FDR started segregation in home ownership

The new episode of this american life is extremely powerful, basically talks about redlining which was started by FDR.

It really started after the Great Depression. So in the early to mid '30s, the federal government realized that home ownership was going to be a major way to build and fortify the middle class. So the Roosevelt administration starts to back loans. And so you only had to put down 20%. And this is when the practice of redlining actually began. The federal government was the one who introduced redlining.

It was not just about whether a neighborhood was black or not, but whether that neighborhood was integrated, and the government wanted to provide a disincentive to live in an integrated neighborhood. So if you were a white homeowner who didn't mind living in an integrated neighborhood, you could not get a loan. And if you owned a home in an integrated neighborhood, you knew that you could not resell your home to other white folks, so you had to sell your home to black people and get the hell-- oops, excuse me-- get the heck out of there. Because your property values were absolutely going to go down. It had nothing to do with whether the black people in your neighborhood could afford to pay their mortgage

Right, exactly, not keeping their properties up. It was about the fact that the government was deeming these neighborhoods as less valuable. And so your property values were going to go down because the government had decided that black and integrated neighborhoods were automatically less valuable.

And what ultimately happens, of course, between 1934 and 1964, 98% of the home loans that are insured by the federal government go to white Americans, building up the white middle class by allowing them to get home ownership. And black Americans are largely left out of that process. And, if there's one thing that's amazing about all of this, is how efficient the federal government was in creating segregation.

Around 1930, most black Americans in Northern cities are living in neighborhoods that are about 30% black. By the '60s, the neighborhoods of African Americans in the industrial Northeast are 74% percent black and higher.

No other racial or ethnic group has ever been that segregated. Even when you had large groups of immigrants coming from Ireland or Poland or Italy, even in places where they had Little Italys and things like that. So by 1960, cities have largely been abandoned by white Americans, you have massive public housing projects, where nearly everyone in there is black and poor, and even if you're middle class and black, you can't move out of those neighborhoods. You're still forced to live in those very dead neighborhoods.

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/512/house-rules

 

A thoughtful response would be nice. This is damning evidence that ghettos with public housing projects were created by racist policies aka housing segregation. And this is what led to race riots in the late 60's.

 

The fair housing act has passed, but the implications still live on today. Go to any city and look at the majority black areas. Ask yourself, why is this so? In 1934 neighborhoods were more integrated than they are now. That is pathetic.

 

In a private memo to his advisers, Nixon wrote, quote, "Even if I should become convinced, and I don't think it would be possible to convince me, that forced integration of education and housing was in the best interests of blacks and not too detrimental to whites, I could not possibly support it in good conscience."

What was most chilling about that letter to me-- and this was-- he was doing all this-- it was an eyes only memo to his two most trusted advisers, this was not something that he talked about publicly-- and what he said was, "I realize that this position will lead us to a situation in which blacks will continue to live for the most part in black neighborhoods, and where there will be predominantly black schools, and predominantly white schools."

I'm reading directly from the letter. So he understands that what this means is that what-- the very issues that the civil rights laws were supposed to pass-- I mean address-- will go unaddressed, right. By taking this view, the schools will still be segregated and neighborhoods will still be segregated. And if you think about the way that we talk about these issues today, the argument is that yes, legal segregation was wrong, but policies that take race into account to address these issues are just as wrong.

So where has that left us? It's left us in a place where we no longer have segregation by law, but we still have segregation by fact, and this moderate view says that there's nothing we can or should do about it. And I think when you think about that logic, that's a logic that has held true really over the last 40 years.

 

And the part of the Fair Housing Act that was meant to address the big picture, to make sure zoning laws and local housing policies comply with the law, the mandate to affirmatively further fair housing, to actively fix the problem, that's been more or less in a coma since George Romney left, even though periodically people try to revive it by deciding on some new interpretation of what it means to affirmatively further fair housing. The Obama administration recently made a move to revive it. We'll see what happens with that.

So given this record of enforcement, where are we? Well, there's no question that black-white segregation has declined significantly overall in the United States. Specifically, some African Americans have left the highly segregated cities of the Northeast and the Midwest and migrated to less segregated Sun Belt cities. Also, relatively small numbers of African Americans who can afford it have moved into formerly all white or mostly white communities. What's left behind are concentrated areas that are usually poor and mostly African-American.

But that can make it seem like segregation now is all about poverty rather than race, and it's not. The average African-American household making $75,000 a year or more, that family lives in a poorer neighborhood than the average white family making less than $40,000 a year. That is, a black family making twice as much money as a white family probably still lives in a poorer neighborhood. That's according to a study from Brown University. Racial segregation and not just people's income is key to understanding where people live and why, though I'm not sure we're facing the reality of that today.

 

I think you missed this.

And what ultimately happens, of course, between 1934 and 1964, 98% of the home loans that are insured by the federal government go to white Americans, building up the white middle class by allowing them to get home ownership.

 

Me too. Probably the best episode of TAL I've ever heard.

 

Give HUD the power to enforce the fair housing act properly, basically what George Romney was doing until Nixon fired him.

 

Learning the exact reasons behind why it is eye opening and shocking though.