How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood

by P.E. Moskowitz

It would be easy to dismiss the guidelines as clumsy or a product of less enlightened times, but the FHA knew exactly what consequences its practices would have. In a 1939 memo about Washington, DC, FHA officials admitted the guidelines would end up concentrating poor African Americans in city centers and moving richer whites out to the suburbs: “The ‘filtering up’ process [white people moving to the suburbs], and the tendency of Negroes to congregate in the District, taken together, logically point to a situation where eventually the District will be populated by Negroes and the surrounding areas in Maryland and Virginia by white families.”