The History of Residential Segregation in the United States, Title VIII, and the Homeownership Remedy

• Date: 01 May 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ajes.12243
• Published date: 01 May 2018

The History of Residential Segregation

in the United States, Title VIII, and the

Homeownership Remedy

By Teron McGrew* MS, PhD

AbSTrAcT. Residential segregation was practiced by federal, state, and

local governments as an instrument of racial domination in the United

States throughout much of the 20th century. Systematic racial

discrimination in housing was unconstitutionally developed and

implemented by state and federal agencies. Laws, regulations, and

private practices in the real estate industry were used to promote

legally enforced residential segregation in the United States. Zoning,

redlining, and blockbusting created the division of our urban landscape

along the color line: black and white. Residential segregation has had

debilitating impacts on African Americans in cities in terms of lost

opportunities for economic prosperity and the denial of homeownership

and the wealth-building potential that comes from it. Oakland, California

is at the center of this research, where urban renewal and an interstate

highway destroyed whole neighborhoods in West Oakland. The Acorn

Housing Project was built in the aftermath of the urban renewal

program. Title VIII of the Fair Housing Act remains the most promising

basis for developing strategies for African Americans to fully engage in

American’s legacy of wealth building through homeownership—the

American Dream. Historically, that dream was designed only for white

America. The task now is to realize it for everyone.

Introduct ion

The use of race as a resource for domination creates systemic advan-

tage and exclusion, allowing people and institutions to ensure unequal

American Jour nal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 77, Nos. 3-4 (May-Septe mber, 2018).

DOI: 10 .1111/ajes.122 43

© 2018 American Journ al of Economics and Sociology, Inc

*An Oakland, Cal ifornia native and GenXer. CEO, McGrew & A ssociates, a fair housing

and legislation, urban ecolog y and construct ion and sustainabil ity company with a

mission to improve the lives of mar ginalized com munities in Oakl and by creating,

designing, and engineer ing sustainable homeownership. Her fami ly’s legacy in Oakland

real estate was to promote raci al integration of homeowner ship at a time when state

and federal laws made it almost i mpossible for African American s to purchase property.

1014 The American Journal of Economics and Sociology

outcomes (Becher 2015)). Thus racial dominance in the United States

has been used since the Civil War to shape our urban areas, permit-

ting the quality of life for African Americans in America’s large cities

to decline, deteriorate, and remain inferior to the spaces occupied

by white Americans. George Frederickson argued that white lead-

ers assumed that African Americans were so inferior that they would

not survive the decline in their living conditions and would eventu-

ally disappear (Ritzdorf 1997). For this reason, after the Emancipation

Proclamation, the aim of maintaining racial dominance justified for

policymakers the beginning of the vicious patterns of residential seg-

regation that still exist today.

Understanding the causes of urban deterioration requires a histor-

ical and multi-perspectival orientation, one that dispenses with many

of the conventional apprehensions that often attend structural assess-

ments of policy and practice, and instead prioritizes clarity over hy-

perbole. The facts are clear: while the history of segregation, whether

de facto or de jure, may have been rife with individual prejudice, those

prejudices were aided and abetted, as a matter of record, by federal,

state, and local government policies. Segregation was never simply a

product of individual prejudice, as when white people moved out of

a neighborhood when black people moved in. That was only a small

part of it. As Richard Rothstein (2017: vii–viii, xii), an influential resi-

dential housing discrimination scholar, has explained:

Today’s residential segregation in the North, South, Midwest, a nd West

is not the unintended consequence of ind ividual choices and of other-

wise well-meaning law or regulation but of un hidden public policy that

explicitly segregated every metropolit an area in the United States. The

policy was so systematic and forceful t hat its effects endure to the present

time. Without our government’s purposefu l imposition of racial segrega-

tion, the other causes—private prejud ice, white flight, real estate steer ing,

bank redlini ng, income differences, and self-segregation— still would have

existed but with far less opportu nity for expression. Segregation by inten-

tional government action is not de facto. R ather, it is what courts call de

jure: segregat ion by law and public pol icy …. Racial segr egation in hous-

ing was not merely a project of southerners in t he former slaveholding

Confederacy. It was a nationwide project of the federal government in the

twentieth century, designed and implemented by its most l iberal leaders.

Our system of official segregat ion was not the result of a single law that

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History of Residential Segregation in the United States

consigned African A mericans to designated neighborhoods. R ather, scores

of racially explicit laws, regulations, and govern ment practices combined

to create a nationwide system of urban ghettos, su rrounded by white sub-

urbs. Private discrim ination also played a role, but it would have been

considerably less effective had it not been embraced and rein forced by

government.

De jure segregation resulted initia lly from the creation of zoning

ordinances by urban strategists and planners early i n the 20th ce ntu r y.

It is unclear whether racial segregation was an intentional feature

of the first zoning ordinances or an unfort unate byproduct. Zoning

ordinances are land use policies established to create a hierarchy of

land uses. The original legal rationale for zoning was to separate

industrial, residential, and commercial distr icts to avoid conflicting

uses of land. However, since zoning was devised and planned by

white male planners, it also resulted in racially divided communities.

The planners established the middle-class value system and stand ards

vis-à-vis residential housing—the so-cal led American Dream. But that

dream was intended for whites only. For instance, Baltimore and St.

Louis passed zoning ordinances that prohibited Afr ican Americans

from moving onto blocks that were mainly white. Thus politicians

and policymakers, adhering to the will of their white const ituencies,

instituted a model that encouraged planners around the country to

design racially segregated communities.

Sadly, the historical snapshot of the foundational planning mecha-

nism used to establish and maintain residential segregation continues

to thrive. A study of residential segregation by Douglass S. Massey

(2016) has documented a dynamic and long-held reality that zoning

and high levels of residential segregation locked African Americans

out of the American Dream. More accurately, it may be viewed as

what Langston Hughes ([[1950] 1990] [1950] 1990) referred to as a

“dream deferred” in his poem “Harlem.” That deferral of a dream is

an extension of the unmet promise made to freed slaves in Georgia

and South Carolina in 1865 that they should receive “forty acres and a

mule”: the chance to own land and farm it as reparations for slavery.

There is ample evidence of the government’s continuing role in

segregating America’s residential landscape into distinct black/white,

poor/wealthy neighborhoods even today. According to Massey’s (1985)