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Confronting the History of Housing Discrimination

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Who We Are: Jewish Alliance for Law & Social Action

The Jewish Alliance for Law and Social Action (JALSA) is devoted to engaging the community in promoting civil rights, protecting civil liberties and achieving social, economic, environmental, and racial justice.

JALSA is guided by our fundamental Jewish values, and enables people to connect their Jewish identity to their ideology on public policy issues. We believe that it is our job to strive for the world as it should be, and we are optimistic enough to believe that it is possible to achieve.

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“Our system of official segregation was not the result of a single law that consigned African Americans to designated neighborhoods. Rather, scores of racially explicit laws, regulations and government practices combined to create a nationwide system of urban ghettos surrounded by white suburbs. Private discrimination played a role, but it would have been considerably less effective had it not been embraced and reinforced by government.”

The Color of Law: The Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein

Thanks for the introduction. This presentation is designed to go deeper on the history of housing segregation and how it connects to current racial justice issues. Much of the presentation draws on the book, The Color of Law, by Richard Rothstein, which many may be familiar with. We thought it made sense to start with a quote from that book

Richard Rothstein, writes in The Color of Law:

“Our system of official segregation was not the result of a single law that consigned African Americans to designated neighborhoods. Rather, scores of racially explicit laws, regulations and government practices combined to create a nationwide system of urban ghettos surrounded by white suburbs. Private discrimination played a role, but it would have been considerably less effective had it not been embraced and reinforced by government.” NEXT SLIDE PLEASE.

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Confronting the History of Housing Discrimination

Section 1 A Divided and Unequal Region

Section 2 Jim Crow and the Roots of Discrimination

Section 3 The Six Pillars of Historic Housing Segregation

Section 4 What Remains Today

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Kirwan Institute Opportunity Map of Greater Boston

Ending housing segregation is critical to creating a more just and equitable community, region, and country.

We live in a divided and unequal region, and a great many of the things we place value on are distributed based on where we live. The map you see on the screen now illustrates that. It is map of opportunity in Greater Boston developed by the Kirwan Institute at Ohio State University for the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute about a decade ago.

When we look at this map, we are look at the real, ongoing consequences of racial segregation for African American communities and for other people of color, who inherit the legacy of decades of segregation.

Where we live determines our health and life expectancy, as well as our access to good schools, jobs, and transportation. It determines whether we can build wealth by buying a home that will increase in value. We often hear that “your zip code should not determine your future,” but we know that it does determine many aspects of that future.

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Jim Crow, as you know, was the system of laws and practices erected following the Civil War and the relative progress of the reconstruction period, to explicitly enforce the continued oppression of formerly enslaved African American people. A major component of Jim Crow was the enforced separation of white and Black people in all aspects of life and often the exclusion of Black people from public amenities like swimming pools or public libraries.

Jim Crow originated in the South after the Civil War and was enshrined in laws after African Americans were disenfranchised with the end of Reconstruction in the 1870s. By the 1890s, the Jim Crow system of legal segregation was in place throughout the South and had been given federal sanction by Supreme Court decisions like the famous “separate by equal” Plessey v. Ferguson decision in 1896.

For much of the 19^th century both before and after the Civil War, a small number of African Americans that lived in northern cities and towns did not live segregated in separate districts though they suffered many other kinds of discrimination in northern states. However, as the great migration of African Americans from the South began in the early 20^th century efforts to segregate growing numbers of African Americans became more common.

We see Jim Crow coming north in the early 20^th century starting with the border states. Laws and practices that segregated African Americans became more common in cities and towns north of the Mason Dixon line. The creation of a system of segregated cities and towns was residential Jim Crow. NEXT SLIDE PLEASE.

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In the 20th Century, the Six Pillars of Housing Segregation

created the legacy of racial segregation and inequality.

Redlining

Discriminatory Real Estate Practices

Restrictive Covenants

Urban Renewal & Highway Construction

Violence

Zoning

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

1.

Redlining

Discriminatory Real Estate Practices

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The First Pillar: Zoning

Zoning of cities and towns for specific land uses began in Germany in the late 19th Century and was widely adopted in the United States in the early 20th Century for a variety of reasons.

Much of the momentum for zoning came from urban reformers and progressives, but the movement for zoning grew at the same time as Jim Crow laws were being enacted in the South.

Zoning is the system of land use regulations that most American cities and towns use to define what kind of building or use can be built on a plot of land. Zoning of cities and towns for specific land uses began in Germany in the late 19th century and was widely adopted in the United States in the early 20th century for a variety of reasons.

Although much of the early momentum for zoning came from urban reformers and progressives, zoning grew as Jim Crow laws were being enacted in the South and border states and beyond. Zoning became a valuable tool of segregationist’s efforts to legally enforce separation. Early zoning laws explicitly forbade African American from living in certain districts of cities and only allowed them to live in designated areas. This was like the apartheid restrictions that were South African law until the1990s.

Baltimore adopted one of the first such zoning ordinances in 1910. Other cities that adopted racial zoning ordinances include St. Louis, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Oklahoma City, Atlanta, and Louisville, Kentucky.

In 1917 a Supreme Court decision outlawed explicitly racial zoning laws. Despite this decision, explicitly racial zoning laws continued to be adopted throughout the 1920s and 1930s,

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Single Family Zoning

A Tool of Segregation

With the 1917 Buchanan decision in effect, advocates of segregation turned to other zoning mechanisms to achieve the same goals The most common zoning tool became the creation of single-family districts.
Even though single-family zoning was not explicitly racial it was widely understood to be effective in enforcing racial segregation.
In 1921, the National Advisory Committee on Zoning (led by then U.S. Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover) published a national manual on model zoning law. This committee included the head of the National Association of Real Estate Boards which had already established a policy in favor of residential segregation.
It also included Frederick Law Olmstead, Jr., a Massachusetts resident and noted landscape architect and urban planner, and a believer in residential segregation who wrote.
“...in any housing developments which are to succeed…racial divisions have to be taken into account…if you try to force the mingling of people who are not ready to mingle and don’t want to mingle,” a development cannot succeed economically.
The manual published by the National Advisory Committee played a significant role in promoting the adoption of local zoning ordinances and of the kinds of zoning that exclude multifamily housing from many areas of cities.
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Early history of zoning in Massachusetts

Before 1918 there was no local authority to regulate land use.
Constitutional amendment adopted November 1918 that gives municipalities the “power to limit buildings according to their use or construction to specified districts.”
Judge Robert Walcott of Cambridge was a key advocate for zoning and he argued that multifamily buildings were essentially an industrial or commercial use so that the constitutional change would allow restrictions on density. He sought to block apartment construction.
Concerns about using zoning for racial segregation were raised at the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention in 1918.

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The Big Downzone 1970-1975

Recent research by Amy Dain and the Boston Indicators Project shows a region-wide down zoning wave in the early 1970s where in community after community, multi-family housing was restricted or eliminated.
This wave of “downzoning” likely had more than one cause but racial exclusion likely played a significant role.
In the words of researcher Amy Dain, “the big Downzone may best be understood, not only in light of the environmental movement and general growth pains but specifically in the context of “racial and class exclusion”
We are still living with the results of the big downzone in Massachusetts despite some incremental changes.

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Needham’s 1976 Growth Policy Statement

Amy Dain’s recent study “Exclusionary Design” describes the growth policy statements developed by many Massachusetts communities in response to a state law passed in 1975
According to Dain, “ Needham’s Growth Policy Committee submitted its goals as preventing major changes to the physical character of the community,” thus implicitly rejecting the idea of diversifying housing to welcome a diverse population to the suburb.”
Needham’s statement was similar to many other statements which rejected growth and changes to the housing mix.

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Unendorsed appendix to the 1976 Needham Growth Statement

The Congregational Church of Needham submitted its own statement as an appendix to the Growth Policy Statement. It reads in part:

“ The moral and human costs of segregation are intolerable. Opening up

our town and others like ours is the interests of all citizens…

In general, therefore we hope our town will be a diverse community

with a variety of housing arrangements, where people of disparate age,

income, family size, and background will be welcome and comfortable…

We therefore urge this Growth Policy Committee to view the best

interests of Needham as integrally bound up with the needs and requirements of the

metropolitan area.

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Current zoning in Needham

5,109 acres are zoned for single family homes of the 5,361 zoned acres in Needham constituting 95% of the of the zoned acres.
110 acres are zoned for multifamily housing which constitutes 2% of the zoned acres in Needham.
79 acres are zoned for single family homes on small lots, or 1% of the zoned acres.

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“…hereafter no part of said property or any portion there of shall be…occupied by any person not of the Caucasian race, it being intended hereby to restrict the use of said property…against occupancy as owners or tenants of any portion of said property for resident or other purposes by people of the Negro or Mongolian race.”

The Second Pillar: Racially Restrictive Covenants

Covenants

Segregationists also sought other ways to enforce racial separation. Racially restrictive covenants, which were widely used from early part of the 20^th century until the 1940s, were one such tool.

Racial covenants were private contracts that were enforced in court as binding upon the parties that signed them. They typically included language like that language on the slide:

“…hereafter no part of said property or any portion thereof shall be…occupied by any person not of the Caucasian race, it being intended hereby to restrict the use of said property…against occupancy as owners or tenants of any portion of said property for resident or other purposes by people of the Negro or Mongolian race.”

Other disfavored ethnic groups that were often excluded by restrictive covenants included Jews, Italian, and Armenians.

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The Third Pillar:

Discriminatory Real Estate Agent Practices

Housing developers and real estate agents used restrictive covenants as a marketing tool.
Many real estate industry organizations were led by segregationists. They promoted segregation in their training programs and lobbied against integrated housing at all levels of government.
Real estate industry promoted the myth of “protection of property values” as a justification for segregation.

From the early 20^th century beginnings of a professional real estate field racial discrimination was seen as a professional obligation and racial steering was commonplace.

In fact, recent scholarship on the real estate industry portrays a century long effort to segregate America’s neighborhoods. In the words of, Gene Slater, author of Freedom to discriminate: How Realtors Conspired to Segregate Housing and Divide America:

“The realtors need to justify this racial system transformed American values. The residential system they created not only drew on existing prejudice but required

and fostered it. Every white resident must view any minority not as an

individual but as a threat to his home, community, and the American dream.

Inventing a “scientific” law that “undesirable human elements” depreciate

property values, realtors built this axiom into vast federal programs.”

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T

The 1939 National Association of Real Estate Boards Handbook warned brokers to be on guard against “a colored man of means who was giving his children a college education and thought they were entitled to live among whites.”

Cited in The Color of Law, page 228

The real estate industry’s national and state associations promoted these views in their training manuals and their standards of conduct for real estate brokers.

The real estate industry also engaged in the pernicious practice of block busting to capitalize on racial fears and get fearful white homeowners to sell quickly in fear of African Americans moving into an area. The real estate speculators would then sell the homes at a premium to African American homebuyers, who had limited options.

Even with the 1968 passage of the Fair Housing Act, African Americans continued to face discrimination in the home purchase and rental markets

While the worst abuses by the real estate industry have been curbed, more subtle forms of discrimination continue as we will see in this short clip of video from a recent investigation by Newsday, the Long Island newspaper . NEXT SLIDE PEASE

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The Fourth Pillar: Redlining and Bank Discrimination

New Deal Housing programs cemented discrimination as national policy

A defining point in the history of racial segregation came in 1930s with the New Deal. This was the first time the U.S developed national housing policies and programs. While we often associate the New Deal with social progress including social security, public works on a grand scale, and protections for workers, the political dynamics of that era meant it also enshrined housing segregation in government policy.

Modern American housing policy has its origins in the New Deal, including the 30-year fixed rate mortgage, public housing, mortgage insurance and many other innovations that still define America’s housing. Passing legislation through Congress to create these programs required the support of the Southern segregationists' members of Congress that were a critical part of the Democratic Party at the time. The result of this, as well as of racial attitudes prevalent in the North as well as the South, was that many New Deal programs, although economically progressive, allowed and promoted racial discrimination.

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The most far-reaching New Deal housing innovation was federal mortgage insurance. The Federal Homeowner’s Loan Corporation and the Federal Housing Administration were created to insure mortgages and help rebuild the housing market in the wake of the 1929 crash.

The HOLC created mandatory underwriting guidelines for the banks that made insured mortgage loans. These underwriting guidelines required that neighborhoods be racially homogenous and white to be eligible for federal mortgage insurance.

For each city, the HOLC developed maps showing which neighborhoods were eligible for federal insurance. These maps graded neighborhoods with African Americans as “fourth grade” or hazardous, making them ineligible. These districts were colored red on the HOLC maps as and this practice became known as “redlining.” Redlining is now used as shorthand for a variety of discriminatory practices.

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“...if a neighborhood is to retain stability, it is necessary that properties shall continue to be occupied by the same social and racial classes.”

FHA Underwriting Manual, 1935

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Levittown

The post WW2 period saw huge growth in America’s suburbs.

Housing was often built using Federally insured financing that required that Black buyers be excluded.

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The Fifth Pillar:

Urban Renewal and Highway Construction

The Robert Taylor Homes on Chicago’s South Side were

completed between 1961 and 1963.

Slide 28 The fifth pillar Highway construction and urban renewal -image of Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago with Dan Ryan Expressway visible

In the 1950s cities began to grapple with the consequences of many white people leaving the cities, encouraged by federal policy like development of suburban single family home neighborhoods in the suburbs. City leaders and business leaders’ sough to “protect” commercial downtowns that were nearby African American neighborhoods and they created new tools to enforce housing segregation and deepen the isolation of African American neighborhoods.

The image on the screen is that of Robert Taylor Homes, a public housing development of over two thousand homes that was developed in Chicago in the early 1960s along a newly built north south expressway. This was a spectacular example of how urban renewal and highway construction was used to isolate the African American community from both downtown and from white residential areas. It was composed of 28 high-rise buildings with 16 stories each, with a total of 4,415 units, mostly arranged in U-shaped clusters of three, stretching for two miles along the expressway. It was finally demolished between 1998 and 2007. NEXT SLIDE PLEASE.

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The Sixth Pillar: Violence

As with enslavement and with Jim Crow, the whole structure of racial segregation rested on violence and the threat of violence. Restrictive covenants were enforced with violence even after the 1948 Supreme Court decision that deemed them unenforceable.

This slide shows a case in point described in The Color of Law. The Wade family stands in front of their home in the Louisville, Kentucky suburb of Shively where gun shots have damaged the front window. The second photograph shows the bombed remains of the house. The couple sought to move into a white suburb of Shively in 1954. The only individual indicted in the aftermath of this violence was the white civil rights activist who facilitated the purchase of the home by the Wades despite confessions from the shooters and the bombers.

This kind of violence occurred in many parts of the country including well documented cases in the Philadelphia suburbs and the Chicago suburbs. It must have deterred many African Americans in the 20^th century from attempting to exercise their constitutional rights to live in whatever community they chose.

The threat of violence was also sometimes used as the justification for segregation. Very often, as in the case of the Wade family, the private violence was tolerated and abetted by local authorities.

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Move-in Violence

A recent book, Hate Thy Neighbor, by Jeannine Bell describes how pervasive what she terms “move-in violence” was during the 20^th century and how it has been a major factor in the persistence of racial segregation.
Bell argues that mob violence which was common in the period before 1970 and the 1968 passage of the Fair Housing Act changed in the 1970s and 1980s but continued with individual acts of violence replacing organized mobs but “move in violence continued to be a major barrier to housing integration.
Here in the Boston area, families moving into formerly all-white public housing developments in Boston faced violence throughout the 1980s despite strong efforts by the city government to stop violence and support integration.

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Boston Celtics legend Bill Russell’s home was vandalized in Reading, Massachusetts in the early 1960s repeatedly and the police did little to respond.

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What Remains Today

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The Paper Wall of Zoning

Zoning for Multifamily Homes (2+ units)

Source:

MAPC Zoning Atlas

One thing that remains is a divided region where current zoning sharply restricts opportunities and helps to perpetuate segregation. Researcher Amy Dain has called this -The Paper wall of zoning

This “wall” along with the wealth gap that we discussed in the beginning of this presentation are the most important obstacles that remain. The paper wall refers to widespread restrictions on multifamily housing in high-opportunity communities. A recent study by Amy Dain explored these realities in Greater Boston, finding that all municipalities highly restricted multifamily development compared to demand. Consequently, little land is zoned for multi-family housing and what is zoned is often built out to the allowed capacity. Municipalities also highly restrict the density of new multi-family developments, adopting dimensional standards about height, setbacks, and smallest parcel sizes, that further limit the potential for buildout.

This is particularly troubling because earlier research, including that which was included in the 2019 Greater Boston Housing Report Card, has showed an association between levels of racial integration and if a community provides zoning for multi-family housing. NEXT SLIDE PLEASE

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“Neighborhood defenders”

While the violence that was used to enforce racial segregation in the 20^th century is now very uncommon there is now a more subtle way that white people defend their neighborhoods from the perceived threats whether racial or class or other.

Political scientists, Katherine Einstein, David Glick, and Maxwell Palmer studied the records hundreds of community meetings on housing project proposals in communities across Massachusetts over several years and out of that work were able to document who came to these meetings and who spoke out about these proposals. What they found was that participants in these meetings were overwhelmingly older white male homeowners. Even in communities where white people were a minority and most of the time they opposed the proposed development, in fact 62 percent of commenters in public meetings were opposed and only 15 percent were supportive of the developments. NEXT SLIDE PLEASE.

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Why is it so difficult to overcome the legacy of racial discrimination in housing?

The racial wealth gap

The system of “public process” that privileges current homeowners, the “neighborhood defenders”

Single family zoning in the vast majority of communities

Continued racial discrimination by real estate agents

Modern versions of redlining

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What can we do to overcome historic discrimination and create more housing opportunities?

Adopt more inclusive zoning policies in local communities including Chapter 3A that allow for multifamily rental housing.
Support targeted efforts to address the historic wealth gap like the Mass Housing Commonwealth Builders program and Mass Affordable Housing Alliance STASH program
Support more resources to create affordable housing like Gov. Healey’s historic Affordable Homes Act.
Build the capacity of local and regional nonprofit housing developers.
Continue to activate “pro-housing voices” in local communities.