A map depicting neighborhoods in California. Red areas, inhabited by black people, were denied mortgages and home insurance.
Baltimore serves as an outstanding example of how housing discrimination has shaped the city’s past and current segregated neighborhoods. Following the purchase of a home in Baltimore by a black Yale Law School Graduate in 1910, the local government enacted an ordinance with the supposed intention of “preserving peace, preventing conflict and ill-feeling between the white and colored races in Baltimore city.” The law would become the first of many as states throughout the nation enacted similar statutes mandating the confinement of black people to certain blocks and areas.
George Romney, Secretary of HUD 1969-1972, fought for an increase of federal funding allocated to black neighborhoods as opposed to well-endowed all-white suburbs.
The current segregation we witness today could be interpreted as the aftermath of such laws. However, with the creation of the Department of Housing and Urban Development 31 years after the FHA’s creation, confinement of black people to certain areas continued unabated. In an unprecedented move to end discriminatory practices by the HUD in 1970, then-Secretary of HUD-George Romney- proposed withholding of federal funds from all-white suburbs resisting integration. He was able to garner some support for his efforts but was eventually ousted by President Richard Nixon and forced out of his position.
The government seemingly has a pattern of resistance as it pertains to non-discriminative housing practices. This pattern has managed to suppress choice as to where one lives and stifles what wealth could be accumulated by black people upon purchasing real estate. As the pattern reoccurs, the effect compounds like interest from generation to generation and appears just as evident eighty years later.
Sources:
From Ferguson to Baltimore: The Fruits of Government-Sponsored Segregation
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/02/the-ghetto-public-policy-and-the-jewish-exception/273592/
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/05/the-racist-housing-policy-that-made-your-neighborhood/371439/
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opinion: Black people’s troubles are forced on us through racist practice. You can’t get a loan and if you do you pay twice as much and then when you did the house not worth nothing.
