Housing
No. 6 | 2021
Two weeks ago, on a Wednesday, Donald Trump took to Twitter to tout his new “Fair Housing Policy,” proclaiming that people living out the “Suburban Lifestyle Dream” would “no longer be bothered or financially hurt by low-income housing built in their neighborhoods.”
That same week, John Lewis died.
And in his final words, he 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 reveal the wrenching existential struggle at the heart of racism, or what Isabel Wilkerson has since named plainly as caste stratification.
It is in this sense, I think, that white Americans can begin to understand equitable housing policy as a form of repair. Not symbolic repair, but the kind Ta-Nehisi Coates describes. Repair that emerges from a revolution of American consciousness. A reckoning between our self-image as a great democratizer and 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. Thousands of residents were displaced to make way for what would become Central Park.
Twentieth Century
In 1933 and 1934, Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Home Owners’ Loan Act and the National Housing Act into law. Their stated goal was to prevent foreclosures and make rental housing and homeownership more affordable. What followed tells a different story.
First, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation created maps to assess mortgage risk. Neighborhoods with nonwhite residents were labeled hazardous and outlined in red. This practice, now known as redlining, denied people of color, especially Black Americans, access to mortgage refinancing and federal underwriting.
Second, as a direct result, only 2 percent of the $120 billion in FHA loans distributed between 1934 and 1962 went to nonwhite families.
Third, three out of four neighborhoods the HOLC deemed “hazardous” in the 1930s remain low- to moderate-income today. More than 60 percent are still predominantly nonwhite.
Late Twentieth into the Twenty-First Century
Thirty years ago, Atlanta lawmakers demolished the nation’s oldest federally subsidized affordable housing project. More than 30,000 predominantly Black families were displaced to make room for Centennial Olympic Park.
From 2000 to 2013, Washington, D.C. experienced the highest rate of gentrification in the country. Over 20,000 African American residents were displaced. Today, nearly one in four Black residents of Washington, D.C., 23 percent, live in poverty. Only 3 percent of white residents do.
Now
Over the past fifty years, gentrification has taken root in most American cities, driving up rents and home prices in urban cores. Lawmakers have largely failed to create programs that protect longtime Black residents from the destabilizing effects of this shift. As gentrification compounds white privilege, it also fuels the suburbanization of poverty. Low-income Black families are pushed out of cities and into areas with fewer resources and fewer protections.
This brings us to the present moment. Trump names a “new” policy that promises white suburban homeowners they will not be asked to disrupt a system of segregation that works in their favor. The language is familiar. The outcome is predictable.
Taken together, this history reveals a painful truth. Our responses to housing and economic inequality remain profoundly inadequate. As Clyde Ross has said, “The reason Black people are so far behind now is not because of now. It’s because of then.”
What’s not said
Intentional exclusion from federal programs has produced structural barriers to homeownership that continue to undermine Black wealth accumulation. The American housing system depends on this history while pretending it does not exist. Structural racism relies on the past even as it tries to erase it.
This can look different.
When we confront the reality of white privilege and its historical foundations, we create space for change. As a starting point:
Lawmakers can expand the supply of affordable housing and dismantle exclusionary zoning practices.
Housing policy can promote equitable access to resources and opportunity for residents of color.
Voters can demand robust civil rights enforcement in the housing market by insisting on disparate impact assessments in discrimination cases and reforming the mortgage appraisal process.
These steps cannot undo centuries of injustice. But they represent something more than moral pressure. They move us closer to repair. Closer to responsibility. Closer to something that begins to resemble reparation.
Learn more about housing policy and reparations
Bye for Now.
So. Much. Love.
Cara
