Housing
No. 6 | 2021
1936 Philadelphia. Credit: The Philadelphia Redlining Research Project
Two weeks ago, on Wednesday, Donald Trump took to Twitter to tout his new Fair Housing Policy, proclaiming that people living out the “Suburban Lifestyle Dream” will “no longer be bothered or financially hurt by low-income housing built in their neighborhoods.”
That same week, John Lewis died. And reminded us that there is nothing new about a housing policy that leans into structural racism to displace Black lives. His farewell editorial insisted that studying history would lay bare for us the wrenching existential struggle that is racism (or as Isabel Wilkerson recently named it outright, Caste stratification).
It’s in that sense that white folks can begin, I think, to see equitable housing policies as the kind of reparations that Ta-Nahesi Coates talks about…the kind that emerge from a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history.
History
Nineteenth Century
In the early 1850s, New York City lawmakers used eminent domain to destroy a thriving Black community in Manhattan, displacing thousands of residents in order to create Central Park.
Twentieth Century
In 1933 and 1934, FDR signed the Home Owners’ Loan Act and the National Housing Act into law to prevent foreclosures and make rental housing and homeownership more affordable. Here’s how that worked:
First, the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) created maps to assess the risk to mortgage loans; nonwhite neighborhoods were hazardous and colored red. This process, known as redlining, denied people of color—especially Black people—access to mortgage refinancing and federal underwriting.
Second, and as a result, just 2 percent of the $120 billion in FHA loans distributed between 1934 and 1962 were given to nonwhite families.
Third, 3 in 4 neighborhoods that HOLC deemed “hazardous” in the 1930s remain low to moderate-income today, and more than 60 percent are predominantly nonwhite.
Late 20th into the 21st Centuries
30 years ago, Atlanta lawmakers demolished the United States’ oldest federally subsidized affordable housing project, displacing more than 30,000 predominantly Black families to create Centennial Olympic Park.
From 2000 to 2013, Washington DC endured the nation’s highest rate of gentrification, resulting in more than 20,000 African American residents’ displacement. Today, almost 1 in 4 Black Washington DC residents—23 percent—live in poverty… 3 percent of white Washington residents live in poverty.
Now
Over the past 50 years, gentrification has taken root in most cities, driving up rents and home prices in urban areas across the United States. Currently, lawmakers do not create programs to insulate longtime Black residents from the disruptive effects of gentrification. As gentrification exacerbates white privilege, it also contributes to the suburbanization of poverty; low-income Black people are forced to relocate from cities to areas outside them.
That brings us to now…a time in which Trump names a “new” policy that excludes Black families by promising white suburban homeowners that they will not be required to break down a pattern of segregation that works to their advantage.
The entire history amplifies the sad reality that our solutions to the great problems of housing and economic inequality are not-so-much. “The reason black people are so far behind now is not because of now,” Clyde Ross explains “It’s because of then.”
Speaking Unspoken
Intentional exclusion from federal programs has produced structural barriers to homeownership that undermine Black people’s wealth accumulation. The U.S. Housing system shows how the mechanism of structural racism both leans on (and tries to ignore) the past in an effort to continue harming Black lives in the present. This can and should look different. When we look at the reality and history of white privilege, we clear the way for change. As a start:
lawmakers can expand the supply of affordable units and dismantle existing exclusionary zoning practices;
housing policies can promote access to resources and opportunities among residents of color;
voters can support robust civil rights enforcement in the housing market by (1) demanding the application of disparate impact assessments to housing discrimination cases and (2) modifying the mortgage appraisal process.
These policies can’t make amends for centuries of injustice, but they are a different step toward racial equity…something more than moral pressure. Something moving us closer to reparation.
Learn more about housing policy and reparations
Bye for Now.
So. Much. Love.
Cara
