and mortality rates than do African Americans in metropolitan areas with very high segregation levels.
Sander and Jonathan M. Zazloff, along with Yana A. Kucheva of the City College of New York, looked at outcomes for African Americans in metropolitan areas where the black—white dissimilarity index was below 0. The outcomes were consistently better for African Americans living in moderately segregated areas than highly segregated areas, both in absolute terms and when compared with non-Hispanic whites living in the same regions. The unemployment rate for black men ages 25—34, for example, was Unemployment was 3.
See Figure 3. Likewise, for all blacks, age-adjusted mortality relative to non-Hispanic whites was better in moderately segregated regions 1. Part of the reason for better outcomes, the authors of the study suggest, is that blacks are more likely to live in concentrated poverty in metropolitan areas with high levels of racial segregation than those with moderate levels of racial segregation.
The researchers found, for example, that 17 percent of low-income blacks living in moderately segregated metro areas reside in concentrated poverty, compared with 33 percent of low-income blacks living in highly segregated areas. Both currently and historically, segregation is best understood as a tool used to promote and preserve white supremacy, deployed to make it easier to isolate, divest from, surveil, and police black and brown people concentrated in certain communities.
The ingenuity of this racist tool is that its evil use creates its own justification—that is, once employed, it creates perspectives and data that seem to support its further use. As communities of color suffer under the deprivations that come with segregation—economic disinvestment, political disenfranchisement, educational inequity, and unfair, ineffective policing practices—those who build and install resilient and enduring racist systems that sustain segregation explain their decisions in terms of protecting and promoting safety, strong schools, and stable housing markets.
These indeed are desirable neighborhood attributes—but they are the very same attributes that the conditions of segregation disrupted for blacks. In fact, regarding neighborhood characteristics, African Americans express the same values and desires as most Americans, even though they have much more difficulty in realizing them.
Yet only 16 percent rated their local public schools as excellent , and 43 percent of residents reported feeling that their local government services were not a good value for the taxes that they pay. Extensive evidence suggests that black residents in many segregated communities do not believe that their needs and desires are met in their current environments.
For African Americans, an integrated community is one where between 20 to 50 percent of residents are African American. White definitions of integration indicate that they accept diversity only when they can continue to dominate, defining integration as a scenario where only 10 percent of neighborhood residents are black. Certainly, integration is not a panacea for past and present injustices. In fact, pro-integration advocates should respect the ways that integration might lead to new hardships for black folks—increased discomfort and fear of police encounters, elevated levels of surveillance and suspicion from neighbors, disproportionate discipline of black children in predominantly white schools, and so on.
And so one challenge of contemporary housing integration efforts becomes how to dismantle the racist system of policies that created and continue to sustain residential segregation without simultaneously destroying valuable cultural and economic institutions that black and brown communities have created in response to it.
Integration best functions and is best incentivized when public policies and private citizens tackle the myriad of inequities and indignities that complicate, and sometimes limit, the lives of African Americans. Despite this caveat, it remains true that 1 both historically and currently, black people have risked their comfort, livelihoods, and sometimes lives to gain access to integrated spaces; and, most importantly, that 2 segregation itself is a white supremacist practice that has proven both durable and highly effective at limiting black wealth and opportunity.
Racial housing segregation, residential poverty concentration, and diminished housing access did not emerge accidentally.
Sign up for updates. Sign Up Follow us. Members of government and private entities began to deliberately segregate residential areas by race in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, largely by prohibiting blacks from purchasing homes in majority-white neighborhoods.
After the Civil War, those newly liberated black people dispersed throughout the United States, but an abrupt end to Reconstruction ushered in an era of heightened white paramilitary violence, exploitative sharecropping arrangements, and Jim Crow laws. As anti-black discrimination formalized and intensified, many communities systematically expelled African Americans, excluded them from public goods and services, and adopted policies that forbade blacks from residing in towns, or even remaining within town borders after dark.
Pioneered by Baltimore in , racial zoning quickly emerged as an effective way to further subjugate and segregate black folks. Louis, and others. The U. Supreme Court in struck down explicit racial zoning with its decision in Buchanan v. Warley , arguing that such ordinances interfered with the rights of property owners. Localities quickly found a way to circumvent the ruling and preserve the racial caste system in housing.
Some localities created and enforced laws in flagrant violation of Buchanan. Richmond, Virginia, for example, passed a law prohibiting anyone from moving onto a block where they could not marry the majority of people on that block.
Because the state had then-enforceable anti-miscegenation laws on the books, the ordinance effectively prevented neighborhood integration without explicitly mentioning race. Other localities were slightly more subtle. These policies rapidly proliferated. In , just eight cities had zoning ordinances; by , that number had risen to 1, Supreme Court affirmed the practice of exclusionary zoning in Euclid v. Ambler , finding that zoning ordinances were reasonable extensions of police power and potentially beneficial to public welfare.
In order to continue to exclude middle- and upper-class blacks from white neighborhoods, public and private interests conspired to establish a web of racist policies and practices surrounding housing and homeownership.
One practice for many white homeowners was to band together and adopt racially restrictive covenants in their neighborhoods, which forbade any buyer from reselling a home to black buyers. Initially upheld in Corrigan v.
Buckley , the U. Supreme Court reasoned that covenants were private contracts not subject to the Constitution. In city after city, courts and sheriffs successfully evicted African Americans from homes that they had rightly purchased in order to enforce racially restrictive covenants.
Supreme Court declared them unconstitutional in Shelley v. Of all of the homeownership loans approved by the government between and , whites received 98 percent of them. Supreme Court ultimately struck down racially restrictive covenants in Shelley v.
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