Did you know about the racist policies though? I certainly didn't. This was actually a decent post from da1 for once.
Aren't unintended consequences great!? The real irony hasn't been fully revealed. I'd contend that these policies to build up homeownership are slowly destroying the middle class. If homeownership is the goal, we should be happy with tighter restrictions on lending and on interest rates. Lower home prices would make buying a home more attainable for the average person. Current policies are not doing that. They're making it easy for people to qualify for loans they cannot afford, which is putting upward pressure on home prices while making the middle class less wealthy. If these policies continue, the middle class will slowly erode.
Sure - a big confluence of demographic & historical circumstances and a healthy dose of racism helped this. And you're right that FDR wasn't that forward on the issue of desegregation compared to his successors like Truman and Johnson - of course, he had what are arguably bigger fish to fry with massive global economic cataclysm and ultra massive global war being his primary concerns. Does this excuse it? I don't know. But again I don't really see a big reveal here.
The reveal is the circumstances that created segregation are because of the federal government, but other than George Romney's measures, the federal government has since taken the moderate approach of not interfering with suburban areas to make sure they are following the fair housing act, so the act is toothless. So we still have de facto segregation in every city in the country to this day as a result.
Where did you find this quote? I googled several parts of it and all that comes up verbatim is this thread. Truly curious, because I like links and sources.
This was a good post. Always thought block busting, red lining, and white flight were post-war happenstances. Didn't know the roots were further back.
Romney recognized that the postwar white suburbs surrounding Detroit were created by Federal Housing Administration and Veterans Administration policies enacted in the 1930s and 1940s, which required insured properties to have deeds prohibiting sales to African Americans. By the time the two agencies ceased requiring such clauses in the 1950s, the exclusive white character of Detroit’s suburbs had been firmly established. State-licensed real-estate agents who openly refused to sell or rent to blacks in the suburbs and federally regulated banks that refused to make loans to credit-worthy black applicants reinforced the pattern. Local authorities, with federal encouragement and consent, segregated public housing and then, as whites left the projects for all-white suburbs, placed new projects only in black neighborhoods to ensure continued segregation. Federal urban-renewal funds were used to bulldoze black neighborhoods to make space available for white residential and business expansion; resulting displacements further overcrowded the ghettos. Suburbs adopted exclusionary zoning laws requiring large lot sizes and banning multiunit developments, often with the barely disguised purpose of ensuring that no African Americans could afford to become neighbors. Federal and local officials in the 1950s and 1960s routed highways through black communities to force residents to move to ghettos farther from white residences and businesses. The executive director of the American Association of State Highway Officials, himself deeply involved in the congressional design of the program, later acknowledged that “some city officials expressed the view in the mid-1950s that the urban interstates would give them a good opportunity to get rid of the local ‘******town.’” Suburban exclusion also limited black economic opportunities as manufacturing jobs moved outside Detroit. The suburb of Sterling Heights, for example, obtained a Ford plant, but black workers from Detroit had to commute because they could not live in the town. In 1964, when a black family did attempt to move in, their home was firebombed. The police made no arrests. Circumstances were similar in Warren, a suburb just north of the city and home to five automobile plants with overall workforces that were 30 percent black and to a General Motors Technical Center, also with black employees. Warren’s realtors would not show blacks homes, and landlords would not rent to them. Then, in 1967, an African American managed to move to Warren. Nightly, crowds of up to 200 gathered outside the home. With police looking on, residents threw rocks into the windows, cut the phone line, burned crosses, and lit a fire on the front lawn. Cars cruised by as occupants shouted obscenities. Police made no arrests. Because, as Romney later recalled, local officials “would not fulfill their responsibilities,” he ordered state police to disperse the mob. An official of the state Civil Rights Commission observed, “Nearly all attempts by black families to move to Detroit’s suburbs have been met with harassment.” http://prospect.org/article/cost-living-apart
After he became president, “Nixon, with an eye toward his suburban constituency, kept the issue of open housing away from the White House.” When a White House task force on low income housing recommended linking federal aid to suburban racial integration, Nixon wrote: “I am absolutely opposed to this. Knock it in the head now.” http://www.prrac.org/pdf/RoismanHistoryExcerpt.pdf
housing projects weren't specifically for blacks. i'm sure in the thirties the income disparity between races was even worse than now
