Housing, Race, and Inequality

I'm reading a book called The Origins of the Urban Crisis. I bought it for my wife for Christmas, because I thought she would enjoy it, but it turned out to be a little more textbooky than I thought it would be(one reason not to buy books online).

Here's what I've learned:

Systemic structural discrimination laid the groundwork for the segregation of Detroit, the ghettoization of black neighborhoods and pervasive, lasting inequality. Vast numbers of blacks migrated from the South in the 1930's, 40's and 50's to northern cities like Detroit. This is what they found...

Detroit was the land of opportunity, the land of jobs, equality, hope. So to Detroit came the poor, the out-of-work, the landless. To buy a house you had to get a loan, to get a loan you needed the backing of the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) which based it's recommendations on the annual report of the Home Owner's Loan Corporation (HOLC). The HOLC rated neighborhoods from A-D. A being places they deemed safe bats and loan worthy, D being neighborhoods not worthy of receiving loan money. Every neighborhood with at least one black person in it was automatically rated D. So it was virtually impossible to get a home improvement loan in a black neighborhood.

Of course if you had money saved up you could buy a home, unless you were black. over 90% of the neighborhoods in Detroit had "white-only" clauses in their charters. (In fact, our community was barred from living in one neighborhood here because it has a vestigial-only one family per home-rule instituted originally under the assumption that most blacks couldn't afford to own a home by themselves to ensure a white only neighborhood after such overtly racial clauses were ruled unenforceable) And part of the guiding ethic of the national board of Realtors was to never assist in the disruption of the racial homogeneity of a neighborhood. In one area in north Detroit the FHA required a contractor to build a six foot concrete wall between the black and white neighborhoods to qualify for loans to develop land in the white section

So you rent. Of course due to the housing shortage in Detroit rent was expensive. And only a small fraction were open to blacks, and only a small fraction of those were open to adults. Landlords in the black sections of town subdivided homes and apartments, and increased rents. As buildings were converted from white to black the apartments got smaller and more expensive and the owners stopped maintenance.

Work was hard to get for black people. And when they did find it it payed less and was more dangerous.

And so stereotypes were reinforced with black neighborhoods becoming crowded, dirty, poor, dilapidated...And then the city government sought to clean up "blight". They built the freeways through the black areas of town, displacing residents to...even more crowded neighborhoods. And they tore down neighborhoods to build public housing, which reinforced segregation since they were all segregated through the 50's.

Enough details...this isn't a book report...I knew this all before I read the book, I just hadn't put it all together quite like this. But what I want to get across is this. The system was (and in many ways still is) stacked against blacks, the poor, and especially poor blacks. Structurally, from the federal government to the state government to the city government to community charters, to associations of bankers and realtors, to individuals bankers, homeowners, landlords...everything was (and in many ways still is) lined up in such a way to give advantage to those with money and those with white skin.

I didn't know this growing up. It took me a long time to figure out that racism today is an institutional as well as individual issue. But racial tension is so palpable in Detroit. The ongoing conflict between the suburbs (in between then and now most of the whites and the money left Detroit for the suburbs) and the city is clear. And the segregation and discrimination are still here, with money, resources and jobs concentrated in the mostly white suburbs.