2 Causes of Continued Segregation Between 1896 and 1928

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.

The ways racial segregation causes concentrated poverty in black and Hispanic neighborhoods are explored in the Economic Consequences of Segregation.

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)).

		The systematic racial segregation observable on the maps in this site is the product of the interaction of federal, state/local government, and private sector causes. The chart to the left offers an overview of some of these interactions. Roll your mouse over individual items to get a more detailed view of some of them. These causes of racial segregation form a vicious circle, via the ways segregation in turn causes concentrated urban poverty among African-Americans and Hispanics, which reinforces racial prejudice, further fueling white flight from neighborhoods inhabited by or proximate to blacks and Hispanics.

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Source: http://websites.umich.edu/~lawrace/causes1.htm

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