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Author: Anna Libertin

Home is more than just a building--it’s a haven from life’s daily challenges, a promise of financial security, and an essential part of the American Dream. Yet, for American families of color, the dream of homeownership has been disrupted or denied completely by centuries of discrimination.

What is housing discrimination?

Housing discrimination occurs when individuals or families who are trying to buy, rent, lease, sell, or finance a home face unequal treatment because of their race, class, sex, religion, national origin, or familial status.

This discrimination means that families are unable to buy or rent homes in certain areas, and it eventually causes racial segregation and wealth disparities among races.

In other words, housing discrimination robs individuals and families of the opportunity to thrive financially, academically, emotionally, and communally.

In this article, we hope to address the systematic discrimination that has led to overwhelming segregation in many cities today is the direct result of federal, state, and local laws that explicitly denied people of color the same opportunities given to white families.

The Law of the Land

Writing housing discrimination into federal policy began after the abolition of slavery, as the Jim Crow laws enforced racial segregation in the South. Sixteen years after the Supreme Court declared these laws unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) began to build housing projects for white families -- an effort to segregate America’s housing.

A year later, the FHA began mass-producing subdivisions for white families with the requirement that none of the affordable homes be sold to people of color, who, they claimed, would bring property values down. The FHA drew housing maps around neighborhoods with foreign-born residents, families on welfare, Jewish families, and “negro infiltration,” since these communities were all considered too “risky” for mortgage insurance.

In this way, the federal government participated in a process called red-lining or refusing to offer services to a community because of race or ethnicity. Richard Rothstein—scholar and author of The Color of Law, a work that examines the local, state, and federal policies that mandated segregation—cites these early policies as the beginning of a “state-sponsored system of segregation.” In fact, before red-lining took hold as a federal policy, the 1920s and 1930s saw great urban integration. From Cleveland, Ohio to Atlanta, Georgia and even right outside PullingEight’s door in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the population was half-African American and half-white—with famous black poet Langston Hughes discussing his Jewish friends and Polish girlfriends in his autobiography—until the FHA demolished integrated housing in favor of segregated public projects.

Soon, public housing projects were completely divided along racial lines. Segregation was so rampant that one FHA development featured a six-foot-high cement wall between African-American and white neighborhoods. By the time the housing authorities opened up vacant white-designated projects to people of color, they were also financing the construction of suburban subdivisions that were only open to white families. As a result, jobs moved from cities to suburbs, and people of color were left unemployed and battling poverty. In other words, these newly desegregated housing projects become vertical slums, and today’s racial separation of white suburbs and black cities was created.

The Fair Housing Act

In 1968, one week after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Congress passed the Fair Housing Act to address these decades of mistreatment. This law prohibits housing discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Still, the effects of earlier systemic discrimination remained: Unable to obtain the same security and quality of affordable homes that white people were given in the 1940s and 1950s, families of color struggled for financial independence.

In the 1960s and 1970s, as the next generation of homeowners came of age, the white families who had had stable housing and secure finances could afford to put their children through college. Those children could move on to work in higher paying jobs, find even better homes, and send their children to school. Meanwhile, the households that had faced federally-mandated discrimination couldn’t afford higher education, healthcare, or any of the resources needed for upward mobility.

“The result is that today, the average African American income are about 60% of white incomes. And the average African American wealth is only about 10% of white wealth. And that enormous disparity between 60% income ratio and 10% wealth ratio is entirely attributable to the unconstitutional federal housing policies practiced in the 20th century,” says Rothstein. “Unless we do something to remedy the unconstitutional creation of this wealth gap through housing policy, the Fair Housing Act’s promise that future discrimination can’t exist will not accomplish as much as it otherwise would.”

While the Fair Housing Act promises future protection from discriminatory practices, the long-lasting effects of America’s once-legalized discrimination are still with us to this day. In the year 2018, 50 years after the passage of this act, many of the government departments formed to end discrimination have been stripped of resources by the Trump administration, and the vast disparities in wealth, rates of homeownership, and access to education and healthcare tell us that housing discrimination is not only part of America’s history: it’s part of our present, too.

PullingEight, Inc. recognizes this major need to address over a century of mistreatment in the housing industry. Our programs not only give low-to-moderate income families and Section 8 housing recipients access to affordable housing, but also to provide them with the necessary education, resources, and opportunities to pursue the American promise of homeownership, independence, and success. With our services, housing discrimination can be reported efficiently and investigated immediately, promising an end to personal discriminatory practices and giving voices to those who need to be heard.

The first step in our fight against discrimination in all forms is education. By understanding the often invisible forces of inequality and mistreatment, we can begin to move forward in our quest.

References:
Gross, Terry. May 3, 2017. “A ‘Forgotten History’ Of How the U.S. Government Segregated America.” The National Public Radio (NPR). Retrieved from: https://www.npr.org/2017/05/03/526655831/a-forgotten-history-of-how-the-u-s-government-segregated-america.

Hibdon, Jamie and Sarah Mirk. September 25, 2017. “America’s Shameful History of Housing Discrimination.” The Nib. Retrieved from: https://thenib.com/america-s-shameful-history-of-housing-discrimination.

Nodjimbadem, Katie. May 30, 2017. “The Racial Segregation of American Cities Was Anything But Accidental.” Smithsonian Magazine. Retrieved from: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-federal-government-intentionally-racially-segregated-american-cities-180963494/.

Stoughton Media Access Corporation. February 8, 2018. “Community Form - Richard Rothstein/Color of Law.” Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVBisCqcw6U.

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