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Housing history in Metro Boston + contemporary policy priorities

Wed March 6, 2024

Interactive Data Visualization & Society

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Housing history in Metro Boston + contemporary policy priorities

Wed March 6, 2024

Interactive Data Visualization & Society

How did we get here?

What can we do about it?

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The purpose of studying histories of inequality and exclusion is not to "call out" any industry or field (e.g. real estate or urban planning or private equity) or any group of people (e.g. white people). Rather, it's this:

– From the BlackSpace Urbanist Collective

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Where we live determines the quality of our children’s education, our access to jobs, and aspects of our health and well-being.�

– Fair Housing Center of Boston

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1920s–1948: Racially Restrictive Covenants
1934–1968: FHA Mortgage Insurance Requirements Use Redlining
1948–1968: Unenforceable Restrictive Covenants
1950–mid 1970s: Impact of Rte 128 & Rte 495
1970s–Present: Disparate Impact of Local Land Use Regulations
1968–Present: Housing Discrimination Today + Financialization

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1920s–1948: Racially Restrictive Covenants
1934–1968: FHA Mortgage Insurance Requirements Use Redlining
1948–1968: Unenforceable Restrictive Covenants
1950–mid 1970s: Impact of Rte 128 & Rte 495
1970s–Present: Disparate Impact of Local Land Use Regulations
1968–Present: Housing Discrimination Today + Financialization

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The Great Migration

African-American population, 1910

African-American population, 1970

More than six million African Americans fleD the US South between 1910-1970.

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Buchanan vs Warley, 1917. A win?

Ruling about Louisville, KY, makes racialized zoning by cities illegal
But leads to the proliferation of private agreements about property sales, known as covenants

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Racially Restrictive Covenants

Contractual agreements that prohibit the purchase, lease, or occupation of a piece of property by a particular group of people (usually African Americans but also included Asian people, immigrants, ethnic groups, and Jewish people)
By 1940, 80% of property sales in Chicago and Los Angeles barred Black families through covenants.

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Housing production 1880-1930

An estimated 15,000 "Triple Deckers" were built in the Boston area to house immigrants, Black families, working and middle class families

Whiter and wealthier communities even back in the 1910s and 20s tried to use zoning and vetos on public transit to keep out this denser, multifamily form of housing.

Taft Street, Dorchester. Photo by Matthew Dickey.

See

https://www.bostonfairhousing.org/timeline/1920s1948-Restrictive-Covenants.html

And

https://mappingprejudice.umn.edu/racial-covenants/what-is-a-covenant

Between 1880 and 1930, an estimated 15,000 triple-deckers (also called three-deckers) were built in Boston and surrounding cities. Supplying the housing needs of huge numbers of new immigrants, and Black, working, and middle-class families, the triple-decker offered a path to homeownership, generated income for families who could both live and rent the same house and accommodated multigenerational family living.

“NO MORE ‘THREE-DECKERS,’”58 practically cheered the

Boston Globe’s headline of a 1914 article, announcing that Bedford

had adopted the policy. The article went on: “The adoption of

the tenement house act will prevent the erection of the ‘threedecker’

house and insure the erection only of desirable residential

buildings.” Before any Massachusetts communities had adopted

zoning, many had effectively outlawed all multifamily housing with

three or more dwelling units. - Exclusionary by Design Report

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1920s–1948: Racially Restrictive Covenants
1934–1968: FHA Mortgage Insurance Requirements Use Redlining
1948–1968: Unenforceable Restrictive Covenants
1950–mid 1970s: Impact of Rte 128 & Rte 495
1970s–Present: Disparate Impact of Local Land Use Regulations
1968–Present: Housing Discrimination Today + Financialization

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Redlining 1934-1968

The US federal government's practice of denying or limiting financial services to certain neighborhoods based on racial or ethnic composition without regard to the residents’ qualifications or creditworthiness.
National scale: 239 US cities, including Greater Boston
Agencies involved: Federal Housing Administration (FHA), Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC)

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Redlining data

Nelson, Robert K., LaDale Winling, et al. "Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America." Edited by Robert K. Nelson and Edward L. Ayers. American Panorama: An Atlas of United States History, 2023. https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining.

Available for Boston and Cambridge through the Mapping Inequality project.

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Redlining on platforms?

2019 - US Dept of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) sued Facebook (now Meta)
HUD asserts that Facebook allowed advertisers to “exclude people who live in a specified area from seeing an ad by drawing a red line around that area.”
2022 - Settlement agreement reached out of court where Facebook must develop a new system free of racial bias

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1920s–1948: Racially Restrictive Covenants
1934–1968: FHA Mortgage Insurance Requirements Use Redlining
1948–1968: Unenforceable Restrictive Covenants
1950–mid 1970s: Impact of Rte 128 & Rte 495
1970s–Present: Disparate Impact of Local Land Use Regulations
1968–Present: Housing Discrimination Today + Financialization

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Racial covenants continue, 1948-1968, even though they are "unenforceable"

1948, Shelley v. Kraemer, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled racial covenants were unenforceable
The covenants served as powerful signals to potential homeowners, realtors, and insurers about who was welcome in a given neighborhood
Combined with racial steering practices – real estate agents only show homes in Black neighborhoods to Black people, and homes in white neighborhoods to white people
Exacerbate racial segregation

Famed lawyer and later supreme court justice Thurgood Marshall won Shelley v. Kraemer (1948)

The Shelley Family

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The Fair Housing Act (1968)

Resulted from intense organizing and activism of the Civil Rights Movement, passed by Congress four days after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Outlawed discrimination in the sale, rental, and financing of housing based on race, religion, national origin, and, in subsequent additions, sex (1974), disability, and family status (1988).
Made redlining, racial covenants, and racial steering illegal.

Members and supporters of the NAACP picket against housing discrimination in Detroit in 1963. Credit: Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University.

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Subsequent legislation

HMDA data contains information about mortgages and racial demographics. Could be a really interesting data set to combine with the sales transactions data for your final projects.

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Racial steering by AI?

Paper under review

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1920s–1948: Racially Restrictive Covenants
1934–1968: FHA Mortgage Insurance Requirements Use Redlining
1948–1968: Unenforceable Restrictive Covenants
1950–mid 1970s: Impact of Rte 128 & Rte 495
1970s–Present: Disparate Impact of Local Land Use Regulations
1968–Present: Housing Discrimination Today + Financialization

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Highways and suburbanization

1956 Federal Highway Act, leading to the Mass Pike, I-93, I-95
Highways are built through vulnerable and racialized communities, e.g. Boston Chinatown
Highways enabled "white flight" to the suburbs and disinvestment in urban communities
By 1970, all of the suburban towns, with the exception of Cambridge, were 98% white.

Chinatown cut in half in 1956 to make way for highway

I-93 around South Bay

https://www.digitalcommonwealth.org/search/commonwealth:8c97mj566

https://www.bostonfairhousing.org/timeline/1950s-1975-Suburbs.html

From above link: Route 128 and 495 as dividing lines

The following quote, taken from a report by the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination, illustrates the impact of Rte 128 and the subsequent Rte 495:

“Never in the course of Route 128’s early development was serious consideration given to the ramifications of one community’s actions upon its neighbors or upon the suburban belt as a whole. There was no consideration of the general impact on the city of Boston nor on the social repercussions of the new job locations and new housing. Tremendous changes in population distributions were acknowledged at the time with naïve amazement. The simultaneous black immigration taking place in the region was being funneled into the city. There was no provision for its absorption into the suburbs.

Route 128’s history represents a social failure approaching disaster in terms of its impact on the poor and minority groups. There was an absence of social planning and a misuse of the region’s physical resources. While planning was nonexistent in few towns, it was of poor quality in others. In those towns which had the time and the funds, physical planning succeeded almost too well. These towns are beautiful, although their beautiful was paid for, in part, by the ugliness of others. Their gains, from the larger perspective, were the region’s loss (42).”

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1920s–1948: Racially Restrictive Covenants
1934–1968: FHA Mortgage Insurance Requirements Use Redlining
1948–1968: Unenforceable Restrictive Covenants
1950–mid 1970s: Impact of Rte 128 & Rte 495
1970s–Present: Disparate Impact of Local Land Use Regulations
1968–Present: Housing Discrimination Today + Financialization

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The rise of exclusionary zoning

1950s – Majority white towns like Lincoln and Weston start using exclusionary zoning, sending housing prices soaring
“The Big Downzone" – late 1960s-70s - shows the strongest intent to use zoning for racial exclusion. Coincides with intense civil rights activism, desegregation and bussing in Boston.
Zoning not only about racial exclusion. Dain also discusses fiscal zoning and class zoning.
Exclusionary zoning is also about excluding children because it is imagined that children will be a "drain" on a town's school system (MAPC has demonstrated that this is false! But the idea persists)

“Population Goal: Accommodate further moderate population growth in a manner consistent with the present characteristics of Wellesley.”

�– Wellesley 1965 Comprehensive Plan

Note that Wellesley was 99% white in 1965 so "present characteristics" means white people.

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Exclusionary zoning

From Hope's A2

From David S's A2

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What type of housing gets built with exclusionary zoning?

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Subtheme: Upzoning – MAPC's research question

For this research subtheme, projects can help demonstrate how restrictive current zoning practices are by depicting discrepancies between what is already built and what is allowed by zoning to be built.

Looking comparatively across cities and towns in Boston, which cities have the most restrictive zoning? What percentage of existing properties couldn’t be built today? How can we make data-driven arguments to defeat some of the common pushbacks for zoning reform, like “we want to preserve the historical character of the neighborhood” or "we don't want children draining our town of resources"?

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1920s–1948: Racially Restrictive Covenants
1934–1968: FHA Mortgage Insurance Requirements Use Redlining
1948–1968: Unenforceable Restrictive Covenants
1950–mid 1970s: Impact of Rte 128 & Rte 495
1970s–Present: Disparate Impact of Local Land Use Regulations
1968–Present: Housing Discrimination Today + Financialization

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Housing discrimination persists

The FHCGB has found through testing that: African Americans and Latinos experience discrimination in half of their attempts to rent, purchase, or finance homes in greater Boston.

Families with children and people with Section 8 vouchers are discriminated against two-thirds of the time when seeking rental housing.

Audits in Lowell (2004), Newton (2005), mortgage audits (2005-6)

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Insistence on race as a category of social difference over hundreds of years has led to its manifestation in the world.

We have made it matter.

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Great Recession – 2007-2009

Some causes:

Housing bubble bursts
Subprime mortgages (a.k.a. "predatory inclusion")
Massive home foreclosures

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"Financialization" of Housing

Varying definitions in literature but the main idea is that housing is increasingly treated as a commodity for profit, rather than as a human right.
Since 2008, venture capital & private equity have entered housing markets at scale
Speculators and investors try to squeeze out high rates of return (18%+) for owning & operating rental properties or flipping houses
These incentives are not always aligned with good treatment of residents or concern for neighborhoods.

Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of herself and of her family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond her control.

– Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

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Housing history in Metro Boston + contemporary policy priorities

Wed March 6, 2024

Interactive Data Visualization & Society

What can we do about it?

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Final project subthemes: new data + policies on class website

We will ask you to connect your final projects to current policy debates. But you don't have to only support proposed legislation - perhaps you find evidence that a certain policy should not be adopted!
We encourage you to find creative ways to model possible effects of policies, e.g. what happens if we pass Inclusionary Zoning by Simple Majority and 20% of towns enact this? What might the effects on housing affordability look like?

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Other housing + policy themes that might be interesting to explore for final projects

Climate adaptation and housing
Environmental justice and housing
Interaction btw transportation (MBTA Communities Act) and housing
Projects focused on specific groups or places:

College student experience
Families with children
Historically Black neighborhoods
Unhoused people
Suburban Boston
Seniors
etc