How Housing Discrimination Helped Define Systematic Modern American Racism

 

•  Best

•  Still desirable

•  Definitely declining

•  Hazardous

  
  

  Until the recent explosion of residential real estate, the notion of home ownership was as American as apple pie. Or so it seemed. At least for white people. The Jim Crow era was America for African Americans for almost a century, and when the nation had an opportunity to remedy that anomaly, until a flurry of civil rights cases and legislation in the 1950s and beyond, generally it didn’t. Where fair practices were considered, the 1896 Supreme Court “separate but equal” Plessy vs Ferguson made it clear that racism was a most appropriate consideration.

  Racially restrictive covenants, which were enforced by virtually every court in the land, were the private approach to excluding blacks from neighborhoods. But the U.S. government almost insured a permanent separation of white and black communities as it actually formalized legal structures that pretty much guarantee the ghettoization of black neighborhoods. “In the 1930s, during the Great Depression, unemployment rates were high and many people couldn't make their mortgage payments. A wave of foreclosures swept the country. To help keep people in their homes, the federal government established the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC). Its goal was to refinance mortgages with better terms, like lower interest rates and longer repayment periods, to help people make payments and avoid foreclosure.

  “To determine what loans they would guarantee, HOLC sent people to appraise neighborhoods in cities across the US. They documented the types of housing in neighborhoods, along with information about the people who lived there. They also catalogued ‘detrimental influences,’ with racist descriptions like ‘infiltration of Negroes’ and ‘mixed races’ as characteristics that lowered a neighborhood's value [see above excerpt from such a valuation document]…

  “With this information, HOLC made ‘residential security maps’ for almost 250 cities, including New York City. On these maps, HOLC gave each neighborhood a classification [within the four color categories above].

  “The government used these classifications to determine whether to guarantee loans. Banks used them to determine if people were eligible for mortgages, and wouldn't provide loans to buy homes in the ‘declining’ or ‘hazardous’ neighborhoods… This was redlining - drawing boundaries around neighborhoods based on residents' race and depriving them of resources and opportunities - effectively racializing poverty in cities across the U.S.. This is structural racism: where racism is built into the rules of society.” History of Redlining, NYC.gov Redlining may be illegal today, but the damage it has created seems irreparable. Impoverished neighborhoods led to impoverished schools. Black Americans were separated from wealth building and opportunity, seemingly indefinitely. That gap widened in recent years.

   

  In short, the long-term impact of redlining has been the source of much of the racial turmoil we have seen in recent years. The notion of “us” vs “them” – in everything from economic disparity and lack of opportunity to a seeming separate criminal justice system for people of color – is rooted in this once immutable system of forced separation of the races. It also explains why school integration, without forced bussing, is so difficult. NIMBY. “They’re not like us.” Well, most of us have heard one or another version of these words on more than one occasion.

  A new PBS documentary – Giorgio Angelini’s Owned: a Tale of Two Americas – makes the compelling argument that the gauntlets of racial discrimination and economic disparity are not discrete events, but rather “interrelated symptoms of a disastrous housing system that has greatly disadvantaged non-white people for generations and allowed the commodification of housing to steamroll millions of lower income Americans.

  “[The film is the] story of redlining—the race-based lending policies of the postwar period that blocked nonwhite families from obtaining mortgages in certain places, effectively cutting off a path to homeownership and the development of generational wealth for millions of people… ‘A couple years after starting to make this film that was specifically about suburbia, we had the Freddie Gray uprising in Baltimore, and Michael Brown in Ferguson, and it became apparent to me that there was something connecting these stories,’ [Angelini] says. Pockets of concentrated poverty, the film argues, are the products of the racist housing policies of the past, and problems in these communities are the inevitable result of decades of being forced out of an economic and wealth-building system so integral to the American economy…

  “‘Right now in America our conception of home is less cultural and more financial. It’s specifically about wealth accumulation,’ Angelini says. That’s led to market speculation, unsustainable borrowing, and the gross effects of a bursting housing bubble. It’s also led some homeowners to find it in their own financial interest to subtly embrace the racist housing policies of the past, Angelini says. When homeowners see their own home values connected with who does or doesn’t live in their neighborhood, they may be less likely to call for a more equal playing field for underserved communities hoping to get a piece of the homeownership pie.” FastCompany.com, February 7th.

  Out-of-control capital markets, cheap money and accumulated wealth from existing homeownership – homes that at been commoditized at vastly higher values than ghetto-born communities – simply amplified the unfairness, that highly destructive “us” vs “them” biased cultural assumption. The United States, once called the “land of opportunity” seems to have devolved into a “land of opportunists and inequality.” We are all paying the price fiercely! But Americans of color pay a much higher cost.

  I’m Peter Dekom, and when you tilt the playing field heavily against someone and then hold a notion of “inferiority” against the person for what you caused… well… welcome to America.