In
his classic critique of urban renewal, Martin Anderson observed that it was
a major cause of housing shortages for the urban poor, who, as we know from
the segregation maps, are disproportionately black and Hispanic. From 1949-1962,
urban renewal projects destroyed 3 housing units for every 1 they created (The
Federal Bulldozer, McGraw-Hill 1967). Crowded slums were cleared, displacing
blacks and Hispanics into ever more crowded areas, and increasing housing prices.
Ironically, this in turn further exacerbated urban blight. The frequency of
fires is highly correlated with degrees of overcrowding. In conjunction with
cutbacks in fire stations serving black and Puerto Rican neighborhoods, overcrowding
in New York City led to a rash of poorly controlled fires that, by 1980, had
devastated block after block in the South Bronx, Harlem, and Brooklyn. (Roderick
Wallace, "Urban Desertification, Public Health and Public Order" Social
Science and Medicine 32 (1991): 801-813.
Housing
discrimination is the norm in the major metropolitan areas where blacks and
Hispanics live. One major Federal survey found that blacks were not informed
of 60-90% of housing units made available to white auditors (John Yinger, Housing
Discrimination Study, HUD 1991). Another found that blacks and Hispanics
seeking the same housing as whites face discrimination about half the time (Margery
Austin Turner & Ron Wienk, "The Persistence of Segregation in Urban
Areas," in Housing Markets and Residential Mobility, G. Thomas Kingsley
& Margery A. Turner eds., 1993). Note that these are probabilities of facing
discrimination in a single encounter. Given that housing searches typically
require several site visits, it is nearly certain that a black or Hispanic person
seeking housing will face discrimination at least once in most major metro areas
of the U.S.
Municipal
incorporation endows inhabitants with the power to zone, and hence to exclude
those who cannot afford housing that meets zoning requirements. In the 1950s,
the desire of whites to use the zoning power to exclude blacks appears to have
been a major factor spurring the creation of new towns. See Nancy Burns, The
Formation of American Local Governments, 1994, for extensive evidence on
this point.
Zoning
was introduced to the U.S. in 1916, marketed as a device by which cities could
exclude "undesirable" residents and practice segregation by race and
class. Although zoning by race is unconstitutional (Buchanan v. Warley,
245 U.S. 60 (1917)), class-exclusionary zoning is permitted and widely practiced,
and the evidentiary standards needed to prove that a city is using class-based
zoning for the unconstitutional purpose of racial exclusion are very high (Village
of Arlington Heights v. Metropolitan Housing Development Corp., 429 U.S.
252 (1977)). Whatever cities' purposes in practicing class-exclusionary zoning,
their impact does fall disproportionately on blacks and Hispanics, keeping them
out of prosperous towns rich in taxable property and public services.
Towns
have often collaborated with the private sector in generating racial segregation,
by closing integrated public schools at the boundaries between white and black
or Hispanic neighborhoods, and building schools in the middle of subdivisions
that developers market to only one race. Although such collaboration is unconstitutional
(See Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenberg Board of Education, 402 U.S. 1 (1971)),
undoing its effects is extraordinarily difficult and costly.
Restrictive
covenants are contracts among private property owners in a neighborhood, by
which all agree not to sell or rent their property to blacks, Jews, or members
of other groups considered undesirable by the contracting parties. They were
a common device for enforcing racial segregation from 1910-1948. The Supreme
Court declared them unenforceable in Shelly v. Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1 (1948).
The
"Fundamental Attribution Error" is a cognitive bias whereby observers
attribute features associated with different people to their internal traits
rather than their external circumstances. (L. Ross, "The intuitive scientist
and his shortcomings," in L. Berkowitz, ed., Advances in experimental
social psychology, vol. 10, Academic Press, 197, pp. 174—220.) It is
a basic cause of racial prejudice. Observing the concentrated poverty of inner
city blacks, whites attribute its cause to supposedly inferior black biological
or cultural traits (laziness, criminality) rather than to segregation and discrimination.
(Glenn Loury, The Anatomy of Racial Inequality (Harvard UP, 2002). This
prejudice, in turn, fuels white flight from urban areas where blacks live to
white suburbs. White interests in avoiding the problems of poor urban neighborhoods
also fuel white flight.
In
the post-World War II era, the Federal government adopted two strategies for
addressing the acute housing shortage (due to the paucity of housing starts
since the Depression). It built public housing for the working class, and financed
mortagages through the FHA. Public housing authorities initially promoted an
integrationist vision. However, the segregationist policies of the FHA, combined
with overwhelming white demand to exclude blacks, prevented the construction
of public housing projects in white neighborhoods. (Thomas Sugrue, The Origins
of the Urban Crisis, ch. 3, has an excellent account of this process in
Detroit.) Moreover, as Jane Jacobs argued in her classic critique of public
housing (The Rise and Fall of Great American Cities), the bleak architecture
of massive high-rise public housing projects also isolated their residents,
blocking the informal social interactions that help prevent crime, keep children
out of trouble, and keep the elderly and infirm connected to social support.
Today, federal housing policy continues to reinforce segregation, even though
massive public housing projects are being torn down. Instead of turning to the
projects, poor people can obtain section 8 certificates, by which they can get
access to subsidized apartments in the private sector. But they can obtain these
certificates only from their local housing authority, which can only issue certificates
that are valid within their boundaries. Poor blacks and Hispanics are therefore
trapped by the administration of federal subsidies within the segregated neighborhoods
where they reside.
Federal
highways have reinforced segregation in three main ways. First, inner city highways
have often been part of slum clearance projects which destroyed housing predominantly
occupied by blacks and Hispanics, with the same effects as other urban renewal
projects. Second, planners have often built highways at the boundaries between
white and black or Hispanic neighborhoods, thereby setting up formidable barriers
to interracial interaction. Third, the federal highway system provided a key
means for supporting white flight to the suburbs, as well as the flight of jobs
to the suburbs, leaving blacks and Hispanics behind in economically depressed
neighborhoods. For a detailed explanation of how this has worked in Atlanta,
see Robert Bullard and Glenn Johnson, Just Transportation: Dismantling Race
and Class Barriers to Mobility (New Society, 1997) and Robert Bullard, Glenn
Johnson, and Angel Torres, Sprawl City: Race, Politics, & Planning in
Atlanta (Island Press, 2000).
The
Federal government played a key role in shaping the racial composition of the
suburbs that arose in the post-WWII era. It financed a substantial percentage
of all mortgage loans in the U.S. between 1945-1960, through the Federal Housing
Administration and the Veterans' Administration (GI Bill). Virtually all of
these loans went to white homeowners in all-white neighborhoods. The Federal
government refused to back mortgage loans to prospective owners in integrated,
all-black, or racially changing neighborhoods, viewing these homes as having
a high risk of declining market value. This policy amounted to a self-fulfilling
prophecy: the mass denial of credit to integrated and black neighborhoods spelled
their decline. Whites alone were enabled by Federal subsidies to move to the
booming suburbs. Federal policy also gave whites a huge stake in resisting the
entry of blacks into their neighborhoods, by threatening them with financial
ruin if they did (they would be far less able to resell their homes if buyers
could not obtain federally backed mortgages to buy them). For more information,
see Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier (Oxford UP, 1985).
The
Federal Homeowners Loan Corporation played a key role, starting in the 1930s,
in establishing standards for evaluating the risk of mortgage loans. It defined
black, integrated, and racially changing neighborhoods as credit risks, and
drew maps coloring these neighborhoods red. "Redlined" neighborhoods
were deemed non-creditworthy. The FHA, VA and private banks accepted these maps
as guidelines for making their own loans, thus for decades effectively depriving
all but segregated white neighborhoods of access to mortgages. (See Kenneth
Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier).
The
race riots of the 1960s in major urban centers such as Detroit, Los Angeles,
and Newark are remembered for spurring white flight to the suburbs. While these
riots were a factor, the basic institutional forces causing white flight--most
notably federal housing and highway policies, and deindustrialization--had already
been well underway for at least 20 years (Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the
Urban Crisis). Long forgotten are the white-led race riots against blacks
in the earlier part of the 20th c.--Atlanta (1906), Houston (1917), St. Louis
(1917), Chicago (1919), Elaine, Ark. (1919), Tulsa (1921), Detroit (1943). In
the Tulsa riot, the most devastating race riot in U.S. history, a white mob
laid waste to the entire black community (35 city blocks), killing somewhere
between 38-300 people. Apart from the riots, individual acts of violence were
long used, and are still used, to keep blacks out of white neighborhoods. (For
a history, see Stephen G. Meyer, As Long as They Don't Move Next Door: Segregation
and Racial Conflict in American Neighborhoods (2000)).
