The Great Depression of the late 1920s and early 1930s gave the average American a boost. By 1933, a quarter of Americans were out of work, the average national income had fallen to less than half of what it had been a few years earlier, and more than a million Americans were facing foreclosure. .
One of several programs put in place by the newly elected Franklin D. Roosevelt to stimulate the economy offered home buying assistance for Americans, but only for white Americans. The Federal Housing Administration, administered through the National New Deal Housing Act of 1934, encouraged homeownership by providing federal loan support – securing mortgages. But since its inception, the FHA has limited assistance to potential white buyers.
“The FHA had a handbook that explicitly said it was risky to give mortgages in predominantly black areas,” says Richard D. Kahlenberg, senior fellow at the Century Foundation who wrote on housing segregation in the states. -United. “And so the federal home ownership subsidy went almost entirely to white people.”
Loan restrictions draw lines between neighborhoods
A black family in a poor neighborhood in Washington, DC, 1937.
Corbis / Getty Images
The aid program not only limited recipients to white Americans, but it established and then reinforced housing segregation in the United States, effectively drawing boundaries between white and black neighborhoods that would persist for generations.
For example, in 1940, the FHA denied insurance to a private Detroit builder because he intended to build a subdivision near a predominantly black neighborhood. The FHA only wanted to insure houses in white neighborhoods.
The builder responded by constructing a concrete wall half a mile long and six feet high between the Black Quarter and the location where he planned to build, historian Richard Rothstein says in The Color of the Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Parted America. Assured that this wall would maintain the racial segregation of the neighborhoods, the FHA then agreed to insure the houses.
A “New Deal” for White Americans
A sign placed in front of the Sojourner Truth housing project reads, “We want white tenants in our white community,” in Detroit, Michigan, 1942.
Arthur Siegel / Anthony Potter Collection / Getty Images
The FHA not only focused its aid on future white house owners, but its policies actively sought to insure mortgage loans in white neighborhoods that would remain white.
“If a [Black] the family could afford to buy in a white neighborhood without government help, the FHA would refuse to insure future mortgages even to whites in that neighborhood because he was now threatened with integration, ”Rothstein wrote in The American Perspective.
Many housing deeds have categorically stated that a house can only be sold to white people, explaining that this complies with FHA requirements. William Levitt, who developed the suburban communities of Levittown for returning WWII veterans, complied with the FHA by only selling to white veterans and creating acts that prohibited them from reselling their homes to black Americans.
READ MORE: How GI Bill’s Promise Was Denied to One Million Black WWII Veterans
Neighborhoods separated by walls, highways
Like the Detroit builder, developers have also tried to make their housing projects “less risky” by using barriers to separate them from predominantly Back neighborhoods. A common obstacle, Kahlenberg says, has become the highways, which still separate many predominantly white and predominantly black neighborhoods today.
In addition to the discriminatory practices of the FHA, federal housing projects from the 1930s helped keep black Americans in neighborhoods with fewer educational and employment opportunities than white neighborhoods.
“The existing models of segregation have been carefully and deliberately designed – socially designed by the government in the first place,” says Kahlenberg.
Redlining becomes a lasting legacy
A house sublet by William Cotter and his family was plastered with panels in the front yard in a last ditch effort to prevent the family’s eviction in Levittown, New York, 1953. The Cotters were the first black family to moved into the subdivision and were refused to renew her lease or buy her house; the family sued for racial discrimination.
Jim O’Rourke / Newsday RM / Getty Images
The Fair Housing Act of 1968 sought to end these discriminatory practices, but did not completely end federal redlining – the denial of services like race-based loans – or address the negative effects. that decades of discrimination and segregation had already had on black Americans.
The term “redlining” originates from the actual red lines on the maps which identified predominantly black neighborhoods as “dangerous”. Beginning in the 1930s, the government-funded Home Owners’ Loan Corporation and the Federal Home Loan Bank Board used these cards to deny loans and investment services to black Americans.
This lack of investment has had a profound and lasting impact on black neighborhoods, says Halley Potter, senior researcher at the Century Foundation. “We see the legacy today when you look at the maps, housing values and demographic patterns in our cities.”
