How the Federal Government Built White Suburbia

[Responsible Allen Iverson]

How the Federal Government Built White Suburbia


How the Federal Government Built White Suburbia
Federal housing policies didn’t just deny opportunities to black residents. They subsidized and safeguarded whites-only neighborhoods.

• Kriston Capps
• @kristoncapps
• Sep 2, 2015
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A 2007 photo of 52 Oaktree Lane in Levittown, New York. (Mary Altaffer/AP)
Just two minutes into the first address at the 2015 National Fair Housing Conference on Tuesday, the conversation turned to Show Me a Hero. It was only a matter of time. Housing policy and Winona Ryder just don’t intersect that often.

But the conversation got real just as quickly. Richard Rothstein, a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute, gave a barn-burner of an address at the conference, a program convened by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

“We’ve all forgotten how federal, state, and local governments consciously segregated our metropolitan areas by race,” Rothstein said.

His speech is a potent reminder. Rothstein delivered his address on modern residential segregation last year at The Atlantic’s “Reinventing the War on Poverty” conference. It’s worth your time to read the full talk. The rough outline below covers many of the policy levers that leaders at all level of government used to build and safeguard white residential areas.

The Federal Government Built Exclusively White Neighborhoods

• Federally funded public housing got its start in the New Deal. From the very beginning, public housing was segregated by race. Harold L. Ickes, the U.S. Secretary of the Interior and the most liberal member of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s brain trust, proposed the “neighborhood composition rule,” which said that segregated public housing would preserve the segregated character of neighborhoods. (This was the liberal position. Conservatives preferred to build no public housing for black people at all.)
• After World War II, the Federal Housing Administration (a precursor to HUD) and the Veterans Administration hired builders to mass-produce American suburbs—from Levittown near New York to Daly City in the Bay Area—in order to ease the post-war housing shortage. Builders received federal loans on the explicit condition that homes would not be sold to black homebuyers.
• The Housing Act of 1949, a tentpole of President Harry Truman’s Fair Deal, greatly expanded the reach of the public housing program, which was then producing the most popular form of housing (!) in the country. In an effort to kill the bill, conservatives tried to tack on a “poison pill” to the legislation: an amendment that would have required public housing to be integrated.

Government Policy Guided Segregation at the Neighborhood Level

• Way back in 1917, after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down certain segregation rules, Baltimore launched an official Committee on Segregation as a workaround. The committee organized neighborhood associations in order to promote restrictive covenants and otherwise intimidate white homeowners or real-estate agents who were selling to black buyers.
• In St. Louis, segregated housing developments replaced neighborhoods that were roughly 55 percent white and 45 percent black.
• San Francisco wanted to build integrated public housing near the Hunters Point Shipyard development, but the Navy wouldn’t allow it.
• In 1984, The Dallas Morning News surveyed federally funded housing projects in 47 metro areas. All of them and their 10 million residents were segregated by race. The white projects that remained by the 1980s had better facilities, amenities, and maintenance than the others.

Ghettoes Are the Mirror of White Suburbs

• Pruitt–Igoe, the notorious and short-lived public housing project in St. Louis, was designed to be segregated. Pruitt was for blacks, Igoe was for whites. But by the time the development was completed in 1955, the housing shortage had grown less pressing for whites (thanks to efforts to repopulate them in the suburbs). The waiting list for Pruitt was long; Igoe experienced vacancies. Before Pruitt–Igoe met its early demise, its towers were entirely opened to black residents, like most formerly whites-only housing projects.

Courts Often Endorse a Myth of ‘De Facto’ Segregation

• In 1974, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart argued in Milliken v. Bradley—a case about busing—that segregation in Detroit schools was caused by “unknown and unknowable factors.”
• As recently as 2007, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer and Chief Justice John Roberts ruled (in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 ) that racially segregated neighborhoods were the result of de facto isolation, not de jure segregation. (Meaning that residential segregation was a matter of choice among residents, not consequence decided by law.)

A Federal Project Like Levittown Cannot Be Undone Locally

• In 1947, white buyers could purchase homes in Levittown for $8,000 (which is roughly $84,000 in 2015 dollars). Today, the median housing value in Levittown is $365,000, per Census data. The Long Island suburb built more than 17,000 Levitt homes, nearly all of which were leased or purchased by whites, thanks to racial covenants guided originally by the terms of the Federal Housing Administration loans.
• While African Americans are allowed to live in Levittown now, they by and large do not: The city’s population is 89 percent white and less than 1 percent black. New York City, meanwhile, is 26 percent black and just 44 percent white.

There’s more to Rothstein’s talk than a laundry-list of dates and figures, so read his essays about the root causes of contemporary segregation. Start here or here or here or here. His challenge is consistent throughout.

“Government thinks things done by accident can only be remedied by accident,” he said. “Things done on purpose can only be remedied on purpose.”

An aerial photo of Levittown taken in 1950. (AP)

 

[agnosticlady]

Thank you for the information ! I remember listening to a podcast about how black homeowners between the 1950's to the 1980's (I can't remember the specific time) were pushed to take out second mortgages so that they could eventually lose their houses. .

 

[LadySimone]

ta-nehisi Coates talks a lot about this in his the case for reparations. Everyone needs to read that. It's a great read.

 

[I_Got_Da_Burna]

Bill O'Reilly's family is from Levittown. Jon Stewart used this point to kill him O'Reilly on his views of government subsidies.

 

[wheywhey]

Fresh Air on NPR did a radio program with Richard Rothstein on how the government created ghettos, on the national, state, and local levels.



Under the New Deal it was mandated that public housing had to be racially segregated.

After WWII the Federal Housing Administration would only give developers (like Levittown) loans on the condition that they don't sell to blacks. Thus suburbs were for whites, public housing for blacks.

In 1970 George Romney (Mitt's father) tried to integrate the suburbs by withholding federal funds. He was forced to end the programs and was pushed out as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development.

Housing after WWII was affordable, 2.5 times median income. The same housing is 7 times median income, which partly explain the black-white wealth gap. Blacks have 5% the wealth of whites, although black income is 60% of white income.

Baltimore first city to prevent blacks from buying in white neighborhoods.

City health and building inspectors would condemn homes sold to blacks.

Whites were required, convinced, and tricked into signing racial covenants preventing them from selling their homes to blacks.

The Veterans Administration/GI Bill would not approve loans for integrated neighborhoods or if blacks lived nearby.

State employment agencies would only post jobs for whites.

Construction unions were whites only, certified by the National Labor Relations board until 1964.

Ghettos created because limited garbage pickup and blacks couldn't live anywhere else. Blockbusting was done by scaring white into selling houses cheap then reselling the homes at high costs because they couldn't live anywhere else.

Redlining was created by the federal government. Black neighborhoods were covered red on maps. Banks wouldn't loan to blacks because FHA wouldn't insure the loans.

In the 2000's housing bubble, Wells Fargo Bank had a special sales unit in Baltimore. The sales people were black and they went to black churches to convince churchgoers to refinance their homes with subprime loans that started with loan payments that quickly exploded. Many lost their homes and were pushed back into the ghettos.

Richard Rothstein says stop sanitizing language and use the word ""ghetto".

Edit: St Louis zoning permitted liquor stores and houses of prostitution in black neighborhoods.

 

[KOohbt]

Excellent thread. A lot of folks think white people did it on their own when in reality they got one of the most massive welfare programs in human history to prop them up. Multiple times at that.

 

[Elle Driver]

Excellent thread. A lot of folks think white people did it on their own when in reality they got one of the most massive welfare programs in human history to prop them up. Multiple times at that.

Rural whites with no power, influence, or money were given all these grants for land and shyt because they were warming to an alliance with blacks due to the fact they were both considered under class. Then the government gave them susidies all in the name of preventing black advancement (even if it meant something good for poor rural whites). That's why you have poor ass whites on SNAP and Section 8 voting republican.

 

[↓R↑LYB]

I just listened to the NPR interview and I'm like

 

[KOohbt]

Rural whites with no power, influence, or money were given all these grants for land and shyt because they were warming to an alliance with blacks due to the fact they were both considered under class. Then the government gave them susidies all in the name of preventing black advancement (even if it meant something good for poor rural whites). That's why you have poor ass whites on SNAP and Section 8 voting republican.

Most moves the govt make are to keep us from advancing. They don't want to parts in competition with us.

 

[Elle Driver]

Most moves the govt make are to keep us from advancing. They don't want to parts in competition with us.

First slavery, then Jim Crow, then "the war on drugs". But they depict us as lazy.

 

[KOohbt]

First slavery, then Jim Crow, then "the war on drugs". But they depict us as lazy.

The moment a significant number of us compete it's over. I think personally, If we competed as a group we would be more successful than white people even with the population disparities. It's crazy that the only time we're lazy is when it comes to doing things specifically for us.

 

[Elle Driver]

The moment a significant number of us compete it's over. I think personally, If we competed as a group we would be more successful than white people even with the population disparities. It's crazy that the only time we're lazy is when it comes to doing things specifically for us.

I agree.

Black wealth is scary.

 

[Soon]

Redlining was no joke, we didn't have access to FHA/VA loans.

So they pushed us into ghettos, and the whites in nice neighborhoods.

Of course all that generation wealth whites enjoyed is the real reason they prospered. While we were under attack, and still under attack. I love how they try to make it that we would have not prospered giving the same opportunities.

 

[Yehuda]

Now add all of this to this:

 

[Poitier]

T I think personally, If we competed as a group we would be more successful than white people even with the population disparities.

nope.