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The federal government had required public housing to be made available only to families who needed substantial subsidies, while the same government declined to provide sufficient subsidies to make public housing a decent place to live.
“the federal government [had] in effect been planting the seeds of Jim Crow practices throughout the region under the guise of ‘respecting local attitudes.’”
guaranteed mortgage in the Elmwood district of Berkeley. By the closing date, Mr. Cohn wasn’t ready to move in and, while keeping up his mortgage payments, rented the house to a fellow teacher, Alfred Simmons, an African American. The Berkeley chief of police asked the Federal
THEN THE Supreme Court issued a ruling that was as much of an upheaval for housing policy as Brown v. Board of Education would be, six years later, for education.
the Court repudiated its 1926 endorsement of restrictive covenants and acknowledged that enforcement by state courts was unconstitutional.
Only in 1962, when President John F. Kennedy issued an executive order prohibiting the use of federal funds to support racial discrimination in housing, did the FHA cease financing subdivision developments whose builders openly refused to sell to black buyers.
It took another nineteen years before a federal appeals court ruled that the covenants themselves violated the Fair Housing Act and that recording deeds with such clauses would constitute state action in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Three of the nine justices excused themselves from participating because their objectivity might have been challenged—there were racial restrictions covering the homes in which they lived.
Often racial integration caused property values to increase.
Indeed, the study confirmed that because African Americans were willing to pay more than whites for similar housing, property values in neighborhoods where African Americans could purchase increased more often than they declined.
Blockbusters’ tactics included hiring African American women to push carriages with their babies through white neighborhoods, hiring African American men to drive cars with radios blasting through white neighborhoods, paying African American men to accompany agents knocking on doors to see if homes were for sale, or making random telephone calls to residents of white neighborhoods and asking to speak to someone with a stereotypically African American name like “Johnnie Mae.”
In a 1962 Saturday Evening Post article, an agent (using the pseudonym “Norris Vitchek”) claimed to have arranged house burglaries in white communities to scare neighbors into believing that their communities were becoming unsafe.
But if the agency had not adopted a discriminatory and unconstitutional racial policy, African Americans would have been able, like whites, to locate throughout metropolitan areas rather than attempting to establish presence in only a few blockbusted communities, and speculators would not have been able to prey on white fears that their neighborhoods would soon turn from all white to all black.
Whites could leave—blacks had to stay.
EVEN WHEN mortgage loans were not insured by the FHA or the VA, banks and savings (thrift) institutions pursued discriminatory policies.
Like the FHA, it claimed that judging African Americans to be poor credit risks because they were black was not a racial judgment but an economic one.
One of the more troubling has been the regulatory tolerance of banks’ “reverse redlining”—excessive marketing of exploitative loans in African American communities. This was an important cause of the 2008 financial collapse because these loans, called subprime mortgages, were bound to go into default.
In the early 2000s, reverse redlining was tolerated, sometimes winked at, by bank regulators.
For example, mortgage broker compensation systems included incentives to pressure borrowers into accepting subprime mortgages, without the brokers disclosing the consequences. Brokers received bonuses, in effect kickbacks (called “yield spread premiums,” or YSPs), if they made loans with interest rates higher than those recommended by their banks on formal rate sheets for borrowers with similar characteristics.
or agreed to lend only if he paid higher interest, a premium for integration ranging from an additional 5½ percent to an additional 9 percent.
THE MILPITAS story illustrates the extraordinary creativity that government officials at all levels displayed when they were motivated to prevent the movement of African Americans into white neighborhoods.
Condemnations of property and manipulations of zoning designations to prevent African Americans from building occurred almost routinely in the 1950s and 1960s.
“Justice delayed is justice denied” was the frequent experience of African Americans having to fight legal battles to obtain housing in white neighborhoods.
One slum clearance tool was the construction of the federal interstate highway system.
Built post-Shelley, the Pennsylvania project did not have restrictive covenants, but the FHA continued to support Levitt and other developers only if they refused to sell to African Americans.
Although the 1968 Fair Housing Act made violence to prevent neighborhood integration a federal crime and the Department of Justice prosecuted several cases, frequent attacks on African Americans attempting to leave predominantly black areas continued into the 1980s.
State-sponsored violence was a means, along with many others, by which all levels of government maintained segregation in Louisville and elsewhere.
IN 1935, President Roosevelt signed the National Labor Relations Act, granting unions at construction sites and factories the right to bargain with management if the unions were supported by a majority of workers.
The enactment of the Wagner Act was accomplished with the knowledge that it sanctioned an unconstitutional policy of legally empowering unions that refused to admit
African Americans.
Auxiliary members had to pay dues to the white local but were not permitted to file grievances or vote in union elections.
At least twenty-nine other national unions either excluded African Americans entirely or
restricted them to second-class auxiliaries.
but federal agencies continued to recognize segregated unions within the government itself until 1962, when President Kennedy banned the practice.
African Americans were neither permitted to live in the new suburbs nor, for the most part, to boost their incomes by participating in suburban construction.
The city’s streetcar system refused to hire African Americans until 1942. Maya Angelou, who lied about her age to get a conductor’s job as a teenager, was one of the first.
When the Bay Area Rapid Transit subway system (BART) was built in 1967, not a single African American skilled worker was hired to work on it.
In 2015, New York City’s sheet metal workers union began paying thirteen million dollars in compensation to African Americans who, although union members, received fewer job assignments than whites from 1991 to 2006.
But an assessor can undermine tax fairness by using different percentages of market value in different communities.
These governments did so by overassessing properties in black neighborhoods and underassessing them in white ones.
In a 1973 study of ten large U.S. cities, the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) found a systematic pattern of overassessment in low-income African American neighborhoods, with corresponding underassessment
in white middle-class neighborhoods.
The article recounted another case where rents were so high that thirty-eight people lived in a six-room apartment, sleeping in three shifts.
Nationwide, African Americans had disposable incomes that were lower than those of the whites with whom they worked, because of higher commuting costs from segregated neighborhoods to jobs that were now found in the suburbs.
Income differences are only a superficial way to understand why we remain segregated. Racial policy in which government was inextricably involved created income disparities that ensure residential segregation, continuing to this day.
Two years later, civil rights advocates tried again, and this time the Senate eked out by the narrowest of margins a Fair Housing Act that prohibited private discrimination in housing sales and rentals; shortly after, pressured by national emotion following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in April 1968, the House of Representatives enacted the law.
But the public policies of yesterday still shape the racial landscape of today.
Wow!!!
Were housing segregation not pervasive, school desegregation would have been more successful.
Perhaps most pernicious has been the federal tax code’s mortgage interest deduction, which increased the subsidies to higher-income suburban homeowners while providing no corresponding tax benefit for renters.
Likewise developers of low-income housing have used federal tax credits mostly to construct apartments in already-segregated neighborhoods.
