Part II: Critical Race Theory and American Housing Policy

By Michael Kelly, Kevin Marchman, Erik Solivan

“Two hundred years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounded moral debts, America will never be whole.

-Ta-Nehisi Coates from “The Case for Reparations”

Critical Race Theory (CRT) – The initiation point of CRT was Critical Legal Studies and began as a law journal article on how the American legal system permits discrimination. This legal analysis evolved into a critique of our institutions and government systems that are based on legally permitted discrimination and are therefore, inherently racists.

Recently, CRT has been co-opted by conservative lawmakers to promulgate laws and guidelines that would ban the truthful teaching of American history and silence any discussion on systemic racism.

A prime example of institutional racism embedded in these laws and policies is the history of government-assisted housing in America. For decades, governmental housing policies created nation-wide racial segregation and contributed to the displacement and containment of poor people of color.

United States government policy has produced historic and ongoing racial displacement, exclusion, and segregation. It has prevented people of color from obtaining and retaining homeownership as well as accessing safe and affordable housing. Professor Richard Rothstein clearly articulates this history in the “Color of Law – A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America.”

The FHA (Federal Housing Administration) was founded as part of the New Deal to stimulate job development through housing construction and to respond to the nation’s need for more housing. The chief tool of the FHA was their mortgage insurance program that insured private mortgages and created lower interest rates, as well as reduced payment requirements. This program established a system of neighborhood maps that graded perceived “stability.” Neighborhood maps colored in green were graded “A” and received excellent insurance backing and those colored red, which were occupied primarily by people of color, were graded “D” and were ineligible for FHA support. These maps were adopted by the entire mortgage industry and “redlining” extended past FHA loans. Developers encouraged by the FHA created segregated mass-produced subdivisions and established deed restrictions to maintain white neighborhoods.

After World War II, the GI Bill provided homeownership support to returning veterans. But while the GI Bill’s language did not specifically exclude African American veterans from its benefits, it was structured in a way that shut doors for the 1.2 million Black people who had bravely served their country during World War II, in segregated ranks. The Department of Veteran Affairs did not provide loans to Black vets. Black vets wishing to purchase homes were subjected to marked up prices and marked up interest rates. A development that was later challenged by the Supreme Court for its discriminatory policies was Levittown which was developed specifically for veterans using FHA loans and provided racially restrictive deeds that refused people of color.

The Housing Act of 1937 provided subsidies from the U.S. government to local public housing agencies to improve living conditions for low-income families. Most of the early public housing was built for working class whites. The 1949 Housing Act funded and facilitated the government’s ability to clear neighborhoods through eminent domain to create large high rise public housing developments. It also explicitly permitted the government to segregate occupants. Pruitt-Igor in St. Louis for example, designated one development for African Americans and another for whites.

The unintentional consequences of the creation and management of public housing in America disconnected many Black people from integrated neighborhood housing. The “slum clearance” that facilitated the creation of “towers in the park” style public housing relocated hundreds of black homeownership communities and stripped them of the financial stability of property ownership. An early example of governmental eminent domain to destroy a thriving Black community was the removal of thousands of residents in Manhattan in 1850 to create Central Park.

The policies of the FHA, created by Congress in 1934, were prime contributors to housing discrimination in America. Founded as part of the New Deal to stimulate job development through housing construction and to respond to the nation’s need for more housing, the chief tool of the FHA was a private mortgage insurance program that created lower interest rates and reduced payment requirements.

The creation and management of public housing in America disconnected Black people from integrated neighborhood housing. The “slum clearance” that created “towers in the park” style public housing relocated hundreds of Black residents and stripped them of the financial stability of property ownership. In the 1850s, governmental eminent domain destroyed a thriving Black community to create Manhattan’s Central Park.

Federal policies supported the rapid development of single-family suburban homes that were primarily for whites, while urban public housing became a predominantly Black housing program. As working-class whites moved out of inner cities, new public housing residents were poor Black people, with limited ability to pay rent sufficient to fund building maintenance and operations, resulting in significant physical deterioration of the housing developments. This created a systemic underfunding for maintenance of public housing, and by 1980, over 100,000 units were deemed by Congress to be uninhabitable.

United States government policy has produced historic and ongoing racial displacement, exclusion, and segregation. It has prevented people of color from obtaining and retaining homeownership as well as accessing safe and affordable housing.

These lessons learned from these historic examples should be used to build a more equitable future that dismantles racial structural inequities. However, CRT which provides the framework for further research and policy development is now being challenged by conservative lawmakers who are unjustifiably using the term CRT to implement a willfully “color-blind” approach to public policy and education and is intentionally misinterpreted by people unwilling to acknowledge our country’s racist history and how it impacts the present.

US lawmakers emboldened by white supremacy, nurtured by the previous presidential administration, and insisting that they are advocating for a balanced and “patriotic” educational system have recently promulgated laws that would deny the truth about our nation’s history and silence dissent by censoring educational material that includes the truth of the consequences of racism in America.

Former President Trump stated during a White House event that Critical Race Theory is a “crusade against American history and ideological poison that…will destroy our country.” In September 2020, he issued the Executive Order on “Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping” which became the blueprint for states to create legislative bans on truth.

To date, more than twenty-five states have introduced legislation that would restrict or ban what students can learn or what teachers can teach about our nation’s history and twelve such state bills have already passed. School boards across the country are now being attended by unprecedented numbers of mainly white parents demanding that CRT be banned from the curriculum.

The fact that governmental action through the years has directly contributed to racial segregation, urban decay and poverty is irrefutable. How society can learn from these actions and of course, correct them can only be a product of research through the CRT analytical framework and must not be lessened or scuttled by those who wish to rewrite history to ensure that white supremacist policy continues in America.

This attempt to return to an era when Black voices and experiences were excluded

through intimidating legislative and executive bans is not new. We can draw inspiration from efforts to overcome these forces in the past and unite. There are ways to fight for the policies and decisions that will lead us to a more equitable future. However, it will require all of us to keep our eyes open to the truth and continue to communicate our understanding of how white supremacy is deeply embedded in our institutions and in our laws.

Truth is truth. Truth matters.

Suggested Reading: The Colorado of Law: – A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. Richard Rothstein, W.W. Norton & Company Publishing  

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