Redlining
Human Health & the Environment
Class Meetings
Dates: 2026-09-29T16:00:00, 2026-10-01T16:00:00
Redlining & Public Health Legacies Printable PDF
Videos or Films Watched
How systemic racism shaped the ecosystems of U.S. cities
Science Magazine, 10 09, 2020
Video (4:08)
Description
Historically Black and immigrant communities are more vulnerable to environmental stressors
Read the research: https://scim.ag/3nzjnQE
Credits
producer
Meagan Cantwell
supervising producer
Joel Goldberd
research
Schell et al., Science 2020
DOI: 10.1126/science.aay4497
special thanks
Elizabeth Pennisi
Pratheek Rebala
Sacha Vigneri
video footage
Meagan Cantwell
Pond5
Videoblocks
Videvo
archival footage
Dynamic Films
Encyclopedia Britannica Films
FDR Presidential Library
Prelinger Archives
photos
Library of Congress
Ted Etyan/Flickr
Will Parson/Chesapeake Bay Program
Enoch Pratt Free Library/Maryland’s State Library Resource Center
illustrations
British Library/Flickr
maps/data
Howard Center for Investigative Journalism/CNS/NPR
Johns Hopkins University
Library of Congress
Meagan Cantwell
Portland State/SUPR Lab
Robert K. Nelson et al., 2020 “Mapping Inequality”
music
“Vultures” by Chris Burns
Transcript
0:01 · The urban environment is a feat of human decision-making— from where to develop street grids lined with large glass office buildings, to which green spaces to preserve for outdoor recreation.
0:13 · How humans make these choices, and the natural environment’s response, can create extremely different ecosystems in neighborhoods just a few blocks away from each other.
0:23 · Researchers delved into dozens of studies to understand what drives these variations.
0:29 · One well documented phenomenon in cities is the relationship between wealth and biodiversity.
0:35 · More affluent areas generally have greater canopy cover, with larger, mature trees, as well as a higher diversity of birds.
0:45 · This is known as the “luxury effect.”
0:48 · Low-income areas typically have more man-made surfaces— including major heat-absorbers like asphalt and concrete, compared to higher-income areas.
0:59 · The lack of shade from trees and vegetation, combined with more asphalt and concrete, makes it hotter in these neighborhoods— a phenomenon known as an “urban heat island.”
1:10 · These communities are also more likely to be near sources of air pollutants, like expansive interstates pumping car exhaust.
1:19 · Although wealth can sometimes predict the outcomes of an urban ecosystem, there isn’t always a clear relationship.
1:26 · In some cases, the racial make-up of a neighborhood is better than income when forecasting canopy cover.
1:33 · Researchers explored studies that highlight how systemic racism shaped our build environment.
1:39 · One glaring example in the United States is residential segregation.
1:44 · From 1933-1968, the federal government limited access to homeownership among Black Americans through a practice known as redlining.
1:55 · Neighborhoods were graded based on the riskiness of providing a mortgage in the area.
2:00 · The grades ranged from A, the most desirable areas, full of wealthy businessmen, to D, neighborhoods considered high-risk investments due to a combination of factors: from their environmental quality and distance from large industrial factories to the main determinant, the presence of foreign-born and Black people.
2:22 · The inability for Black people to buy homes in these neighborhoods meant many types of capital investments left— landlords abandoned their properties, and public services, such as transportation and park maintenance, weren’t prioritized.
2:36 · Today, many U.S. cities still exhibit long-lasting environmental impacts from this discrimination.
2:42 · Neighborhoods which had a “D” grade in the 60s have about half the canopy cover of historically white communities.
2:50 · Some studies evaluate how the current environment relates to historically redlined communities, but researchers did not find any research that traces how ecosystems changed over time because of this segregation.
3:03 · They propose that because habitable regions are more spread out in these areas, animal populations struggle to breed since they are cut off from each other.
3:14 · The reduced breeding options for animals could have decreased gene diversity, an important way for animals to adapt to changing environments.
3:23 · And decreased gene flow of native species could promote the abundance of pest species, like mosquitos and brown rats, which carry diseases that can infect humans.
3:34 · The combination of all these outcomes— from urban heat islands to increased pests— make low-income, marginalized communities far more vulnerable to risks like climate change.
3:47 · Scientists say such evidence shows that conservation and social justice cross paths— especially along neighborhood streets.
Greenlining Fund Invests in Omaha’s Historically Redlined Neighborhoods
The Omaha News, 03 12, 2025
Video (1:32)
Description
The Omaha News streams live every Wednesday at 4 p.m. on YouTube, Facebook and The Knowledge Network (TKN) during the academic year. The half-hour newscast also airs state-wide on NET reaching all of Nebraska’s 1.9 million residents.
Our mission is to fully immerse University of Nebraska at Omaha journalists into the business of reporting and investigating live, local stories that impact our region. Located in the Community of Public Affairs and Community Service building, our newsroom is home to state-of-the-art facilities and award-winning journalism.
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Transcript
0:02 · front porch Investments green lining fund is helping homeowners in historically Redline areas invest in their properties and enhance the community redlining is the practice of denying loans and services to minority neighborhoods which led to long-term disinvestment and though outlawed in 1968 its effects still linger Yolanda
0:19 · Williams housing Justice and grants manager at front porch Investments says this impact is still evident today how can this impact North Omaha residents particularly the black North Omaha residents that’s struggle to find affordable housing that are struggling with home ownership and just the valuations of these homes are much lower than counterparts in you know Midtown or West Omaha in 2023 the green lining fund launched a program providing 0% interest loans of up to $5,000 per property to
0:48 · help homeowners with critical repairs These funds support Home Improvements and Renovations aiming to stabilize households and address critical housing needs etel Lopez CEO of the Latino Economic Development Council says many homeowners are forced to choose between basic maintenance and other essential costs and it’s expensive I mean you talk about you know replacing a window all of this windows in my home office have not been replaced and it’s really cold here do I want to replace the windows which is you know going to cost me so much or
1:17 · do I want to pay a higher monthly bill the green Ling fund isn’t just about fixing homes it’s about restoring investment empowering residents and ensuring North and South Omaha communities can Thrive for generations for the Omaha news I’m marry mitoff
Housing Segregation and Redlining in America A Short History Code Switch NPR
NPR, 04 11, 2018
Video (6:36)
Description
In 1968, Congress passed the Fair Housing Act that made it illegal to discriminate in housing. Gene Demby of NPR’s Code Switch explains why neighborhoods are still so segregated today.
• Read “How Segregation Shapes Fatal Police Violence” at https://n.pr/2Ic6A1Q
• Read or listen to: “‘The Color Of Law’ Details How U.S. Housing Policies Created Segregation” at https://n.pr/2HgqATh
WHAT’S CODE SWITCH?
It’s the fearless conversations about race that you’ve been waiting for! Hosted by journalists of color, our podcast tackles the subject of race head-on. We explore how it impacts every part of society — from politics and pop culture to history, sports and everything in between. This podcast makes ALL OF US part of the conversation — because we’re all part of the story.
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Transcript
0:00 · Chris Rock: You know what’s so sad, man?
0:00 · You know what’s wild?
0:01 · Martin Luther King stood for nonviolence.
0:03 · Now what’s Martin Luther King?
0:05 · A street.
0:07 · And I don’t give a f*** where you at in America, If you on Martin Luther King Boulevard there’s some violence going down.
0:13 · Gene: That, of course, is Chris Rock’s famous joke about streets named for Martin Luther King Jr., which tend to be in – let’s say distressed areas.
0:22 · And he’s not wrong, because if you look at the way housing segregation works in America you can see how things ended up this way.
0:28 · Once you see it, you won’t be able to unsee it.
0:31 · OK, let’s look at MLK Boulevard in Baltimore.
0:35 · I want to show you how to see housing segregation in schools, in health, in family wealth, in policing.
0:41 · But first, an explanatory comma.
0:45 · It’s the 1930s in the wake of the Great Depression.
0:47 · FDR is president.
0:48 · He wants to bring economic relief to millions of Americans through a collection of federal programs and projects called The New Deal.
0:54 · One part of that “new deal” was The National Housing Act of 1934, which introduced ideas like the 30-year mortgage and low, fixed interest rates.
1:03 · So now you have all these lower-income people who can afford homes, but how do you make sure they don’t default on their new mortgages?
1:09 · Enter the Home Owners Loan Corp.
1:12 · The HOLC created residential security maps.
RESIDENTIAL SECURITY MAPS
1:15 · And these maps? They’re where the term redlining comes from.
1:20 · Green meant “best area, best people,” aka businessmen; blue meant “good people,” like white-collar families; yellow meant a “declining area,” with working class families; and red meant “detrimental influences, hazardous,” like “foreign-born” people, “low-class whites,” and – most significantly – “Negroes.”
1:41 · Again and again on these HOLC maps, one of the most consistent criteria for redlined neighborhoods is the presence of black and
brown people.
1:49 · Let’s be clear.
1:50 · Studies show that people who lived in redlined areas were not necessarily more likely to default on their mortgages.
1:57 · But redlining made it difficult — if not impossible — to buy or refinance.
2:02 · So landlords abandon their properties.
2:04 · City services become unreliable.
2:06 · In most places, crime increases.
2:09 · And property values drop.
2:11 · All of these conditions fester for 30 years as white people flee to the brand new suburbs popping up all over the country.
2:18 · Many of those suburbs institute rules, called covenants, that explicitly forbid selling homes to black people.
2:23 · And all of this was perfectly legal.
2:27 · Now it’s 1968.
2:29 · And MLK is assassinated.
2:31 · News Report: Good evening.
2:32 · The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, 39 years old, The apostle of nonviolence in the civil rights movement has been shot to death in Memphis, Tenn.
2:39 · Martin Luther King was shot and was killed tonight in Memphis, Tenn.
2:42 · In the aftermath, Congress passes the Fair Housing Act of 1968.
2:47 · It’s a policy meant to encourage equal housing opportunities regardless of race, or religion or national origin.
2:52 · And it offers protections for future homeowners and renters, but does little to fix the damage already done.
2:58 · Over the next 50 years, the Fair Housing Act is rarely enforced.
3:02 · So you can still see housing segregation and its effects, in Baltimore and often along any MLK Boulevard in any U.S. city.
3:11 · Like its effects on wealth.
WEALTH
3:13 · So homeownership is the major way Americans create wealth, right?
3:16 · Well, discrimination in housing is the major reason that black families up and down the income scale have a tiny fraction of the family wealth that white families do – even white families with less education and lower incomes.
3:28 · For almost 30 years, 98 percent of FHA loans were handed out to white borrowers.
3:33 · Not only were black neighborhoods redlined, and not only was the Fair Housing Act selectively enforced, if at all, but it is still today much harder for a black person to get a mortgage or home loan than it is for a white person.
3:46 · John: Families are fearful of speaking up about a basic human right that should be afforded to everyone in the world but definitely in the richest country in the world.
3:59 · And housing segregation in schools.
4:02 · The primary way that Americans pay for public schools is by paying property taxes.
4:07 · People who live in more valuable homes have better-funded local schools, better-paid teachers, better school facilities and more resources.
4:15 · Here’s a feedback loop: The better the schools in a neighborhood, the more those homes in that neighborhood are worth.
4:21 · And the higher the property values of those homes, the more money there is for schools.
4:25 · And so on and so on.
4:27 · And housing segregation in health.
4:29 · Because of urban planning that benefited those richer, whiter neighborhoods, people of color are more likely to live near industrial plants that spew toxic fumes; they’re more likely to live far away from grocery stores with fresh food, and in places where
the water isn’t drinkable.
HEALTH
4:43 · They’re more likely to live in neighborhoods with crumbling infrastructure, and in homes with toxic paint.
4:49 · Karen: When you’re living with rats, roaches, and things like that – that’s deplorable.
4:53 · You cannot have that kind of stuff with children running around in the building.
4:56 · A building that may be full of lead.
5:00 · And, not coincidentally, people of color have higher incidences of certain cancers, asthma and heart disease.
5:08 · And housing segregation in policing.
POLICING
5:11 · Housing segregation means we are having vastly different experiences with crime and vastly different experiences with policing.
5:17 · Because our neighborhoods are so segregated, sometimes racial profiling can be camouflaged as spatial profiling — where living in certain areas can make you more likely to be stopped by the police.
5:29 · And it means people have a lot of unnecessary contact with the criminal justice system just because of where they live.
5:38 · Reggie: The problem in our city?
5:41 · The police and the citizens are fighting.
5:43 · They keep targeting my brothers and sisters who don’t really have nothing.
5:49 · And that heavy, aggressive kind of policing that you see in black neighborhoods in particular makes people feel like they can’t trust the police.
5:55 · And when people don’t trust the police, crimes go unsolved and people have to find other ways to keep themselves safe.
6:03 · But, of course, it’s not just Baltimore.
6:05 · Because housing segregation and discrimination fundamentally shape the lives of people in nearly every major American city.
6:14 · It really is in everything.
6:18 · To hear more about how race shapes American life, visit npr.org/codeswitch.
6:23 · I’m Gene Demby. Be easy.
Assigned Background
How Housing Discrimination Works
Duration: 00:54:14
Released: 2021
Series: Stuff You Should Know
Owning a home in the US is a way to pass wealth down from one generation to the next and lift families into a comfortable life down the road. But there have been barriers to buying homes that Black Americans have faced from the time of slavery to today. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcript
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I’m Josh Clark,
and there’s Charles W Chuck Bryan over there, and this
is stuff you should know. Um the man oh man addition,
(00:25):
do you know what I love about this topic is
that it’s not just a bunch of like ranting about
how we think things are and how people think things are.
It’s like so studied and statistic heavy that you can
talk about how things are and then say, and here’s
(00:45):
the proof exactly, here’s a lot of data to back
it up. It’s really great. I love it when they
dovetail like this. Yeah. I get the impression, though, UM
that you when you’re talking about the studying race and
especially in America like you are, you have to back
it up with data like people are like, oh, yeah,
I don’t I don’t know about that. But um, I
want to give a shout out to actually to um
(01:08):
uh scholars both sell sociologists of race. UM Professor Villnabashi
Treatler from UC Santa Barbara and Professor Tricia Rose of
Brown University both are experts on this stuff and they
helped me out big time with this and some other
research on on racism I’ve done, um and they Dr
(01:28):
Bashi Treatler said, hey, make sure you mentioned this hashtag
we have going called site hashtag. Sorry, and I’m making
the hashtag symbol like justin Timberlake hashtag site black women
ce I t e black women. UM, and that leads
you to all sorts of good often overlooked research by
black scholars. Um, who are women that don’t always get
(01:51):
a lot of credit. So I’m glad you told me
about that one. I wanted to tell everybody else. So
when you, uh, that was a stutter when he said
so so sociologists, you didn’t mean they were just mediocre sociologists. No,
I was. I was sociologist. I could see how that
would be confusing. I was doing my impression of Phil
Collins saying sociologist so so studio. Yeah, well that’s the
(02:16):
last joke we’re gonna tell you. Oh yeah, probably. I
was warned by Dr Bashi Treatler not to do our
usual stick when we’re talking about race stuff, and I
was like, well, I mean, we we can handle ourselves.
She said. I I listened to your stuff. I listened
to the Braws episode just trust me on this. It’s like,
all right, So then that means the housing discrimination episode
(02:38):
officially starts. Now, that’s right. So that’s what we’re talking about, dude.
Housing discrimination and um uh in the United States, and
there is a very long history of housing discrimination. And
you might say, like, well, that really sucks. That sucks
that people have trouble buying a home or maybe they
get less favorable terms on their loans just because of
(02:59):
their race, and that does suck. That’s absolutely true. But
it’s even worse than that because in the United States,
one of the biggest ways of growing wealth intergenerationally, like
over the course of generations within a single family is
through a house. Yeah, I mean it’s sometimes people don’t
(03:19):
have a ton of money to invest in the stock market.
Some people think the stock market is not something to trust.
But one thing that has always been fairly reliable in
this country, you know, say, for a few moments in history,
is real estate and the idea that if you scrap
up and save enough money for a down payment for
a home, that house will eventually be worth quite a
(03:42):
bit more years later, and you can sell it and
use that extra windfall of cash to invest in the
stock market or to pass down to your kids so
they can then get in the housing market sooner than
they might have and then it just becomes a cycle
where it just builds wealth. Yeah, Like the average family
(04:02):
in America has most of their net worth tied up
in their house, and then you know, when it comes
time to sell it and the house is paid off,
that’s a lot of money. And then when you kick
the bucket, your kids get that money and maybe they
get a better house, and it just keeps growing and growing.
So if you put up barriers to housing, you’re actually
putting up barriers to passing along intergenerational wealth. And as
(04:24):
a big, big problem in America. UM Still today, I
saw a study from I think Brookings that found that,
um the median. Yeah, brooking study said that the median
net worth of a white family in America is a
hundred and seventy one thousand dollars. The median net worth
(04:48):
of a black family in America is seventeen thousand, one
hundred and fifty dollars, about a ten of what the
median is for white people. And that is largely because
of housing discriminate in the history of housing discrimination in
this country. Yeah, and as far as history goes, you know,
it started with literal racist laws where they said, if
(05:10):
you’re a black person or a black family, you cannot
live here. Um. That went on for a while, and
then those laws were sort of altered to the Jim
Crows Separate but Equal era, where they said, you know what, Um,
we’ll say things are better, but it’s really the same
effect in the end. And then they got rid of
(05:30):
those laws and said, all right, now we’ve really passed
the meaningful legislation, and now we can just racially discriminate
on the down low and very creative ways. Yeah, that’s
basically the pattern that it’s followed. Um. And what kind
of stuck out to meet Chuck is is that before
about nine hundred, before like the rise of like industrialization
(05:53):
to a really legitimate degree in the United States, like,
there wasn’t not nearly as much segregation as we saw
starting around nineteen especially in the North, because if you
had a trade or a craft in the North and
you were an African American, there’s a really good chance
that you were going to be serving white people as
well as black people, right and because you usually were
(06:16):
very closely your home was tied close to your shop,
you often lived above it if you were like a
cobbler or something like that. Um, you made live next
door to a white baker or something like that. So
the there wasn’t a lot of segregation until industrialization came
along and there was a big call for labor, which
drew a lot of African Americans, a lot of Black
(06:38):
Americans out of the South up to the north. And
all of a sudden, all of those people who were
living in integrated neighborhoods, all those white people I should say,
had had a problem with this influx of black migration
from the South to the north, and they responded with
a lot of really disgusting violence. Yeah. I mean, we’ve
talked about some of these, um race incidents and race
(07:01):
riots and race almost race wars really uh here and
there on the show, and they’re always hard to talk about.
But that was just sort of the reality of things
at the time. Um. In the nineteen thirties, the New
Deal comes along, and this is when legislation starts to
kind of kick in. When the government stepped in and said,
you know what, we think we should make it easier
(07:23):
for people to own homes. We really want to boost
home ownership because that’s a boon for the economy of
the country. And we’re going to create the home Owners
Loan Corporation, which is going to help people refinance their mortgages.
But we need some criteria here to sort of establish
a uniform way of like how to how to dole
(07:45):
out this assistance. And they reckoned, let’s let’s look at
every population of forty or more and let’s create a
color coded map that’s based on riskiness of these loans.
And they said, you know, they talked to real estate brokers,
they talk to bankers, and they said, help us out,
help us draw these boundaries, and they came up with
a one, two, three, four color graded system. Right, yeah,
(08:07):
that’s right. Because again this was like long before credit
scores were developed, so you couldn’t really look at you know,
if somebody came into your bank to ask for a loan,
you couldn’t be like, well, you’re your your credit scores this,
So I’m not gonna look at that start. I don’t
know we should do an episode on if we haven’t already.
I don’t think for sure. Um, but yeah, so the
four color codes they had were also um delineated by
(08:29):
grades Grade A, B, C, and D. Grade A was
the most desirable neighborhood. They were usually homogeneous, meaning white. Um,
there were um lots of professionals living in there. Grade
B was maybe a step down, but still largely homogeneous,
if not totally homogeneous, and they were considered still desirable.
And then it started to get into the lower grades
(08:50):
grades C and D, and C was um, I think
colored yellow on the map, right, Yeah, the first two
were green and blue, and then Grade C was rated
as declining and colored yellow and that sort of. In fact,
I think it even said infiltration of a lower grade
population in the document, which you don’t have to be
(09:13):
a genius to figure out what they were saying there.
It means people of color were moving in. And then
finally you end up with the color red Grade D,
which is least desirable. Um, very densely populated areas almost
always communities of color. Right. So um, the h O
l C created these maps, and then um, along came
(09:36):
the Federal Housing Authority and they said, well, we need
similar maps because we’re not we’re not here to help
stem the tide of foreclosures. We’re actually here to generate
new home ownership among Americans. Um, but we still have
the same issue. We got to figure out who’s credit
worthy and who’s not. So we’re going to base it
on where the people live. And they basically made identical
maps to the h O l C maps, and so
(09:58):
they probably used them. Right, there’s a lot of debate.
I don’t think anyone’s found the smoking gun yet. But
if you take an h O l C map in
an f h A map and you put them over
one another, they’re basically the same thing. And I I
it’s kind of all. It’s up for the debate still.
But the the the upshot was that because of these maps, Um,
(10:22):
if you lived in one of these red and often
yellow communities, they wouldn’t lend to you, for um, for
a new mortgage or even a second mortgage to say,
remodel your home. And they also wouldn’t assist you with
refinancing your existing mortgage, which means you’re subject to foreclosure.
And if you were in a red or yellow community,
(10:43):
you were probably um black or a person of color
or some other ethnic minority. And UM, that means that
they were shut out of this enormous housing boom that
generated a tremendous amount of prosperity immediately after the New
Deal in World War Two. As we’ll see, so African
Americans were left out of or on the fringes of
(11:04):
the New Deal anyway. And this is where we get
to shout out Francis Perkins. Perkins again, which is it’s
fun to now that we know so much about her,
to continually shout her out. But she did a lot
of work arguing in favor of inclusion for black people
in the New Deal. Um, I guess you know, sometimes successfully,
sometimes not. But at the end of the day, the
(11:25):
f h A imposed these rules through the New Deal. Uh.
Their maps were just like the UH the h O
l C. And the process of excluding these groups because
they were colored red was called redlining. That is that
like the where that whole term comes from. That’s exactly
where it comes from. So now today, any any time
you’re discriminated against, whether it’s buying insurance or anything like that, um,
(11:49):
based on your race or say your community. Um, it’s
called redlining now. But that’s where it grew out of
those h O l C maps and f A J maps. UM.
And I mean they would use terms and like their
their handbooks that like these communities had quote undesirable racial
or nationality groups in them, so you couldn’t you couldn’t
lend them any money or whatever. Um. And it was
(12:11):
I mean like this is still like a really big
problem today. Yeah, I mean back then basically and still today.
In many cases, that leaves you with a couple of
options as a person of color. You can rent uh
forever um often times back then and still now from
a white landlord who doesn’t live anywhere near that community,
(12:31):
not always, but usually, or just pay for the home
in cash, which is a stretch for anybody. Uh, it’s
it’s tough to do unless you’re like wealthy. And there
were there were, I have to say there were black
owned banks. But there was nine black own banks in
the entire United States in the thirties. So that is
a place where you could turn to if you’re lucky
enough to have one in your area. But that that
(12:53):
was not a solution to the general population for Black Americans. Yeah,
and like you said, also affected their ability to get
second mortgages, to do home improvements or to like expand
on their house and upgrade it, remodel it. So that
means that the properties are gonna deteriorate and decline over
(13:13):
the years, and it’s just it’s part of that systemic
racist cycle that is just prevalent. Yeah, because still today, eventually,
over time people from the outside looking in say, look,
black people can’t even take care of their communities. Look
at look at how their houses are. Um, just as
a result of this. That is definitely like the definition
(13:33):
of systemic racism for sure. It’s just by the way
into the structures. If you hear dogs barking, My dogs
are upstairs and they’re just very excited about this topic. Yeah,
and I don’t know what’s going on there, but they’re
not going to shut up. So let’s say we press on.
We’ll press on. Should we take a break, then press on.
We’re going to press on like some lee nails right
(13:53):
after a break. How about that? All right, it sounds good.
(14:19):
All right, we’re back and look, these things look amazing
on me. Yeah, they’re very nice. There’s a little bit
of cuticle showing. I didn’t put them right up against it,
but it’s still it’s passable. Well, I think if you
paint them just right, that’s not so noticeable. Right, fill ins,
that’s what I need. I need to get some fill ins.
So back to the topic at hand, joking is over. Um,
(14:43):
so here’s the deal. There’s, like you said, a lot
of debate whether or not or I don’t think we
said this part, whether or not the lenders actually use
these maps because these were government maps from government programs.
It’s not like they said, here, banks have these and
use these. Uh. If you look at the statistics, it
seems like they probably got their hands on some of
(15:03):
these maps. It does. And also, don’t forget the government
figured out, you know, how to draw these maps for
every city over forty people from the lenders, from the banks,
from the Yeah, so they knew this anyway, but now
the government has basically said it is okay to do this, um.
And so so yeah, if you if you look at
the outcome of this redlining, these red line maps, um,
(15:28):
it’s it’s really hard to say, no, this didn’t happen
like this definitely didn’t make it out of government hands
like forts here just great, let’s trade off. Between ninety
four and nineteen sixty two, over of all the federally
backed mortgages that were issued in the United States went
(15:49):
to white buyers. Between four and nineteen sixty two, that’s right,
because of this black ownership since then and can tinuing
today is lagged behind white homeownership in America, and seventeen
just a few short years ago, of black Americans own
their homes versus seventy of white Americans. And then the
(16:13):
other problem with redlining a community is you basically put
a pox on it. It’s cursed, because that means that
those houses are not going to get any kind of
attention UM, and so they’re going to continue to deteriorate.
And if you live in this community, as far as
a banker is concerned, you are a huge credit risk. Right,
And so still today UM sev of the neighborhoods that
(16:35):
were originally redlined in those maps are our redline UM
low income communities today, And which is I mean, that’s
pretty surprising. And I also saw that UM study found
that homes and red line neighborhoods we’re still worth less
than half of those in green neighborhoods. Yeah, and here’s
(16:57):
the one. I marked these as stats with an exclamation point,
just that’s how excited I get. But the ones that
I’m really floored by, I don’t even write anything except
for three exclamation points. I’ve got three exclamation points by
that of back federally back mortgages. For sure, that is
definitely one. Um here’s mine. If if you might say, well,
(17:18):
what about variables man and education level and income level
and stuff like that, Like you gotta factor all that in.
That’s a whole other side conversation as far as systemic
racism and being able to go to good schools and
afford a good education and get a good job and
all that. So just park that to the side. But
if you control for all those variables, college educated black
(17:40):
Americans are still less likely to own their home than
white Americans without a high school diploma. Yeah, That’s That’s
what really gets you is when they they’re like, well,
let us just control for all these factors and only
variable that remains is the race of the people applying
for a owner owning a home, and it’s still the case.
(18:02):
That’s when it’s like, well this is indisputable. Actually yeah,
and you know you can put a price on this.
Red Fen did a study um just last year in
twenty that black American families missed out on the opportunity
to accumulate an average of two hundred and twelve thousand
dollars of you know what, we’re talking about that intergenerational
(18:22):
wealth per household over the last forty years, just over
the last forty years. I mean we’re talking about stuff
that started, I mean back in the days of slavery,
but really started to take off in the nineteen thirties
with the New Deal. And this is just since nineteen
eighty they’ve lost out on that amount of money per household.
That’s nuts and still today, Chuck, here’s another one that
gets me. Black American is five times likelier to own
(18:45):
a home in a red line neighborhood than a white
American is. So this is still an issue today. Um.
So redlining these maps just set off this enormous amount
of um discrimination and I guess is all you can say.
And then all of the horrible effects that come out
of that that level of discrimination. But they weren’t the
(19:06):
only things that set it off. Um. The g I
Bill really kind of came in and said, well, hold on,
hold my beer, I want to mess things up to
what does hold my beer mean? It means that like
there’s some dude just kind of sitting there with like
his shirt, um just barely covering his gut drinking a beer,
watching somebody do something stupid and he says, hold my beer,
(19:26):
and then he doesn’t stupid. That’s right. Yeah, I thought
that’s what it meant. But you know me, I’m a
I’m an old man with a shirt barely covering his gut.
So I wasn’t quite short. You should spend more time
on Urban Dictionary. It should. I don’t drink much beer anymore, though,
although I do love it. What’s your favorite? I mean,
you know I love Tropicalia here out of Athens, Georgia.
(19:49):
The creature comfort. I still never had one. Well, you
should come over. I have a cagorator now on my deck.
Oh my god, I’m serving it up. But I don’t
know why I got it. I got it for friends
because I don’t drink. It’s on a beer. And then
the pandemic happened, and now I’ve just got a half
keg of beer sitting ship. All right. So yeah, the
(20:09):
g I Bill um this, you know, in theory, the
g I Bill is a great thing, and it has
done a lot of good. But in this case, it
did block access to home ownership among black Americans because,
uh they would come home from World War Two. The
g I Bill was passed. Banks are handing out mortgages
to veterans and they were actually allowed to discriminate based
(20:31):
on race. Yes, it’s shocking. Yeah, well it’s like whenever
you see that kind of thing, you’re like, this doesn’t
jibe with what I understand. Just look to the Dixiecrats,
the segregationists of the South, who were a very powerful
voting block and during the Jim Crow era, and they
were like to appease them and get them to vote
(20:52):
for something like a New Deal program or to not
do everything they could to block it. You had to say, okay,
well we’ll make sure that that blacks are excluded them
this that that that Black Americans won’t have access to
this amazing program. And they’d be like, okay, cool, let’s
let’s do it. That’s that’s that’s where a lot of
that came from. And I mean, it’s easy to blame
the Dixie Krats, but you can also be like, well,
(21:14):
you know, how hard did you try to go around
the Dixie Kratz too. I mean it was allowed to happen, yes, yeah,
by everybody, despite Francis perkins best efforts. Yeah, here’s the
stat For instance, in Mississippi in Uh, they build out
told out more than three thousand v A backed home
loans that year. Uh, and two of them were two
(21:37):
black veterans. Uh. Pretty startling. I don’t even know the
percentage on that point nine eight. Oh yeah, there’s got
to be a repeating something in there somewhere. Uh. And
you know this is a big deal because when World
War Two ended, they wanted a housing boom. There was
a lot of the supplies that would have gone to
home construction during the war went to the war effort.
(21:58):
So the f h A said, you know what, we
we need a housing boom here. We’re going to guarantee
construction loans to you like big construction companies out there.
And that’s when the suburbs popped up for the first time,
and that changed everything forever. Yeah. I mean, like they
they the birth of the suburbs were like a deliberate
(22:18):
program created by the federal government to to basically get
more people buying houses, to start that intergenerational wealth and
to create a middle class or to expand the middle
class dramatically. And they were able to do that partially
through just like when the f h came along and said, hey,
you know, we’re going to back these people’s loans as
(22:39):
long as they’re not in a red line neighborhood. That
says to the lenders, well, then you know that means
even if this person defaults, the government will buy the
loan from me. I’m gonna get paid back no matter what.
They did the same thing to these construction companies to
which created this huge housing boom. But there’s a caveat
to it. Just like with the v A loans that
said you can discriminate based on race for loans, even
(23:01):
though this is really important, Chuck. Even though the government
the v A would back the loan of a black
veteran just like they would back the loan of a
white veteran and you would be repaid no matter what,
you were still allowed to discriminate based on race. The
f h A, supposedly with the birth of the suburbs,
said we’re going to guarantee your construction loans, so you
(23:22):
can build suburbs, but you can’t sell two black Americans.
That’s another one that I don’t think there’s a smoking
gun that I saw, so I don’t know if that means,
like get the word out, like you can’t sell the
black people or else we’re not going to back these loans,
or if it was stated policy, that haven’t been able
to turn up. But it’s pretty well understood that the
(23:43):
f h A discriminated against black people basically moving to
the suburbs by not backing construction loans like that. Well. Yeah,
and there were neighborhood covenants in place that said that
black people cannot own homes in these neighborhoods they were
there were clauses that said you cannot resell your home
if you go to move, you can’t sell it to
(24:04):
a black family. Yeah, dude, if you want to be startled,
go search that um on Google Images. There’s like pictures
of these clauses and deeds that say you can’t sell
to anybody who’s not white, or even specifically, you can’t
sell anybody who’s black. It’s really jarring. Yeah, and it’s um,
I mean, it was sort of expressly understood that the
suburbs were being created for a reason, and that’s to
(24:26):
get white people out of the city to a place
where they could live among themselves. And it’s it’s something
that’s still going on. I mean, during the uh most
recent presidential election campaign, Donald Trump started playing praying on
these fears again. He was saying things like, literally, suburban
housewives of America, Biden will destroy your neighborhood and your
(24:49):
American dream. People living their suburban lifestyle dream will no
longer be bothered of fine or financially hurt by having
low income housing built in your neighborhood. And the these
are literal quotes, and it’s just he’s trying to to
garner a certain kind of vote, to be sure. But
you know, we’ll get to other stuff. I mean, Trump
(25:09):
has a long history and his and his family with
he and his father of housing discrimination. But the end
result of all this is white people. You know, people
call it white flight. They left the cities, moved to
the suburbs. People that were in the city still, these
African American families in these yellow and red line communities,
we’re sort of stuck there. So the government steps in
(25:32):
to build affordable housing, which at first were racially integrated.
There were black people and white people, but then even
the lower income white people, uh fled for the suburbs. Yeah,
because wages rose. Yeah, and they left cities in an
urban communities almost entirely black. Um. Yeah. So proportionately speaking,
there was a tremendous drain of white people from the cities.
(25:57):
I’m sure it was different on a city to city based.
As a matter of fact, I know it was. There’s
not a you can’t put a whole blanket of history
over every square inch of the United States, so different
cities had different experiences. But proportionately speaking, black people have
always made up a smaller amount of the American population overall.
(26:17):
But then if you look at the you know, percentage
of black people, say in a city in nine I
think is when it peaked. For Atlanta in particular, Um,
it’s like say black or something that’s a way larger
proportion or disproportionate amount of black people living in the
city than say, um, in the suburbs. And then conversely, Chuck,
(26:38):
when you look at the suburbs and the statistics about
race or demography in the suburbs, then it really kind
of all comes home. Yeah, and you know they’re living
in the suburbs. They decide, you know, we still need
to go into the city sometimes, so we need interstates
to get us there because we like going to concerts
occasionally or seeing a professional sports team play, right, and
(27:01):
so they built these interstates, Uh, they kind of barreled
through black neighborhoods built them there they often became a
dividing line. UH. And you know, these communities were set
up to fail. They had less frequent garbage pickup, they
had inadequate funding to keep up this public housing that
they built, UM, lower access to basic utilities, and they
(27:22):
were just in no position to to succeed basically. Now.
And I’m trying to remember what episode we talked about
prow I Go Housing UM project in in St. Louis.
I think it was the Environmental Psychology episode, if I’m
not mistaken, But that was a really good example of
this of how people pointed to that people from the
outside and we’re like, look, you can’t like black people
(27:43):
can’t take care of anything. Look at the degraded state
that this housing project is in. And it’s, like you said,
like they were set up to fail through all through
like a lack of attention, a lack of funding, UM,
just a lack of basically everything UM. And it’s it’s
that kind of seem to keep perpetuating these um uh biases.
(28:07):
For example, and this is a big one that we’ll
talk about later, that white people think if black people
move into an area, their housing values are going to
go down because of stuff like that. Yeah, I mean,
that’s sort of the I guess you’d call it the
dog whistle that everyone leans on there like, hey, we
you know, we don’t mind. Uh, we’re not bigoted at all.
(28:27):
We just want to keep our housing values up. That’s right.
That that so that one and then the the um
the myth that black people are just inherently um uncredit
worthy or not credit worthy are the two things that
seem to be used the most as cover for, like
you said, post civil rights are segregation in the United States,
(28:51):
the dog whistle, like you said, yeah, I mean, and
now is when we can talk a little bit about
um gentrification, because I mean, the way housing has worked
in this country is really fascinating and really gross in
a lot of ways, but just interesting to look at
from a bird’s eye point of view. The way people
move around and what eventually happened with the cities is that, uh,
(29:16):
you know, call them what you want, yuppies or dinks.
There’s a lot of name for upwardly mobile white people.
They’re like, Hey, I want to move into the city,
I want to be closer to to the concerts. Although
this is going to be controversial, I’m gonna get a
lot of cred for this, but one of the most
annoying trends of the last like fifteen years is building
(29:37):
all these concert venues out in the suburbs. It’s so annoying.
And I know they want their concert venues out there
so they don’t have to come into the city, but
I hate it when I one of my bands plays,
you know, thirty miles out into the suburbs. I won’t go. Yeah,
it’s kind of a pain. Although we did go out.
It’s a huge Motley Crewe thanks to that was Nita Strauss. No,
(30:02):
that’s true, So that was that was worth the trip
because it was Miley Crue and Alice Cooper. I just think,
I don’t know, I think all sports stadiums and all
concerts and you should be in the city. I’m with you.
That’s definitely traditional into the city for a big day out.
You know, when they start moving museums way out in
the exurbs and I’m done. Um. But the same thing.
(30:23):
You could make the same case. When they built the
highways and everything, they just kind of built them through
black communities. That’s what they did with with the stadiums
and all that as well too. Well, no, that’s true.
You know, think about Braves. They just plunked Braves Stadium
ted Turner out just right in the middle of Mechanicsville,
which is a historically black community, and said, everybody moves
(30:45):
move aside, and don’t harass all the white people who
come down to see the game on you know, same day.
We should do I mean, I love sports, but we
should do a There’s such a problematic side to pro
sports from that too. Um, these billionaire owners is using
city money to build new stadiums when their other stadium
is just like ten years old or whatever. That is
(31:06):
definitely problematic. It’s crazy, what a crazy amount of waste
that produces a loan just that alone. Yeah, um, alright,
so where was I? All right? Uh, white dinks are
moving into the neighborhoods again in the city because they
want good Thai food, and uh, these neighborhoods become a
(31:28):
little more attractive the more white people move into, other
white people to move in, and they start moving in
and increasing numbers, and the houses are generally renovated or
improved over time or sometimes they might bulldoze you know,
a pretty decent house with good bones just to build
you know, the biggest house possible on their postage stamp
(31:48):
of a lot. It’s crazy how close they build these
mammoth houses together. I’m sure it happens everywhere. Atlanta’s got
a real problem with it. But what happens is, you know,
home user going to increase, that’s gonna raise taxes on
the other homes around them. A lot of time, those
other homes are owned by UM, longtime lower income residents,
(32:10):
most times people of color, it becomes unsustainable. UM. We
have a great, great program here in my neighborhood and
east like called Neighbor in Need. That is UH Emily
and I have four main charities that we work with
and give to every year, and Neighbor in Need is
one of them because we like to stay really locally focused.
But Neighbor in Need basically addresses this head on and
(32:33):
they you know, raise a lot of money and they
use that money to take care of these people. UM,
if they hear about a neighbor that’s like, you know,
in need, like an older African American couple who’s been
here for forty years, they’re having to pay way too
much in property taxes so they can’t afford a roof
on their house. They’ll go put a roof on their house,
or they’ll pay their power bill, um whatever. I mean.
(32:56):
It’s a really really great grassroots organization, so UM very
happy to be working with them and uh, you know,
trying to fight the sort of ills of gentrification overall. Yeah,
that’s neat because it also draws the community together to
help the longest term residents of that community rather than
that whole everybody’s on their own kind of thing, which
(33:17):
I’m sure most people who move into a community like
you know that is gentrifying probably would want to do.
They just don’t know how to do it, or they
don’t know how to contact anybody. People don’t just usually
go over to their neighbor’s house and knock on the
door and introduce themselves anymore. So that’s cool. Yeah, and
you know this is uh sometimes they are able to
sell their house for a pretty good you know, the
(33:39):
housing value does increase, so they’re able to get more
money than they might have before, which can be a
nice windfall. But I’ve also seen firsthand, literally with my neighbors, UM,
these sort of predatory home builders that come in there,
and while they think it’s probably decent money compared to
what they thought they could get, it’s still a lower
(34:00):
than what they would offer a white family. But even
if they were treated fairly and they walked away with
the big windfall from the sale, um and you know,
had a lot of money to retire on, that community
was still fractured. You know, the people who are having
to move and their neighbors who already had to move
may have lived there for generations or even you know,
(34:22):
just their whole lives and they formed a community. And
it’s not like that whole community just moves elsewhere together.
They all go to different communities, often towards the end
of their life, and it leads to alienation, isolation. Um.
It’s a that I mean, that’s a real problem. Even
even if they are being paid well for the the
houses they’re they’re being bought out of because they don’t
(34:43):
necessarily want to move, but they just can’t afford the
taxes anymore. Um. So there’s there’s that’s a big issue
with gentrification. It’s tough to get around sounds like that
neighborhood group that you’re talking about what’s the name again
that they that they’ve they’ve figured out a way or
round it. Do you know what there needs to be
dude is uh and this is chuck twenty two stuff. Okay.
(35:08):
I think if you live in a house long enough,
you shouldn’t have to pay property tax anymore. Yeah, I
think there are I mean, I have to be a lot.
Maybe it’s like twenty years or something, but that would
solve a lot of this problem. There is zero reason
why some elderly African American couple that’s been in a
home for forty years needs to be paying taxes at
(35:28):
all on that house, much less these jacked up rates. Yeah. No,
I think that’s that’s totally true. Um. Yeah, I think
there’s a if it’s not law, there’s a proposal in
Georgia to do that once you’re sixty five or something
like that. Maybe. I mean, I’m ad about property tax anyway,
just because it’s I don’t know, we pay so much
in taxes. Then you finally scrape up enough to buy
(35:50):
a place that’s your own, and the government’s then like, well,
if you’re going to have to pay tax on that,
do right? You know, I know, it’s seems unfair. Also,
you shouldn’t have to pay full price for coffee anywhere
once you reach sixty five or old agreed, especially after
three pm. Uh, All right, well, should we take a
break and then talk about the Fair Housing Act, which
(36:11):
solved everything. It totally did. It’s all great now, alright,
we’ll be right back up to this. Alright, spoiler, So
(36:41):
we ruined things. They passed the Fair Housing Act, and
racism has been solved in America. That’s right. Ninety eight
And we talked about the Fair Housing Act a little bit, UM,
and you know, it’s a good thing they passed it.
It did banned discrimination in housing practices officially, but it
just led to a little trickier way to get around
(37:03):
stuff by UM doing it on the download. Yeah, and
that is that is for if you’re studying systemic racisicism
in the United States. The passing of like the Voting
Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act UH,
and some other legislation UM during the sixties really changed
things in that no longer was the government in the
(37:27):
business of enforcing discrimination and segregation UM. And also now
you had recourse in the courts if you were discriminated
against UM. But it didn’t just a race racism in
the United States that that task of enforcing basically white
supremacy and racial discrimination and segregation and all the stuff
(37:48):
that comes along with it fell to um lesser institutions
in everyday people who carried out. And when you’re talking
about something like housing discrimination, UM, the people who now
are best able to continue enforcing segregation and discrimination in
the United States are people like lenders and real estate
(38:10):
agents and even people who are deciding where to buy
a house. Um. Everyday americans buying the house UM often
make choices that they don’t necessarily think our racist, and
they might they probably don’t think that they’re racist, but
they’re still they’re housing choices often reflect um inadvertent or
(38:32):
otherwise racial choices or choices along racial lines. Yeah, and
this you know this next bit, we’re we’re sort of
busting on real estate professionals a little bit. I have
very good friends that are real estate agents. They’re great
people for the most part. We don’t mean to just
paint everything with the big broadbrush, but the industry does
(38:54):
have a history of it, for sure. Yeah, and we
have to talk about it. So there was one in
the in the eighties, there was one practice called block
busting god um not having anything to do with video stores,
I know it was the eighties, but um literally busting
up a block. When a real estate agent would work
or sort of act as a speculator and say, either, hey,
(39:19):
you know what you know, there are some black families
that are moving into the area. You may want to
think about selling just to protect your home values before
they fall. Or they might sell to a black family
and introduce them to the area so they could then
turn around, um, buy these houses from the white residents
and then sell them to the black residents or you know,
(39:41):
hopefully black residents, but at a big mark up. Yeah,
which has insult to injury, Like they created a basically
white flight from an area just from the rumor of
black people moving in, and then they move black people
in and sell them sell to them at wildly inflated rates,
which is crazy. And I read one story to Chuck
of one of these real estate agents that was doing blockbusting.
(40:03):
They would have a black dad with the stroller walk
around the neighborhood, um like he had moved in or
was thinking of moving in or whatever, and apparently just
that was enough to get people to start to sell.
And again you’re like, you know, this is this is
terrible that real estate agents are doing it. But the
fact that it was effective really says a lot about
every day you know, white homeowners too. And also again
(40:27):
like it it doesn’t mean like that these white homeowners
hate black people like they were worried about their property values,
because it’s such an embedded myth in America that when
a black family moves into a neighborhood, they’re so bad
at taking care of their their house and their home
values that it’s going to drag the home values down
in throughout the entire neighborhood. And so everybody needed to
(40:49):
get out before that happened. That’s that’s again, that’s the
definition of systemic racism. Yeah, and you know this has
been busted up to a large degree officially, but up
until nineteen fifty, the official policy of the National Association
of Real Estate Boards UM said a realtor should never
be instrumental and introducing into a neighborhood members of any
(41:13):
race or nationality whose presence will clearly be detrimental to
property values in that neighborhood. That was like literal policy
up until nineteen fifty, and then there was a study
in two thousand six by the National Fair Housing Alliance
that said, and this is something else called steering, which
is not blockbusting, but it’s like, hey, like we want
(41:34):
to show you houses over here in this neighborhood because
we think it’s a better fit for you. Uh. And
you know here the financial instruments available to get mortgages
for you and maybe not just for everybody. And black
people historically have not given the full picture. They’re maybe
not shown white neighborhoods. Uh. And the study found that
steering occurred sent of the time when researchers posed as
(41:58):
buyers and we’re shown homes like these sort of undercover operations. Yeah,
and steering occurs, um not just you know, if you’re
if you’re a black home buyer, you’re not just going
to be shown a black neighborhoods. If you’re a white
home buyer, they’re probably not going to take you to
black neighborhoods either. So through this process of racial steering,
this is basically enforcing patterns of segregation still in the
(42:22):
United States. Yeah, there was another study by Brookings. They
found that black owned homes are undervalued by an average
of forty thou dollars. And this is one that’s controlled
by all the factors like home quality and amenities and everything. Exclamation, Yeah,
it’s forty eight grand literally because it is a home
(42:43):
owned by a black individual. When they control for amenities
where the home is the size of the house, everything
else about the house. If you compare apples to apples,
and it’s the same house owned by a white person
and the other house that’s exactly the same home by
a black person, the black person’s house is going to
be forty thousand dollars less in value just because it’s
(43:05):
owned by a black person. And that’s that’s just basically
that whole idea of um that black people drag home
values down becoming a self fulfilling prophecy, and um that
those same home values are all of that undervaluing that
same Brooking study found amounts to a loss of about
(43:27):
a hundred and fifty six billion dollars for Black Americans. Yeah,
for wealth they were not able to achieve. And uh,
you know, we talked a lot about the Great Recession
in the mortgage crisis kind of when it was going
on and shortly thereafter, Um, Black Americans back then were
likelier to receive subprime mortgages. These were the loans that
(43:47):
were really expensive to repay. They had higher fees, they
had higher interest rates, um they also had mechanisms built
in if you were a black loan owner that made
it easier for the lender to seize their collateral with
usually meant their house and so like, it makes sense
that if you are taking a greater risk lending to
somebody as the bank, you should be able to get
(44:10):
more money for it, right, But the problem is is
like subprime mortgages were doled out to black homeowners or
black home buyers at way higher rates than they were
to white home buyers. And that’s a problem in and
of itself if the if the rates are less favorable
and it’s easier for the bank to repossess the house.
But especially it proved to be a big problem during
(44:32):
the mortgage crisis when that bubble bursts, because if you
were a low income Black American, you were probably denied
a mortgage of any kind. But even if you were
a middle to high income black home buyer, you probably
got a subprime mortgage compared to say, a white buyer
(44:52):
with the same criteria that you had to offer. UM.
So that meant that when those foreclosures happened because the
bubble bursts, Black Americans, especially UM, wealthier Black Americans, were
disproportionately impacted, so that that subprime mortgage debacle erased way
more Black intergenerational wealth than it did for white people. Yeah,
(45:15):
I have my last three exclamation points. Stat during the
subprime mortgage crisis, there was a study that found black
and Latino families, because you know we’ve mentioned people of
color a few times, is not just solely African American
families affected? Um, And the study found that black and
Latino families making two hundred thousand dollars a year or more,
(45:39):
we’re still more likely to receive a subprime loan than
white families making less than thirty thousand dollars a year.
That nuts, and six point two percent of white people
with a credit score of six sixty or higher received
a subprime mortgage compared to twenty one point four percent
of black borrowers with that same credit score. So, Chuck, UM,
(46:00):
there’s a big problem with all this. And it’s kind
of like you said at the beginning, like when you’re
talking about race and especially discrimination by race. Um, people
tend to be like, especially white people tend to be like, well,
I don’t know about that. I mean, there’s a lot
of other factors involved, Like it could be anything. So
you really have to kind of prove that this is
a thing. And ever since the federal government got out
(46:22):
of discriminating on paper, um, it’s gotten a lot harder
to track. So back in the seventies, the Department of
Housing and Urban Development, they have an office of Research
and Policy. They came up with the way of testing
this to control for as many variables as possible and
just see if it’s just race that is being discriminated against.
(46:43):
And it’s called paired testing. It’s actually pretty clever from
what I understand. Yeah, that’s when you get to equally
qualified candidates to apply for homeown or to go to
a real estate agent and like look at apartments or
houses or whatever. Uh. They are trained to basically be
as identical as they can be to one another, to
(47:04):
respond to the questions in the same way, have the
same credit history, same job status, same income level, and
basically sort of be duplicates of one another except for
their skin color. Uh, they’re not working together so they
don’t even know, um, like there’s no bias there even
because they’re not like paired together, right, They’re not like,
oh they got too, I’m gonna try this with them.
Like they don’t. They don’t meet one another, they don’t
(47:26):
interact with one another. They’re just doing their thing and
they’re just trained to do it exactly the same way.
The only distinction between them is their their race. Right.
And so the Urban Institute, which is a think tank,
UM study this and they came up with kind of
four big points from this paired testing UH exercise, which
(47:47):
is UH. They found about discrimination and housing vouchers that
are intended to let low income renters choose from a
bigger pool a rental housing uh than the realtors even showed. UM,
there were fewer homes and apartments available to minorities like
we were, like I kind of mentioned earlier, like just
a smaller like no, you know, we’ll just look here. Yeah,
(48:09):
the racial steering usually results in fewer, fewer places being shown. Um.
They were steered again to primarily um, you know, neighborhoods
of their own ethnicity, and then given less information overall.
Like I mentioned about mortgage products, UM, different kinds of loans,
different kinds of ways of structuring a loan, just not
(48:31):
given that information at all. Right, Um, so the they
also found this paired testing turns up very frequently that um,
it’s not just even people of colors, not just black Americans,
but it’s people of color in general. But um, it’s
not even just down to to racial discrimination. There’s also
a lot of discrimination against people who are differently abled.
(48:53):
They actually sometimes fair worse than minorities when it comes
to housing discrimination. Paired testing is has turned that up
as well. So it’s still the upshot of all this
is that it’s still a problem and there is like
some silver lining to it. Um the I think. Uh.
That same think tank, the Urban Institute, also turned up
(49:14):
that there’s been a general decline overall. It’s not huge,
but it’s it’s noteworthy. It’s remarkable. Um of preference in
favoritism toward white white buyers over buyers of of like
minority buyers by about five percent between and two thousand.
It went from about so And there does seem to
(49:38):
be a general decline in racism or discrimination, I should say, uh,
in the United States. So that’s the good news, is
that America seems to be getting less racist. The bad
news is that America is still racist. Like, we still
have a long way to go. It’s, as the study
put the studies findings confirm a hard truth that America’s
(49:58):
long journey to end housing discrimination remains unfinished. Um. And
so there’s still a long way to go. And I
think it’s really important for everybody to realize that there’s
a long history of discriminating against people of color, but
also very specifically Black Americans, and that it’s still going
on today. And even though it’s in a slightly lesser form,
it’s very important if it’s going on at all, that
(50:21):
we we erase it. That’s right, agreed, You got anything else?
Nothing else? All right, Chuck, Well then that’s housing discrimination.
And since I said all right, Chuck, it’s time for
a listener mail. Well instead of reading a specific listener mail.
And because this episode is a little heavy, we thought
we’d have a little fun. Um. We got maybe more
(50:45):
emails than we have for any other episode in our
history down literally about Neco wavers Um. A lot of
support for the Neco for people, and a lot of
condemnation for yucking yums without giving having tried them. You
were all correct. We honor you all, and we’re gonna
Josh got some sent them to me. We’re gonna try
(51:06):
some necka wafers on the air. Listen there. I just
realized I think I made a grave mistake by not
having any water in the basement. Yeah, I just realized
this as well. Do you have a pipe to tap into?
I think we should eat the same color. Oh really? Okay,
all right, so we can kind of go, you know,
nose to nose. I’m never open one these before. Okay, exactly, already,
(51:29):
so nasty. You know, everybody was right about yucking people’s
yams in general, but also because we hadn’t tried them.
So that’s why we’re doing this. I mean, they’re just
falling apart when I opened the package. So to strike one,
I’ve got a mess on my table. What color are
we gonna do? I mean it’s hard to tell. This
looks sort of like a very pale yellow. That’s the
(51:51):
only whole one in my hand. Pale yellow. I don’t
even have that. I got white. I’ve got orange it
maybe maybe it is white, Okay, I’ll call it. Wait wait, wait, wait,
I might have a palio when I do, I do it. Okay,
apology to the people of Mesophonia, but here we go.
Oh my god, it’s just like it’s like a flatter um,
(52:18):
bigger candy heart. The conversation hart, it’s not bam like okay,
very hard, the crunches. I think what probably gets people.
I mean, the taste isn’t bad, but it’s not great. No,
they’re not great, But I mean, who’s crazy for conversation hearts,
sickos and weirdos? You know, the same goes for me. Well,
(52:40):
what’s the verdict? Would you ever buy and eat Neca
wafers after this? I will tell you what. I will
probably eat the rest of these. And I like sugar.
I like as atter fact, I’m gonna do one of
the gray ones real quick. What about you? Uh no, no,
that is not my up my alley. But I’m gonna
(53:02):
try one of those chocolates because those where I think
recommended steer clear, the dark gray ones, the liquorice ones.
They’re awful. It tastes Oh no, it is slightly different. Yeah,
I get a little hint up cocoa. I’ve come around
a little bit to the liquorice ones. At the end Wow,
I’m turning into an eco weirdo. Actually, the chocolate aren’t bad.
(53:23):
What about pink? Try pink? Well, that’s um, this is
winter green. I think people are so disgusted right now. Yeah,
this is all right. We’re literally the last two people
listening to this. Man, I think we should wrap this. Okay. Well, um,
if you want to tell us that we shouldn’t yuck
everybody’s jump, especially about something we haven’t tried, we need
(53:44):
to hear that whenever we do that. It’s totally true
and totally right. Thank you everybody who wrote him. You
can get in touch with us at Stuff podcast at
I heart radio dot calm Stuff. You should know it
is pretty action of I heart Radio. For more podcasts
for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
(54:05):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H
Older Episo
Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I’m Josh Clark,
and there’s Charles W Chuck Bryan over there, and this
is stuff you should know. Um the man oh man addition,
(00:25):
do you know what I love about this topic is
that it’s not just a bunch of like ranting about
how we think things are and how people think things are.
It’s like so studied and statistic heavy that you can
talk about how things are and then say, and here’s
(00:45):
the proof exactly, here’s a lot of data to back
it up. It’s really great. I love it when they
dovetail like this. Yeah. I get the impression, though, UM
that you when you’re talking about the studying race and
especially in America like you are, you have to back
it up with data like people are like, oh, yeah,
I don’t I don’t know about that. But um, I
want to give a shout out to actually to um
(01:08):
uh scholars both sell sociologists of race. UM Professor Villnabashi
Treatler from UC Santa Barbara and Professor Tricia Rose of
Brown University both are experts on this stuff and they
helped me out big time with this and some other
research on on racism I’ve done, um and they Dr
(01:28):
Bashi Treatler said, hey, make sure you mentioned this hashtag
we have going called site hashtag. Sorry, and I’m making
the hashtag symbol like justin Timberlake hashtag site black women
ce I t e black women. UM, and that leads
you to all sorts of good often overlooked research by
black scholars. Um, who are women that don’t always get
(01:51):
a lot of credit. So I’m glad you told me
about that one. I wanted to tell everybody else. So
when you, uh, that was a stutter when he said
so so sociologists, you didn’t mean they were just mediocre sociologists. No,
I was. I was sociologist. I could see how that
would be confusing. I was doing my impression of Phil
Collins saying sociologist so so studio. Yeah, well that’s the
(02:16):
last joke we’re gonna tell you. Oh yeah, probably. I
was warned by Dr Bashi Treatler not to do our
usual stick when we’re talking about race stuff, and I
was like, well, I mean, we we can handle ourselves.
She said. I I listened to your stuff. I listened
to the Braws episode just trust me on this. It’s like,
all right, So then that means the housing discrimination episode
(02:38):
officially starts. Now, that’s right. So that’s what we’re talking about, dude.
Housing discrimination and um uh in the United States, and
there is a very long history of housing discrimination. And
you might say, like, well, that really sucks. That sucks
that people have trouble buying a home or maybe they
get less favorable terms on their loans just because of
(02:59):
their race, and that does suck. That’s absolutely true. But
it’s even worse than that because in the United States,
one of the biggest ways of growing wealth intergenerationally, like
over the course of generations within a single family is
through a house. Yeah, I mean it’s sometimes people don’t
(03:19):
have a ton of money to invest in the stock market.
Some people think the stock market is not something to trust.
But one thing that has always been fairly reliable in
this country, you know, say, for a few moments in history,
is real estate and the idea that if you scrap
up and save enough money for a down payment for
a home, that house will eventually be worth quite a
(03:42):
bit more years later, and you can sell it and
use that extra windfall of cash to invest in the
stock market or to pass down to your kids so
they can then get in the housing market sooner than
they might have and then it just becomes a cycle
where it just builds wealth. Yeah, Like the average family
(04:02):
in America has most of their net worth tied up
in their house, and then you know, when it comes
time to sell it and the house is paid off,
that’s a lot of money. And then when you kick
the bucket, your kids get that money and maybe they
get a better house, and it just keeps growing and growing.
So if you put up barriers to housing, you’re actually
putting up barriers to passing along intergenerational wealth. And as
(04:24):
a big, big problem in America. UM Still today, I
saw a study from I think Brookings that found that,
um the median. Yeah, brooking study said that the median
net worth of a white family in America is a
hundred and seventy one thousand dollars. The median net worth
(04:48):
of a black family in America is seventeen thousand, one
hundred and fifty dollars, about a ten of what the
median is for white people. And that is largely because
of housing discriminate in the history of housing discrimination in
this country. Yeah, and as far as history goes, you know,
it started with literal racist laws where they said, if
(05:10):
you’re a black person or a black family, you cannot
live here. Um. That went on for a while, and
then those laws were sort of altered to the Jim
Crows Separate but Equal era, where they said, you know what, Um,
we’ll say things are better, but it’s really the same
effect in the end. And then they got rid of
(05:30):
those laws and said, all right, now we’ve really passed
the meaningful legislation, and now we can just racially discriminate
on the down low and very creative ways. Yeah, that’s
basically the pattern that it’s followed. Um. And what kind
of stuck out to meet Chuck is is that before
about nine hundred, before like the rise of like industrialization
(05:53):
to a really legitimate degree in the United States, like,
there wasn’t not nearly as much segregation as we saw
starting around nineteen especially in the North, because if you
had a trade or a craft in the North and
you were an African American, there’s a really good chance
that you were going to be serving white people as
well as black people, right and because you usually were
(06:16):
very closely your home was tied close to your shop,
you often lived above it if you were like a
cobbler or something like that. Um, you made live next
door to a white baker or something like that. So
the there wasn’t a lot of segregation until industrialization came
along and there was a big call for labor, which
drew a lot of African Americans, a lot of Black
(06:38):
Americans out of the South up to the north. And
all of a sudden, all of those people who were
living in integrated neighborhoods, all those white people I should say,
had had a problem with this influx of black migration
from the South to the north, and they responded with
a lot of really disgusting violence. Yeah. I mean, we’ve
talked about some of these, um race incidents and race
(07:01):
riots and race almost race wars really uh here and
there on the show, and they’re always hard to talk about.
But that was just sort of the reality of things
at the time. Um. In the nineteen thirties, the New
Deal comes along, and this is when legislation starts to
kind of kick in. When the government stepped in and said,
you know what, we think we should make it easier
(07:23):
for people to own homes. We really want to boost
home ownership because that’s a boon for the economy of
the country. And we’re going to create the home Owners
Loan Corporation, which is going to help people refinance their mortgages.
But we need some criteria here to sort of establish
a uniform way of like how to how to dole
(07:45):
out this assistance. And they reckoned, let’s let’s look at
every population of forty or more and let’s create a
color coded map that’s based on riskiness of these loans.
And they said, you know, they talked to real estate brokers,
they talk to bankers, and they said, help us out,
help us draw these boundaries, and they came up with
a one, two, three, four color graded system. Right, yeah,
(08:07):
that’s right. Because again this was like long before credit
scores were developed, so you couldn’t really look at you know,
if somebody came into your bank to ask for a loan,
you couldn’t be like, well, you’re your your credit scores this,
So I’m not gonna look at that start. I don’t
know we should do an episode on if we haven’t already.
I don’t think for sure. Um, but yeah, so the
four color codes they had were also um delineated by
(08:29):
grades Grade A, B, C, and D. Grade A was
the most desirable neighborhood. They were usually homogeneous, meaning white. Um,
there were um lots of professionals living in there. Grade
B was maybe a step down, but still largely homogeneous,
if not totally homogeneous, and they were considered still desirable.
And then it started to get into the lower grades
(08:50):
grades C and D, and C was um, I think
colored yellow on the map, right, Yeah, the first two
were green and blue, and then Grade C was rated
as declining and colored yellow and that sort of. In fact,
I think it even said infiltration of a lower grade
population in the document, which you don’t have to be
(09:13):
a genius to figure out what they were saying there.
It means people of color were moving in. And then
finally you end up with the color red Grade D,
which is least desirable. Um, very densely populated areas almost
always communities of color. Right. So um, the h O
l C created these maps, and then um, along came
(09:36):
the Federal Housing Authority and they said, well, we need
similar maps because we’re not we’re not here to help
stem the tide of foreclosures. We’re actually here to generate
new home ownership among Americans. Um, but we still have
the same issue. We got to figure out who’s credit
worthy and who’s not. So we’re going to base it
on where the people live. And they basically made identical
maps to the h O l C maps, and so
(09:58):
they probably used them. Right, there’s a lot of debate.
I don’t think anyone’s found the smoking gun yet. But
if you take an h O l C map in
an f h A map and you put them over
one another, they’re basically the same thing. And I I
it’s kind of all. It’s up for the debate still.
But the the the upshot was that because of these maps, Um,
(10:22):
if you lived in one of these red and often
yellow communities, they wouldn’t lend to you, for um, for
a new mortgage or even a second mortgage to say,
remodel your home. And they also wouldn’t assist you with
refinancing your existing mortgage, which means you’re subject to foreclosure.
And if you were in a red or yellow community,
(10:43):
you were probably um black or a person of color
or some other ethnic minority. And UM, that means that
they were shut out of this enormous housing boom that
generated a tremendous amount of prosperity immediately after the New
Deal in World War Two. As we’ll see, so African
Americans were left out of or on the fringes of
(11:04):
the New Deal anyway. And this is where we get
to shout out Francis Perkins. Perkins again, which is it’s
fun to now that we know so much about her,
to continually shout her out. But she did a lot
of work arguing in favor of inclusion for black people
in the New Deal. Um, I guess you know, sometimes successfully,
sometimes not. But at the end of the day, the
(11:25):
f h A imposed these rules through the New Deal. Uh.
Their maps were just like the UH the h O
l C. And the process of excluding these groups because
they were colored red was called redlining. That is that
like the where that whole term comes from. That’s exactly
where it comes from. So now today, any any time
you’re discriminated against, whether it’s buying insurance or anything like that, um,
(11:49):
based on your race or say your community. Um, it’s
called redlining now. But that’s where it grew out of
those h O l C maps and f A J maps. UM.
And I mean they would use terms and like their
their handbooks that like these communities had quote undesirable racial
or nationality groups in them, so you couldn’t you couldn’t
lend them any money or whatever. Um. And it was
(12:11):
I mean like this is still like a really big
problem today. Yeah, I mean back then basically and still today.
In many cases, that leaves you with a couple of
options as a person of color. You can rent uh
forever um often times back then and still now from
a white landlord who doesn’t live anywhere near that community,
(12:31):
not always, but usually, or just pay for the home
in cash, which is a stretch for anybody. Uh, it’s
it’s tough to do unless you’re like wealthy. And there
were there were, I have to say there were black
owned banks. But there was nine black own banks in
the entire United States in the thirties. So that is
a place where you could turn to if you’re lucky
enough to have one in your area. But that that
(12:53):
was not a solution to the general population for Black Americans. Yeah,
and like you said, also affected their ability to get
second mortgages, to do home improvements or to like expand
on their house and upgrade it, remodel it. So that
means that the properties are gonna deteriorate and decline over
(13:13):
the years, and it’s just it’s part of that systemic
racist cycle that is just prevalent. Yeah, because still today, eventually,
over time people from the outside looking in say, look,
black people can’t even take care of their communities. Look
at look at how their houses are. Um, just as
a result of this. That is definitely like the definition
(13:33):
of systemic racism for sure. It’s just by the way
into the structures. If you hear dogs barking, My dogs
are upstairs and they’re just very excited about this topic. Yeah,
and I don’t know what’s going on there, but they’re
not going to shut up. So let’s say we press on.
We’ll press on. Should we take a break, then press on.
We’re going to press on like some lee nails right
(13:53):
after a break. How about that? All right, it sounds good.
(14:19):
All right, we’re back and look, these things look amazing
on me. Yeah, they’re very nice. There’s a little bit
of cuticle showing. I didn’t put them right up against it,
but it’s still it’s passable. Well, I think if you
paint them just right, that’s not so noticeable. Right, fill ins,
that’s what I need. I need to get some fill ins.
So back to the topic at hand, joking is over. Um,
(14:43):
so here’s the deal. There’s, like you said, a lot
of debate whether or not or I don’t think we
said this part, whether or not the lenders actually use
these maps because these were government maps from government programs.
It’s not like they said, here, banks have these and
use these. Uh. If you look at the statistics, it
seems like they probably got their hands on some of
(15:03):
these maps. It does. And also, don’t forget the government
figured out, you know, how to draw these maps for
every city over forty people from the lenders, from the banks,
from the Yeah, so they knew this anyway, but now
the government has basically said it is okay to do this, um.
And so so yeah, if you if you look at
the outcome of this redlining, these red line maps, um,
(15:28):
it’s it’s really hard to say, no, this didn’t happen
like this definitely didn’t make it out of government hands
like forts here just great, let’s trade off. Between ninety
four and nineteen sixty two, over of all the federally
backed mortgages that were issued in the United States went
(15:49):
to white buyers. Between four and nineteen sixty two, that’s right,
because of this black ownership since then and can tinuing
today is lagged behind white homeownership in America, and seventeen
just a few short years ago, of black Americans own
their homes versus seventy of white Americans. And then the
(16:13):
other problem with redlining a community is you basically put
a pox on it. It’s cursed, because that means that
those houses are not going to get any kind of
attention UM, and so they’re going to continue to deteriorate.
And if you live in this community, as far as
a banker is concerned, you are a huge credit risk. Right,
And so still today UM sev of the neighborhoods that
(16:35):
were originally redlined in those maps are our redline UM
low income communities today, And which is I mean, that’s
pretty surprising. And I also saw that UM study found
that homes and red line neighborhoods we’re still worth less
than half of those in green neighborhoods. Yeah, and here’s
(16:57):
the one. I marked these as stats with an exclamation point,
just that’s how excited I get. But the ones that
I’m really floored by, I don’t even write anything except
for three exclamation points. I’ve got three exclamation points by
that of back federally back mortgages. For sure, that is
definitely one. Um here’s mine. If if you might say, well,
(17:18):
what about variables man and education level and income level
and stuff like that, Like you gotta factor all that in.
That’s a whole other side conversation as far as systemic
racism and being able to go to good schools and
afford a good education and get a good job and
all that. So just park that to the side. But
if you control for all those variables, college educated black
(17:40):
Americans are still less likely to own their home than
white Americans without a high school diploma. Yeah, That’s That’s
what really gets you is when they they’re like, well,
let us just control for all these factors and only
variable that remains is the race of the people applying
for a owner owning a home, and it’s still the case.
(18:02):
That’s when it’s like, well this is indisputable. Actually yeah,
and you know you can put a price on this.
Red Fen did a study um just last year in
twenty that black American families missed out on the opportunity
to accumulate an average of two hundred and twelve thousand
dollars of you know what, we’re talking about that intergenerational
(18:22):
wealth per household over the last forty years, just over
the last forty years. I mean we’re talking about stuff
that started, I mean back in the days of slavery,
but really started to take off in the nineteen thirties
with the New Deal. And this is just since nineteen
eighty they’ve lost out on that amount of money per household.
That’s nuts and still today, Chuck, here’s another one that
gets me. Black American is five times likelier to own
(18:45):
a home in a red line neighborhood than a white
American is. So this is still an issue today. Um.
So redlining these maps just set off this enormous amount
of um discrimination and I guess is all you can say.
And then all of the horrible effects that come out
of that that level of discrimination. But they weren’t the
(19:06):
only things that set it off. Um. The g I
Bill really kind of came in and said, well, hold on,
hold my beer, I want to mess things up to
what does hold my beer mean? It means that like
there’s some dude just kind of sitting there with like
his shirt, um just barely covering his gut drinking a beer,
watching somebody do something stupid and he says, hold my beer,
(19:26):
and then he doesn’t stupid. That’s right. Yeah, I thought
that’s what it meant. But you know me, I’m a
I’m an old man with a shirt barely covering his gut.
So I wasn’t quite short. You should spend more time
on Urban Dictionary. It should. I don’t drink much beer anymore, though,
although I do love it. What’s your favorite? I mean,
you know I love Tropicalia here out of Athens, Georgia.
(19:49):
The creature comfort. I still never had one. Well, you
should come over. I have a cagorator now on my deck.
Oh my god, I’m serving it up. But I don’t
know why I got it. I got it for friends
because I don’t drink. It’s on a beer. And then
the pandemic happened, and now I’ve just got a half
keg of beer sitting ship. All right. So yeah, the
(20:09):
g I Bill um this, you know, in theory, the
g I Bill is a great thing, and it has
done a lot of good. But in this case, it
did block access to home ownership among black Americans because,
uh they would come home from World War Two. The
g I Bill was passed. Banks are handing out mortgages
to veterans and they were actually allowed to discriminate based
(20:31):
on race. Yes, it’s shocking. Yeah, well it’s like whenever
you see that kind of thing, you’re like, this doesn’t
jibe with what I understand. Just look to the Dixiecrats,
the segregationists of the South, who were a very powerful
voting block and during the Jim Crow era, and they
were like to appease them and get them to vote
(20:52):
for something like a New Deal program or to not
do everything they could to block it. You had to say, okay,
well we’ll make sure that that blacks are excluded them
this that that that Black Americans won’t have access to
this amazing program. And they’d be like, okay, cool, let’s
let’s do it. That’s that’s that’s where a lot of
that came from. And I mean, it’s easy to blame
the Dixie Krats, but you can also be like, well,
(21:14):
you know, how hard did you try to go around
the Dixie Kratz too. I mean it was allowed to happen, yes, yeah,
by everybody, despite Francis perkins best efforts. Yeah, here’s the
stat For instance, in Mississippi in Uh, they build out
told out more than three thousand v A backed home
loans that year. Uh, and two of them were two
(21:37):
black veterans. Uh. Pretty startling. I don’t even know the
percentage on that point nine eight. Oh yeah, there’s got
to be a repeating something in there somewhere. Uh. And
you know this is a big deal because when World
War Two ended, they wanted a housing boom. There was
a lot of the supplies that would have gone to
home construction during the war went to the war effort.
(21:58):
So the f h A said, you know what, we
we need a housing boom here. We’re going to guarantee
construction loans to you like big construction companies out there.
And that’s when the suburbs popped up for the first time,
and that changed everything forever. Yeah. I mean, like they
they the birth of the suburbs were like a deliberate
(22:18):
program created by the federal government to to basically get
more people buying houses, to start that intergenerational wealth and
to create a middle class or to expand the middle
class dramatically. And they were able to do that partially
through just like when the f h came along and said, hey,
you know, we’re going to back these people’s loans as
(22:39):
long as they’re not in a red line neighborhood. That
says to the lenders, well, then you know that means
even if this person defaults, the government will buy the
loan from me. I’m gonna get paid back no matter what.
They did the same thing to these construction companies to
which created this huge housing boom. But there’s a caveat
to it. Just like with the v A loans that
said you can discriminate based on race for loans, even
(23:01):
though this is really important, Chuck. Even though the government
the v A would back the loan of a black
veteran just like they would back the loan of a
white veteran and you would be repaid no matter what,
you were still allowed to discriminate based on race. The
f h A, supposedly with the birth of the suburbs,
said we’re going to guarantee your construction loans, so you
(23:22):
can build suburbs, but you can’t sell two black Americans.
That’s another one that I don’t think there’s a smoking
gun that I saw, so I don’t know if that means,
like get the word out, like you can’t sell the
black people or else we’re not going to back these loans,
or if it was stated policy, that haven’t been able
to turn up. But it’s pretty well understood that the
(23:43):
f h A discriminated against black people basically moving to
the suburbs by not backing construction loans like that. Well. Yeah,
and there were neighborhood covenants in place that said that
black people cannot own homes in these neighborhoods they were
there were clauses that said you cannot resell your home
if you go to move, you can’t sell it to
(24:04):
a black family. Yeah, dude, if you want to be startled,
go search that um on Google Images. There’s like pictures
of these clauses and deeds that say you can’t sell
to anybody who’s not white, or even specifically, you can’t
sell anybody who’s black. It’s really jarring. Yeah, and it’s um,
I mean, it was sort of expressly understood that the
suburbs were being created for a reason, and that’s to
(24:26):
get white people out of the city to a place
where they could live among themselves. And it’s it’s something
that’s still going on. I mean, during the uh most
recent presidential election campaign, Donald Trump started playing praying on
these fears again. He was saying things like, literally, suburban
housewives of America, Biden will destroy your neighborhood and your
(24:49):
American dream. People living their suburban lifestyle dream will no
longer be bothered of fine or financially hurt by having
low income housing built in your neighborhood. And the these
are literal quotes, and it’s just he’s trying to to
garner a certain kind of vote, to be sure. But
you know, we’ll get to other stuff. I mean, Trump
(25:09):
has a long history and his and his family with
he and his father of housing discrimination. But the end
result of all this is white people. You know, people
call it white flight. They left the cities, moved to
the suburbs. People that were in the city still, these
African American families in these yellow and red line communities,
we’re sort of stuck there. So the government steps in
(25:32):
to build affordable housing, which at first were racially integrated.
There were black people and white people, but then even
the lower income white people, uh fled for the suburbs. Yeah,
because wages rose. Yeah, and they left cities in an
urban communities almost entirely black. Um. Yeah. So proportionately speaking,
there was a tremendous drain of white people from the cities.
(25:57):
I’m sure it was different on a city to city based.
As a matter of fact, I know it was. There’s
not a you can’t put a whole blanket of history
over every square inch of the United States, so different
cities had different experiences. But proportionately speaking, black people have
always made up a smaller amount of the American population overall.
(26:17):
But then if you look at the you know, percentage
of black people, say in a city in nine I
think is when it peaked. For Atlanta in particular, Um,
it’s like say black or something that’s a way larger
proportion or disproportionate amount of black people living in the
city than say, um, in the suburbs. And then conversely, Chuck,
(26:38):
when you look at the suburbs and the statistics about
race or demography in the suburbs, then it really kind
of all comes home. Yeah, and you know they’re living
in the suburbs. They decide, you know, we still need
to go into the city sometimes, so we need interstates
to get us there because we like going to concerts
occasionally or seeing a professional sports team play, right, and
(27:01):
so they built these interstates, Uh, they kind of barreled
through black neighborhoods built them there they often became a
dividing line. UH. And you know, these communities were set
up to fail. They had less frequent garbage pickup, they
had inadequate funding to keep up this public housing that
they built, UM, lower access to basic utilities, and they
(27:22):
were just in no position to to succeed basically. Now.
And I’m trying to remember what episode we talked about
prow I Go Housing UM project in in St. Louis.
I think it was the Environmental Psychology episode, if I’m
not mistaken, But that was a really good example of
this of how people pointed to that people from the
outside and we’re like, look, you can’t like black people
(27:43):
can’t take care of anything. Look at the degraded state
that this housing project is in. And it’s, like you said,
like they were set up to fail through all through
like a lack of attention, a lack of funding, UM,
just a lack of basically everything UM. And it’s it’s
that kind of seem to keep perpetuating these um uh biases.
(28:07):
For example, and this is a big one that we’ll
talk about later, that white people think if black people
move into an area, their housing values are going to
go down because of stuff like that. Yeah, I mean,
that’s sort of the I guess you’d call it the
dog whistle that everyone leans on there like, hey, we
you know, we don’t mind. Uh, we’re not bigoted at all.
(28:27):
We just want to keep our housing values up. That’s right.
That that so that one and then the the um
the myth that black people are just inherently um uncredit
worthy or not credit worthy are the two things that
seem to be used the most as cover for, like
you said, post civil rights are segregation in the United States,
(28:51):
the dog whistle, like you said, yeah, I mean, and
now is when we can talk a little bit about
um gentrification, because I mean, the way housing has worked
in this country is really fascinating and really gross in
a lot of ways, but just interesting to look at
from a bird’s eye point of view. The way people
move around and what eventually happened with the cities is that, uh,
(29:16):
you know, call them what you want, yuppies or dinks.
There’s a lot of name for upwardly mobile white people.
They’re like, Hey, I want to move into the city,
I want to be closer to to the concerts. Although
this is going to be controversial, I’m gonna get a
lot of cred for this, but one of the most
annoying trends of the last like fifteen years is building
(29:37):
all these concert venues out in the suburbs. It’s so annoying.
And I know they want their concert venues out there
so they don’t have to come into the city, but
I hate it when I one of my bands plays,
you know, thirty miles out into the suburbs. I won’t go. Yeah,
it’s kind of a pain. Although we did go out.
It’s a huge Motley Crewe thanks to that was Nita Strauss. No,
(30:02):
that’s true, So that was that was worth the trip
because it was Miley Crue and Alice Cooper. I just think,
I don’t know, I think all sports stadiums and all
concerts and you should be in the city. I’m with you.
That’s definitely traditional into the city for a big day out.
You know, when they start moving museums way out in
the exurbs and I’m done. Um. But the same thing.
(30:23):
You could make the same case. When they built the
highways and everything, they just kind of built them through
black communities. That’s what they did with with the stadiums
and all that as well too. Well, no, that’s true.
You know, think about Braves. They just plunked Braves Stadium
ted Turner out just right in the middle of Mechanicsville,
which is a historically black community, and said, everybody moves
(30:45):
move aside, and don’t harass all the white people who
come down to see the game on you know, same day.
We should do I mean, I love sports, but we
should do a There’s such a problematic side to pro
sports from that too. Um, these billionaire owners is using
city money to build new stadiums when their other stadium
is just like ten years old or whatever. That is
(31:06):
definitely problematic. It’s crazy, what a crazy amount of waste
that produces a loan just that alone. Yeah, um, alright,
so where was I? All right? Uh, white dinks are
moving into the neighborhoods again in the city because they
want good Thai food, and uh, these neighborhoods become a
(31:28):
little more attractive the more white people move into, other
white people to move in, and they start moving in
and increasing numbers, and the houses are generally renovated or
improved over time or sometimes they might bulldoze you know,
a pretty decent house with good bones just to build
you know, the biggest house possible on their postage stamp
(31:48):
of a lot. It’s crazy how close they build these
mammoth houses together. I’m sure it happens everywhere. Atlanta’s got
a real problem with it. But what happens is, you know,
home user going to increase, that’s gonna raise taxes on
the other homes around them. A lot of time, those
other homes are owned by UM, longtime lower income residents,
(32:10):
most times people of color, it becomes unsustainable. UM. We
have a great, great program here in my neighborhood and
east like called Neighbor in Need. That is UH Emily
and I have four main charities that we work with
and give to every year, and Neighbor in Need is
one of them because we like to stay really locally focused.
But Neighbor in Need basically addresses this head on and
(32:33):
they you know, raise a lot of money and they
use that money to take care of these people. UM,
if they hear about a neighbor that’s like, you know,
in need, like an older African American couple who’s been
here for forty years, they’re having to pay way too
much in property taxes so they can’t afford a roof
on their house. They’ll go put a roof on their house,
or they’ll pay their power bill, um whatever. I mean.
(32:56):
It’s a really really great grassroots organization, so UM very
happy to be working with them and uh, you know,
trying to fight the sort of ills of gentrification overall. Yeah,
that’s neat because it also draws the community together to
help the longest term residents of that community rather than
that whole everybody’s on their own kind of thing, which
(33:17):
I’m sure most people who move into a community like
you know that is gentrifying probably would want to do.
They just don’t know how to do it, or they
don’t know how to contact anybody. People don’t just usually
go over to their neighbor’s house and knock on the
door and introduce themselves anymore. So that’s cool. Yeah, and
you know this is uh sometimes they are able to
sell their house for a pretty good you know, the
(33:39):
housing value does increase, so they’re able to get more
money than they might have before, which can be a
nice windfall. But I’ve also seen firsthand, literally with my neighbors, UM,
these sort of predatory home builders that come in there,
and while they think it’s probably decent money compared to
what they thought they could get, it’s still a lower
(34:00):
than what they would offer a white family. But even
if they were treated fairly and they walked away with
the big windfall from the sale, um and you know,
had a lot of money to retire on, that community
was still fractured. You know, the people who are having
to move and their neighbors who already had to move
may have lived there for generations or even you know,
(34:22):
just their whole lives and they formed a community. And
it’s not like that whole community just moves elsewhere together.
They all go to different communities, often towards the end
of their life, and it leads to alienation, isolation. Um.
It’s a that I mean, that’s a real problem. Even
even if they are being paid well for the the
houses they’re they’re being bought out of because they don’t
(34:43):
necessarily want to move, but they just can’t afford the
taxes anymore. Um. So there’s there’s that’s a big issue
with gentrification. It’s tough to get around sounds like that
neighborhood group that you’re talking about what’s the name again
that they that they’ve they’ve figured out a way or
round it. Do you know what there needs to be
dude is uh and this is chuck twenty two stuff. Okay.
(35:08):
I think if you live in a house long enough,
you shouldn’t have to pay property tax anymore. Yeah, I
think there are I mean, I have to be a lot.
Maybe it’s like twenty years or something, but that would
solve a lot of this problem. There is zero reason
why some elderly African American couple that’s been in a
home for forty years needs to be paying taxes at
(35:28):
all on that house, much less these jacked up rates. Yeah. No,
I think that’s that’s totally true. Um. Yeah, I think
there’s a if it’s not law, there’s a proposal in
Georgia to do that once you’re sixty five or something
like that. Maybe. I mean, I’m ad about property tax anyway,
just because it’s I don’t know, we pay so much
in taxes. Then you finally scrape up enough to buy
(35:50):
a place that’s your own, and the government’s then like, well,
if you’re going to have to pay tax on that,
do right? You know, I know, it’s seems unfair. Also,
you shouldn’t have to pay full price for coffee anywhere
once you reach sixty five or old agreed, especially after
three pm. Uh, All right, well, should we take a
break and then talk about the Fair Housing Act, which
(36:11):
solved everything. It totally did. It’s all great now, alright,
we’ll be right back up to this. Alright, spoiler, So
(36:41):
we ruined things. They passed the Fair Housing Act, and
racism has been solved in America. That’s right. Ninety eight
And we talked about the Fair Housing Act a little bit, UM,
and you know, it’s a good thing they passed it.
It did banned discrimination in housing practices officially, but it
just led to a little trickier way to get around
(37:03):
stuff by UM doing it on the download. Yeah, and
that is that is for if you’re studying systemic racisicism
in the United States. The passing of like the Voting
Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act UH,
and some other legislation UM during the sixties really changed
things in that no longer was the government in the
(37:27):
business of enforcing discrimination and segregation UM. And also now
you had recourse in the courts if you were discriminated
against UM. But it didn’t just a race racism in
the United States that that task of enforcing basically white
supremacy and racial discrimination and segregation and all the stuff
(37:48):
that comes along with it fell to um lesser institutions
in everyday people who carried out. And when you’re talking
about something like housing discrimination, UM, the people who now
are best able to continue enforcing segregation and discrimination in
the United States are people like lenders and real estate
(38:10):
agents and even people who are deciding where to buy
a house. Um. Everyday americans buying the house UM often
make choices that they don’t necessarily think our racist, and
they might they probably don’t think that they’re racist, but
they’re still they’re housing choices often reflect um inadvertent or
(38:32):
otherwise racial choices or choices along racial lines. Yeah, and
this you know this next bit, we’re we’re sort of
busting on real estate professionals a little bit. I have
very good friends that are real estate agents. They’re great
people for the most part. We don’t mean to just
paint everything with the big broadbrush, but the industry does
(38:54):
have a history of it, for sure. Yeah, and we
have to talk about it. So there was one in
the in the eighties, there was one practice called block
busting god um not having anything to do with video stores,
I know it was the eighties, but um literally busting
up a block. When a real estate agent would work
or sort of act as a speculator and say, either, hey,
(39:19):
you know what you know, there are some black families
that are moving into the area. You may want to
think about selling just to protect your home values before
they fall. Or they might sell to a black family
and introduce them to the area so they could then
turn around, um, buy these houses from the white residents
and then sell them to the black residents or you know,
(39:41):
hopefully black residents, but at a big mark up. Yeah,
which has insult to injury, Like they created a basically
white flight from an area just from the rumor of
black people moving in, and then they move black people
in and sell them sell to them at wildly inflated rates,
which is crazy. And I read one story to Chuck
of one of these real estate agents that was doing blockbusting.
(40:03):
They would have a black dad with the stroller walk
around the neighborhood, um like he had moved in or
was thinking of moving in or whatever, and apparently just
that was enough to get people to start to sell.
And again you’re like, you know, this is this is
terrible that real estate agents are doing it. But the
fact that it was effective really says a lot about
every day you know, white homeowners too. And also again
(40:27):
like it it doesn’t mean like that these white homeowners
hate black people like they were worried about their property values,
because it’s such an embedded myth in America that when
a black family moves into a neighborhood, they’re so bad
at taking care of their their house and their home
values that it’s going to drag the home values down
in throughout the entire neighborhood. And so everybody needed to
(40:49):
get out before that happened. That’s that’s again, that’s the
definition of systemic racism. Yeah, and you know this has
been busted up to a large degree officially, but up
until nineteen fifty, the official policy of the National Association
of Real Estate Boards UM said a realtor should never
be instrumental and introducing into a neighborhood members of any
(41:13):
race or nationality whose presence will clearly be detrimental to
property values in that neighborhood. That was like literal policy
up until nineteen fifty, and then there was a study
in two thousand six by the National Fair Housing Alliance
that said, and this is something else called steering, which
is not blockbusting, but it’s like, hey, like we want
(41:34):
to show you houses over here in this neighborhood because
we think it’s a better fit for you. Uh. And
you know here the financial instruments available to get mortgages
for you and maybe not just for everybody. And black
people historically have not given the full picture. They’re maybe
not shown white neighborhoods. Uh. And the study found that
steering occurred sent of the time when researchers posed as
(41:58):
buyers and we’re shown homes like these sort of undercover operations. Yeah,
and steering occurs, um not just you know, if you’re
if you’re a black home buyer, you’re not just going
to be shown a black neighborhoods. If you’re a white
home buyer, they’re probably not going to take you to
black neighborhoods either. So through this process of racial steering,
this is basically enforcing patterns of segregation still in the
(42:22):
United States. Yeah, there was another study by Brookings. They
found that black owned homes are undervalued by an average
of forty thou dollars. And this is one that’s controlled
by all the factors like home quality and amenities and everything. Exclamation, Yeah,
it’s forty eight grand literally because it is a home
(42:43):
owned by a black individual. When they control for amenities
where the home is the size of the house, everything
else about the house. If you compare apples to apples,
and it’s the same house owned by a white person
and the other house that’s exactly the same home by
a black person, the black person’s house is going to
be forty thousand dollars less in value just because it’s
(43:05):
owned by a black person. And that’s that’s just basically
that whole idea of um that black people drag home
values down becoming a self fulfilling prophecy, and um that
those same home values are all of that undervaluing that
same Brooking study found amounts to a loss of about
(43:27):
a hundred and fifty six billion dollars for Black Americans. Yeah,
for wealth they were not able to achieve. And uh,
you know, we talked a lot about the Great Recession
in the mortgage crisis kind of when it was going
on and shortly thereafter, Um, Black Americans back then were
likelier to receive subprime mortgages. These were the loans that
(43:47):
were really expensive to repay. They had higher fees, they
had higher interest rates, um they also had mechanisms built
in if you were a black loan owner that made
it easier for the lender to seize their collateral with
usually meant their house and so like, it makes sense
that if you are taking a greater risk lending to
somebody as the bank, you should be able to get
(44:10):
more money for it, right, But the problem is is
like subprime mortgages were doled out to black homeowners or
black home buyers at way higher rates than they were
to white home buyers. And that’s a problem in and
of itself if the if the rates are less favorable
and it’s easier for the bank to repossess the house.
But especially it proved to be a big problem during
(44:32):
the mortgage crisis when that bubble bursts, because if you
were a low income Black American, you were probably denied
a mortgage of any kind. But even if you were
a middle to high income black home buyer, you probably
got a subprime mortgage compared to say, a white buyer
(44:52):
with the same criteria that you had to offer. UM.
So that meant that when those foreclosures happened because the
bubble bursts, Black Americans, especially UM, wealthier Black Americans, were
disproportionately impacted, so that that subprime mortgage debacle erased way
more Black intergenerational wealth than it did for white people. Yeah,
(45:15):
I have my last three exclamation points. Stat during the
subprime mortgage crisis, there was a study that found black
and Latino families, because you know we’ve mentioned people of
color a few times, is not just solely African American
families affected? Um, And the study found that black and
Latino families making two hundred thousand dollars a year or more,
(45:39):
we’re still more likely to receive a subprime loan than
white families making less than thirty thousand dollars a year.
That nuts, and six point two percent of white people
with a credit score of six sixty or higher received
a subprime mortgage compared to twenty one point four percent
of black borrowers with that same credit score. So, Chuck, UM,
(46:00):
there’s a big problem with all this. And it’s kind
of like you said at the beginning, like when you’re
talking about race and especially discrimination by race. Um, people
tend to be like, especially white people tend to be like, well,
I don’t know about that. I mean, there’s a lot
of other factors involved, Like it could be anything. So
you really have to kind of prove that this is
a thing. And ever since the federal government got out
(46:22):
of discriminating on paper, um, it’s gotten a lot harder
to track. So back in the seventies, the Department of
Housing and Urban Development, they have an office of Research
and Policy. They came up with the way of testing
this to control for as many variables as possible and
just see if it’s just race that is being discriminated against.
(46:43):
And it’s called paired testing. It’s actually pretty clever from
what I understand. Yeah, that’s when you get to equally
qualified candidates to apply for homeown or to go to
a real estate agent and like look at apartments or
houses or whatever. Uh. They are trained to basically be
as identical as they can be to one another, to
(47:04):
respond to the questions in the same way, have the
same credit history, same job status, same income level, and
basically sort of be duplicates of one another except for
their skin color. Uh, they’re not working together so they
don’t even know, um, like there’s no bias there even
because they’re not like paired together, right, They’re not like,
oh they got too, I’m gonna try this with them.
Like they don’t. They don’t meet one another, they don’t
(47:26):
interact with one another. They’re just doing their thing and
they’re just trained to do it exactly the same way.
The only distinction between them is their their race. Right.
And so the Urban Institute, which is a think tank,
UM study this and they came up with kind of
four big points from this paired testing UH exercise, which
(47:47):
is UH. They found about discrimination and housing vouchers that
are intended to let low income renters choose from a
bigger pool a rental housing uh than the realtors even showed. UM,
there were fewer homes and apartments available to minorities like
we were, like I kind of mentioned earlier, like just
a smaller like no, you know, we’ll just look here. Yeah,
(48:09):
the racial steering usually results in fewer, fewer places being shown. Um.
They were steered again to primarily um, you know, neighborhoods
of their own ethnicity, and then given less information overall.
Like I mentioned about mortgage products, UM, different kinds of loans,
different kinds of ways of structuring a loan, just not
(48:31):
given that information at all. Right, Um, so the they
also found this paired testing turns up very frequently that um,
it’s not just even people of colors, not just black Americans,
but it’s people of color in general. But um, it’s
not even just down to to racial discrimination. There’s also
a lot of discrimination against people who are differently abled.
(48:53):
They actually sometimes fair worse than minorities when it comes
to housing discrimination. Paired testing is has turned that up
as well. So it’s still the upshot of all this
is that it’s still a problem and there is like
some silver lining to it. Um the I think. Uh.
That same think tank, the Urban Institute, also turned up
(49:14):
that there’s been a general decline overall. It’s not huge,
but it’s it’s noteworthy. It’s remarkable. Um of preference in
favoritism toward white white buyers over buyers of of like
minority buyers by about five percent between and two thousand.
It went from about so And there does seem to
(49:38):
be a general decline in racism or discrimination, I should say, uh,
in the United States. So that’s the good news, is
that America seems to be getting less racist. The bad
news is that America is still racist. Like, we still
have a long way to go. It’s, as the study
put the studies findings confirm a hard truth that America’s
(49:58):
long journey to end housing discrimination remains unfinished. Um. And
so there’s still a long way to go. And I
think it’s really important for everybody to realize that there’s
a long history of discriminating against people of color, but
also very specifically Black Americans, and that it’s still going
on today. And even though it’s in a slightly lesser form,
it’s very important if it’s going on at all, that
(50:21):
we we erase it. That’s right, agreed, You got anything else?
Nothing else? All right, Chuck, Well then that’s housing discrimination.
And since I said all right, Chuck, it’s time for
a listener mail. Well instead of reading a specific listener mail.
And because this episode is a little heavy, we thought
we’d have a little fun. Um. We got maybe more
(50:45):
emails than we have for any other episode in our
history down literally about Neco wavers Um. A lot of
support for the Neco for people, and a lot of
condemnation for yucking yums without giving having tried them. You
were all correct. We honor you all, and we’re gonna
Josh got some sent them to me. We’re gonna try
(51:06):
some necka wafers on the air. Listen there. I just
realized I think I made a grave mistake by not
having any water in the basement. Yeah, I just realized
this as well. Do you have a pipe to tap into?
I think we should eat the same color. Oh really? Okay,
all right, so we can kind of go, you know,
nose to nose. I’m never open one these before. Okay, exactly, already,
(51:29):
so nasty. You know, everybody was right about yucking people’s
yams in general, but also because we hadn’t tried them.
So that’s why we’re doing this. I mean, they’re just
falling apart when I opened the package. So to strike one,
I’ve got a mess on my table. What color are
we gonna do? I mean it’s hard to tell. This
looks sort of like a very pale yellow. That’s the
(51:51):
only whole one in my hand. Pale yellow. I don’t
even have that. I got white. I’ve got orange it
maybe maybe it is white, Okay, I’ll call it. Wait wait, wait, wait,
I might have a palio when I do, I do it. Okay,
apology to the people of Mesophonia, but here we go.
Oh my god, it’s just like it’s like a flatter um,
(52:18):
bigger candy heart. The conversation hart, it’s not bam like okay,
very hard, the crunches. I think what probably gets people.
I mean, the taste isn’t bad, but it’s not great. No,
they’re not great, But I mean, who’s crazy for conversation hearts,
sickos and weirdos? You know, the same goes for me. Well,
(52:40):
what’s the verdict? Would you ever buy and eat Neca
wafers after this? I will tell you what. I will
probably eat the rest of these. And I like sugar.
I like as atter fact, I’m gonna do one of
the gray ones real quick. What about you? Uh no, no,
that is not my up my alley. But I’m gonna
(53:02):
try one of those chocolates because those where I think
recommended steer clear, the dark gray ones, the liquorice ones.
They’re awful. It tastes Oh no, it is slightly different. Yeah,
I get a little hint up cocoa. I’ve come around
a little bit to the liquorice ones. At the end Wow,
I’m turning into an eco weirdo. Actually, the chocolate aren’t bad.
(53:23):
What about pink? Try pink? Well, that’s um, this is
winter green. I think people are so disgusted right now. Yeah,
this is all right. We’re literally the last two people
listening to this. Man, I think we should wrap this. Okay. Well, um,
if you want to tell us that we shouldn’t yuck
everybody’s jump, especially about something we haven’t tried, we need
(53:44):
to hear that whenever we do that. It’s totally true
and totally right. Thank you everybody who wrote him. You
can get in touch with us at Stuff podcast at
I heart radio dot calm Stuff. You should know it
is pretty action of I heart Radio. For more podcasts
for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
(54:05):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H
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From Redlining to Inclusive Planning
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Released: 2024
Series: Urban Planning Foundations
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How Housing Discrimination Works
Duration: 00:54:14
Released: 2021
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Owning a home in the US is a way to pass wealth down from one generation to the next and lift families into a comfortable life down the road. But there have been barriers to buying homes that Black Americans have faced from the time of slavery to today. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcript
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I’m Josh Clark,
and there’s Charles W Chuck Bryan over there, and this
is stuff you should know. Um the man oh man addition,
(00:25):
do you know what I love about this topic is
that it’s not just a bunch of like ranting about
how we think things are and how people think things are.
It’s like so studied and statistic heavy that you can
talk about how things are and then say, and here’s
(00:45):
the proof exactly, here’s a lot of data to back
it up. It’s really great. I love it when they
dovetail like this. Yeah. I get the impression, though, UM
that you when you’re talking about the studying race and
especially in America like you are, you have to back
it up with data like people are like, oh, yeah,
I don’t I don’t know about that. But um, I
want to give a shout out to actually to um
(01:08):
uh scholars both sell sociologists of race. UM Professor Villnabashi
Treatler from UC Santa Barbara and Professor Tricia Rose of
Brown University both are experts on this stuff and they
helped me out big time with this and some other
research on on racism I’ve done, um and they Dr
(01:28):
Bashi Treatler said, hey, make sure you mentioned this hashtag
we have going called site hashtag. Sorry, and I’m making
the hashtag symbol like justin Timberlake hashtag site black women
ce I t e black women. UM, and that leads
you to all sorts of good often overlooked research by
black scholars. Um, who are women that don’t always get
(01:51):
a lot of credit. So I’m glad you told me
about that one. I wanted to tell everybody else. So
when you, uh, that was a stutter when he said
so so sociologists, you didn’t mean they were just mediocre sociologists. No,
I was. I was sociologist. I could see how that
would be confusing. I was doing my impression of Phil
Collins saying sociologist so so studio. Yeah, well that’s the
(02:16):
last joke we’re gonna tell you. Oh yeah, probably. I
was warned by Dr Bashi Treatler not to do our
usual stick when we’re talking about race stuff, and I
was like, well, I mean, we we can handle ourselves.
She said. I I listened to your stuff. I listened
to the Braws episode just trust me on this. It’s like,
all right, So then that means the housing discrimination episode
(02:38):
officially starts. Now, that’s right. So that’s what we’re talking about, dude.
Housing discrimination and um uh in the United States, and
there is a very long history of housing discrimination. And
you might say, like, well, that really sucks. That sucks
that people have trouble buying a home or maybe they
get less favorable terms on their loans just because of
(02:59):
their race, and that does suck. That’s absolutely true. But
it’s even worse than that because in the United States,
one of the biggest ways of growing wealth intergenerationally, like
over the course of generations within a single family is
through a house. Yeah, I mean it’s sometimes people don’t
(03:19):
have a ton of money to invest in the stock market.
Some people think the stock market is not something to trust.
But one thing that has always been fairly reliable in
this country, you know, say, for a few moments in history,
is real estate and the idea that if you scrap
up and save enough money for a down payment for
a home, that house will eventually be worth quite a
(03:42):
bit more years later, and you can sell it and
use that extra windfall of cash to invest in the
stock market or to pass down to your kids so
they can then get in the housing market sooner than
they might have and then it just becomes a cycle
where it just builds wealth. Yeah, Like the average family
(04:02):
in America has most of their net worth tied up
in their house, and then you know, when it comes
time to sell it and the house is paid off,
that’s a lot of money. And then when you kick
the bucket, your kids get that money and maybe they
get a better house, and it just keeps growing and growing.
So if you put up barriers to housing, you’re actually
putting up barriers to passing along intergenerational wealth. And as
(04:24):
a big, big problem in America. UM Still today, I
saw a study from I think Brookings that found that,
um the median. Yeah, brooking study said that the median
net worth of a white family in America is a
hundred and seventy one thousand dollars. The median net worth
(04:48):
of a black family in America is seventeen thousand, one
hundred and fifty dollars, about a ten of what the
median is for white people. And that is largely because
of housing discriminate in the history of housing discrimination in
this country. Yeah, and as far as history goes, you know,
it started with literal racist laws where they said, if
(05:10):
you’re a black person or a black family, you cannot
live here. Um. That went on for a while, and
then those laws were sort of altered to the Jim
Crows Separate but Equal era, where they said, you know what, Um,
we’ll say things are better, but it’s really the same
effect in the end. And then they got rid of
(05:30):
those laws and said, all right, now we’ve really passed
the meaningful legislation, and now we can just racially discriminate
on the down low and very creative ways. Yeah, that’s
basically the pattern that it’s followed. Um. And what kind
of stuck out to meet Chuck is is that before
about nine hundred, before like the rise of like industrialization
(05:53):
to a really legitimate degree in the United States, like,
there wasn’t not nearly as much segregation as we saw
starting around nineteen especially in the North, because if you
had a trade or a craft in the North and
you were an African American, there’s a really good chance
that you were going to be serving white people as
well as black people, right and because you usually were
(06:16):
very closely your home was tied close to your shop,
you often lived above it if you were like a
cobbler or something like that. Um, you made live next
door to a white baker or something like that. So
the there wasn’t a lot of segregation until industrialization came
along and there was a big call for labor, which
drew a lot of African Americans, a lot of Black
(06:38):
Americans out of the South up to the north. And
all of a sudden, all of those people who were
living in integrated neighborhoods, all those white people I should say,
had had a problem with this influx of black migration
from the South to the north, and they responded with
a lot of really disgusting violence. Yeah. I mean, we’ve
talked about some of these, um race incidents and race
(07:01):
riots and race almost race wars really uh here and
there on the show, and they’re always hard to talk about.
But that was just sort of the reality of things
at the time. Um. In the nineteen thirties, the New
Deal comes along, and this is when legislation starts to
kind of kick in. When the government stepped in and said,
you know what, we think we should make it easier
(07:23):
for people to own homes. We really want to boost
home ownership because that’s a boon for the economy of
the country. And we’re going to create the home Owners
Loan Corporation, which is going to help people refinance their mortgages.
But we need some criteria here to sort of establish
a uniform way of like how to how to dole
(07:45):
out this assistance. And they reckoned, let’s let’s look at
every population of forty or more and let’s create a
color coded map that’s based on riskiness of these loans.
And they said, you know, they talked to real estate brokers,
they talk to bankers, and they said, help us out,
help us draw these boundaries, and they came up with
a one, two, three, four color graded system. Right, yeah,
(08:07):
that’s right. Because again this was like long before credit
scores were developed, so you couldn’t really look at you know,
if somebody came into your bank to ask for a loan,
you couldn’t be like, well, you’re your your credit scores this,
So I’m not gonna look at that start. I don’t
know we should do an episode on if we haven’t already.
I don’t think for sure. Um, but yeah, so the
four color codes they had were also um delineated by
(08:29):
grades Grade A, B, C, and D. Grade A was
the most desirable neighborhood. They were usually homogeneous, meaning white. Um,
there were um lots of professionals living in there. Grade
B was maybe a step down, but still largely homogeneous,
if not totally homogeneous, and they were considered still desirable.
And then it started to get into the lower grades
(08:50):
grades C and D, and C was um, I think
colored yellow on the map, right, Yeah, the first two
were green and blue, and then Grade C was rated
as declining and colored yellow and that sort of. In fact,
I think it even said infiltration of a lower grade
population in the document, which you don’t have to be
(09:13):
a genius to figure out what they were saying there.
It means people of color were moving in. And then
finally you end up with the color red Grade D,
which is least desirable. Um, very densely populated areas almost
always communities of color. Right. So um, the h O
l C created these maps, and then um, along came
(09:36):
the Federal Housing Authority and they said, well, we need
similar maps because we’re not we’re not here to help
stem the tide of foreclosures. We’re actually here to generate
new home ownership among Americans. Um, but we still have
the same issue. We got to figure out who’s credit
worthy and who’s not. So we’re going to base it
on where the people live. And they basically made identical
maps to the h O l C maps, and so
(09:58):
they probably used them. Right, there’s a lot of debate.
I don’t think anyone’s found the smoking gun yet. But
if you take an h O l C map in
an f h A map and you put them over
one another, they’re basically the same thing. And I I
it’s kind of all. It’s up for the debate still.
But the the the upshot was that because of these maps, Um,
(10:22):
if you lived in one of these red and often
yellow communities, they wouldn’t lend to you, for um, for
a new mortgage or even a second mortgage to say,
remodel your home. And they also wouldn’t assist you with
refinancing your existing mortgage, which means you’re subject to foreclosure.
And if you were in a red or yellow community,
(10:43):
you were probably um black or a person of color
or some other ethnic minority. And UM, that means that
they were shut out of this enormous housing boom that
generated a tremendous amount of prosperity immediately after the New
Deal in World War Two. As we’ll see, so African
Americans were left out of or on the fringes of
(11:04):
the New Deal anyway. And this is where we get
to shout out Francis Perkins. Perkins again, which is it’s
fun to now that we know so much about her,
to continually shout her out. But she did a lot
of work arguing in favor of inclusion for black people
in the New Deal. Um, I guess you know, sometimes successfully,
sometimes not. But at the end of the day, the
(11:25):
f h A imposed these rules through the New Deal. Uh.
Their maps were just like the UH the h O
l C. And the process of excluding these groups because
they were colored red was called redlining. That is that
like the where that whole term comes from. That’s exactly
where it comes from. So now today, any any time
you’re discriminated against, whether it’s buying insurance or anything like that, um,
(11:49):
based on your race or say your community. Um, it’s
called redlining now. But that’s where it grew out of
those h O l C maps and f A J maps. UM.
And I mean they would use terms and like their
their handbooks that like these communities had quote undesirable racial
or nationality groups in them, so you couldn’t you couldn’t
lend them any money or whatever. Um. And it was
(12:11):
I mean like this is still like a really big
problem today. Yeah, I mean back then basically and still today.
In many cases, that leaves you with a couple of
options as a person of color. You can rent uh
forever um often times back then and still now from
a white landlord who doesn’t live anywhere near that community,
(12:31):
not always, but usually, or just pay for the home
in cash, which is a stretch for anybody. Uh, it’s
it’s tough to do unless you’re like wealthy. And there
were there were, I have to say there were black
owned banks. But there was nine black own banks in
the entire United States in the thirties. So that is
a place where you could turn to if you’re lucky
enough to have one in your area. But that that
(12:53):
was not a solution to the general population for Black Americans. Yeah,
and like you said, also affected their ability to get
second mortgages, to do home improvements or to like expand
on their house and upgrade it, remodel it. So that
means that the properties are gonna deteriorate and decline over
(13:13):
the years, and it’s just it’s part of that systemic
racist cycle that is just prevalent. Yeah, because still today, eventually,
over time people from the outside looking in say, look,
black people can’t even take care of their communities. Look
at look at how their houses are. Um, just as
a result of this. That is definitely like the definition
(13:33):
of systemic racism for sure. It’s just by the way
into the structures. If you hear dogs barking, My dogs
are upstairs and they’re just very excited about this topic. Yeah,
and I don’t know what’s going on there, but they’re
not going to shut up. So let’s say we press on.
We’ll press on. Should we take a break, then press on.
We’re going to press on like some lee nails right
(13:53):
after a break. How about that? All right, it sounds good.
(14:19):
All right, we’re back and look, these things look amazing
on me. Yeah, they’re very nice. There’s a little bit
of cuticle showing. I didn’t put them right up against it,
but it’s still it’s passable. Well, I think if you
paint them just right, that’s not so noticeable. Right, fill ins,
that’s what I need. I need to get some fill ins.
So back to the topic at hand, joking is over. Um,
(14:43):
so here’s the deal. There’s, like you said, a lot
of debate whether or not or I don’t think we
said this part, whether or not the lenders actually use
these maps because these were government maps from government programs.
It’s not like they said, here, banks have these and
use these. Uh. If you look at the statistics, it
seems like they probably got their hands on some of
(15:03):
these maps. It does. And also, don’t forget the government
figured out, you know, how to draw these maps for
every city over forty people from the lenders, from the banks,
from the Yeah, so they knew this anyway, but now
the government has basically said it is okay to do this, um.
And so so yeah, if you if you look at
the outcome of this redlining, these red line maps, um,
(15:28):
it’s it’s really hard to say, no, this didn’t happen
like this definitely didn’t make it out of government hands
like forts here just great, let’s trade off. Between ninety
four and nineteen sixty two, over of all the federally
backed mortgages that were issued in the United States went
(15:49):
to white buyers. Between four and nineteen sixty two, that’s right,
because of this black ownership since then and can tinuing
today is lagged behind white homeownership in America, and seventeen
just a few short years ago, of black Americans own
their homes versus seventy of white Americans. And then the
(16:13):
other problem with redlining a community is you basically put
a pox on it. It’s cursed, because that means that
those houses are not going to get any kind of
attention UM, and so they’re going to continue to deteriorate.
And if you live in this community, as far as
a banker is concerned, you are a huge credit risk. Right,
And so still today UM sev of the neighborhoods that
(16:35):
were originally redlined in those maps are our redline UM
low income communities today, And which is I mean, that’s
pretty surprising. And I also saw that UM study found
that homes and red line neighborhoods we’re still worth less
than half of those in green neighborhoods. Yeah, and here’s
(16:57):
the one. I marked these as stats with an exclamation point,
just that’s how excited I get. But the ones that
I’m really floored by, I don’t even write anything except
for three exclamation points. I’ve got three exclamation points by
that of back federally back mortgages. For sure, that is
definitely one. Um here’s mine. If if you might say, well,
(17:18):
what about variables man and education level and income level
and stuff like that, Like you gotta factor all that in.
That’s a whole other side conversation as far as systemic
racism and being able to go to good schools and
afford a good education and get a good job and
all that. So just park that to the side. But
if you control for all those variables, college educated black
(17:40):
Americans are still less likely to own their home than
white Americans without a high school diploma. Yeah, That’s That’s
what really gets you is when they they’re like, well,
let us just control for all these factors and only
variable that remains is the race of the people applying
for a owner owning a home, and it’s still the case.
(18:02):
That’s when it’s like, well this is indisputable. Actually yeah,
and you know you can put a price on this.
Red Fen did a study um just last year in
twenty that black American families missed out on the opportunity
to accumulate an average of two hundred and twelve thousand
dollars of you know what, we’re talking about that intergenerational
(18:22):
wealth per household over the last forty years, just over
the last forty years. I mean we’re talking about stuff
that started, I mean back in the days of slavery,
but really started to take off in the nineteen thirties
with the New Deal. And this is just since nineteen
eighty they’ve lost out on that amount of money per household.
That’s nuts and still today, Chuck, here’s another one that
gets me. Black American is five times likelier to own
(18:45):
a home in a red line neighborhood than a white
American is. So this is still an issue today. Um.
So redlining these maps just set off this enormous amount
of um discrimination and I guess is all you can say.
And then all of the horrible effects that come out
of that that level of discrimination. But they weren’t the
(19:06):
only things that set it off. Um. The g I
Bill really kind of came in and said, well, hold on,
hold my beer, I want to mess things up to
what does hold my beer mean? It means that like
there’s some dude just kind of sitting there with like
his shirt, um just barely covering his gut drinking a beer,
watching somebody do something stupid and he says, hold my beer,
(19:26):
and then he doesn’t stupid. That’s right. Yeah, I thought
that’s what it meant. But you know me, I’m a
I’m an old man with a shirt barely covering his gut.
So I wasn’t quite short. You should spend more time
on Urban Dictionary. It should. I don’t drink much beer anymore, though,
although I do love it. What’s your favorite? I mean,
you know I love Tropicalia here out of Athens, Georgia.
(19:49):
The creature comfort. I still never had one. Well, you
should come over. I have a cagorator now on my deck.
Oh my god, I’m serving it up. But I don’t
know why I got it. I got it for friends
because I don’t drink. It’s on a beer. And then
the pandemic happened, and now I’ve just got a half
keg of beer sitting ship. All right. So yeah, the
(20:09):
g I Bill um this, you know, in theory, the
g I Bill is a great thing, and it has
done a lot of good. But in this case, it
did block access to home ownership among black Americans because,
uh they would come home from World War Two. The
g I Bill was passed. Banks are handing out mortgages
to veterans and they were actually allowed to discriminate based
(20:31):
on race. Yes, it’s shocking. Yeah, well it’s like whenever
you see that kind of thing, you’re like, this doesn’t
jibe with what I understand. Just look to the Dixiecrats,
the segregationists of the South, who were a very powerful
voting block and during the Jim Crow era, and they
were like to appease them and get them to vote
(20:52):
for something like a New Deal program or to not
do everything they could to block it. You had to say, okay,
well we’ll make sure that that blacks are excluded them
this that that that Black Americans won’t have access to
this amazing program. And they’d be like, okay, cool, let’s
let’s do it. That’s that’s that’s where a lot of
that came from. And I mean, it’s easy to blame
the Dixie Krats, but you can also be like, well,
(21:14):
you know, how hard did you try to go around
the Dixie Kratz too. I mean it was allowed to happen, yes, yeah,
by everybody, despite Francis perkins best efforts. Yeah, here’s the
stat For instance, in Mississippi in Uh, they build out
told out more than three thousand v A backed home
loans that year. Uh, and two of them were two
(21:37):
black veterans. Uh. Pretty startling. I don’t even know the
percentage on that point nine eight. Oh yeah, there’s got
to be a repeating something in there somewhere. Uh. And
you know this is a big deal because when World
War Two ended, they wanted a housing boom. There was
a lot of the supplies that would have gone to
home construction during the war went to the war effort.
(21:58):
So the f h A said, you know what, we
we need a housing boom here. We’re going to guarantee
construction loans to you like big construction companies out there.
And that’s when the suburbs popped up for the first time,
and that changed everything forever. Yeah. I mean, like they
they the birth of the suburbs were like a deliberate
(22:18):
program created by the federal government to to basically get
more people buying houses, to start that intergenerational wealth and
to create a middle class or to expand the middle
class dramatically. And they were able to do that partially
through just like when the f h came along and said, hey,
you know, we’re going to back these people’s loans as
(22:39):
long as they’re not in a red line neighborhood. That
says to the lenders, well, then you know that means
even if this person defaults, the government will buy the
loan from me. I’m gonna get paid back no matter what.
They did the same thing to these construction companies to
which created this huge housing boom. But there’s a caveat
to it. Just like with the v A loans that
said you can discriminate based on race for loans, even
(23:01):
though this is really important, Chuck. Even though the government
the v A would back the loan of a black
veteran just like they would back the loan of a
white veteran and you would be repaid no matter what,
you were still allowed to discriminate based on race. The
f h A, supposedly with the birth of the suburbs,
said we’re going to guarantee your construction loans, so you
(23:22):
can build suburbs, but you can’t sell two black Americans.
That’s another one that I don’t think there’s a smoking
gun that I saw, so I don’t know if that means,
like get the word out, like you can’t sell the
black people or else we’re not going to back these loans,
or if it was stated policy, that haven’t been able
to turn up. But it’s pretty well understood that the
(23:43):
f h A discriminated against black people basically moving to
the suburbs by not backing construction loans like that. Well. Yeah,
and there were neighborhood covenants in place that said that
black people cannot own homes in these neighborhoods they were
there were clauses that said you cannot resell your home
if you go to move, you can’t sell it to
(24:04):
a black family. Yeah, dude, if you want to be startled,
go search that um on Google Images. There’s like pictures
of these clauses and deeds that say you can’t sell
to anybody who’s not white, or even specifically, you can’t
sell anybody who’s black. It’s really jarring. Yeah, and it’s um,
I mean, it was sort of expressly understood that the
suburbs were being created for a reason, and that’s to
(24:26):
get white people out of the city to a place
where they could live among themselves. And it’s it’s something
that’s still going on. I mean, during the uh most
recent presidential election campaign, Donald Trump started playing praying on
these fears again. He was saying things like, literally, suburban
housewives of America, Biden will destroy your neighborhood and your
(24:49):
American dream. People living their suburban lifestyle dream will no
longer be bothered of fine or financially hurt by having
low income housing built in your neighborhood. And the these
are literal quotes, and it’s just he’s trying to to
garner a certain kind of vote, to be sure. But
you know, we’ll get to other stuff. I mean, Trump
(25:09):
has a long history and his and his family with
he and his father of housing discrimination. But the end
result of all this is white people. You know, people
call it white flight. They left the cities, moved to
the suburbs. People that were in the city still, these
African American families in these yellow and red line communities,
we’re sort of stuck there. So the government steps in
(25:32):
to build affordable housing, which at first were racially integrated.
There were black people and white people, but then even
the lower income white people, uh fled for the suburbs. Yeah,
because wages rose. Yeah, and they left cities in an
urban communities almost entirely black. Um. Yeah. So proportionately speaking,
there was a tremendous drain of white people from the cities.
(25:57):
I’m sure it was different on a city to city based.
As a matter of fact, I know it was. There’s
not a you can’t put a whole blanket of history
over every square inch of the United States, so different
cities had different experiences. But proportionately speaking, black people have
always made up a smaller amount of the American population overall.
(26:17):
But then if you look at the you know, percentage
of black people, say in a city in nine I
think is when it peaked. For Atlanta in particular, Um,
it’s like say black or something that’s a way larger
proportion or disproportionate amount of black people living in the
city than say, um, in the suburbs. And then conversely, Chuck,
(26:38):
when you look at the suburbs and the statistics about
race or demography in the suburbs, then it really kind
of all comes home. Yeah, and you know they’re living
in the suburbs. They decide, you know, we still need
to go into the city sometimes, so we need interstates
to get us there because we like going to concerts
occasionally or seeing a professional sports team play, right, and
(27:01):
so they built these interstates, Uh, they kind of barreled
through black neighborhoods built them there they often became a
dividing line. UH. And you know, these communities were set
up to fail. They had less frequent garbage pickup, they
had inadequate funding to keep up this public housing that
they built, UM, lower access to basic utilities, and they
(27:22):
were just in no position to to succeed basically. Now.
And I’m trying to remember what episode we talked about
prow I Go Housing UM project in in St. Louis.
I think it was the Environmental Psychology episode, if I’m
not mistaken, But that was a really good example of
this of how people pointed to that people from the
outside and we’re like, look, you can’t like black people
(27:43):
can’t take care of anything. Look at the degraded state
that this housing project is in. And it’s, like you said,
like they were set up to fail through all through
like a lack of attention, a lack of funding, UM,
just a lack of basically everything UM. And it’s it’s
that kind of seem to keep perpetuating these um uh biases.
(28:07):
For example, and this is a big one that we’ll
talk about later, that white people think if black people
move into an area, their housing values are going to
go down because of stuff like that. Yeah, I mean,
that’s sort of the I guess you’d call it the
dog whistle that everyone leans on there like, hey, we
you know, we don’t mind. Uh, we’re not bigoted at all.
(28:27):
We just want to keep our housing values up. That’s right.
That that so that one and then the the um
the myth that black people are just inherently um uncredit
worthy or not credit worthy are the two things that
seem to be used the most as cover for, like
you said, post civil rights are segregation in the United States,
(28:51):
the dog whistle, like you said, yeah, I mean, and
now is when we can talk a little bit about
um gentrification, because I mean, the way housing has worked
in this country is really fascinating and really gross in
a lot of ways, but just interesting to look at
from a bird’s eye point of view. The way people
move around and what eventually happened with the cities is that, uh,
(29:16):
you know, call them what you want, yuppies or dinks.
There’s a lot of name for upwardly mobile white people.
They’re like, Hey, I want to move into the city,
I want to be closer to to the concerts. Although
this is going to be controversial, I’m gonna get a
lot of cred for this, but one of the most
annoying trends of the last like fifteen years is building
(29:37):
all these concert venues out in the suburbs. It’s so annoying.
And I know they want their concert venues out there
so they don’t have to come into the city, but
I hate it when I one of my bands plays,
you know, thirty miles out into the suburbs. I won’t go. Yeah,
it’s kind of a pain. Although we did go out.
It’s a huge Motley Crewe thanks to that was Nita Strauss. No,
(30:02):
that’s true, So that was that was worth the trip
because it was Miley Crue and Alice Cooper. I just think,
I don’t know, I think all sports stadiums and all
concerts and you should be in the city. I’m with you.
That’s definitely traditional into the city for a big day out.
You know, when they start moving museums way out in
the exurbs and I’m done. Um. But the same thing.
(30:23):
You could make the same case. When they built the
highways and everything, they just kind of built them through
black communities. That’s what they did with with the stadiums
and all that as well too. Well, no, that’s true.
You know, think about Braves. They just plunked Braves Stadium
ted Turner out just right in the middle of Mechanicsville,
which is a historically black community, and said, everybody moves
(30:45):
move aside, and don’t harass all the white people who
come down to see the game on you know, same day.
We should do I mean, I love sports, but we
should do a There’s such a problematic side to pro
sports from that too. Um, these billionaire owners is using
city money to build new stadiums when their other stadium
is just like ten years old or whatever. That is
(31:06):
definitely problematic. It’s crazy, what a crazy amount of waste
that produces a loan just that alone. Yeah, um, alright,
so where was I? All right? Uh, white dinks are
moving into the neighborhoods again in the city because they
want good Thai food, and uh, these neighborhoods become a
(31:28):
little more attractive the more white people move into, other
white people to move in, and they start moving in
and increasing numbers, and the houses are generally renovated or
improved over time or sometimes they might bulldoze you know,
a pretty decent house with good bones just to build
you know, the biggest house possible on their postage stamp
(31:48):
of a lot. It’s crazy how close they build these
mammoth houses together. I’m sure it happens everywhere. Atlanta’s got
a real problem with it. But what happens is, you know,
home user going to increase, that’s gonna raise taxes on
the other homes around them. A lot of time, those
other homes are owned by UM, longtime lower income residents,
(32:10):
most times people of color, it becomes unsustainable. UM. We
have a great, great program here in my neighborhood and
east like called Neighbor in Need. That is UH Emily
and I have four main charities that we work with
and give to every year, and Neighbor in Need is
one of them because we like to stay really locally focused.
But Neighbor in Need basically addresses this head on and
(32:33):
they you know, raise a lot of money and they
use that money to take care of these people. UM,
if they hear about a neighbor that’s like, you know,
in need, like an older African American couple who’s been
here for forty years, they’re having to pay way too
much in property taxes so they can’t afford a roof
on their house. They’ll go put a roof on their house,
or they’ll pay their power bill, um whatever. I mean.
(32:56):
It’s a really really great grassroots organization, so UM very
happy to be working with them and uh, you know,
trying to fight the sort of ills of gentrification overall. Yeah,
that’s neat because it also draws the community together to
help the longest term residents of that community rather than
that whole everybody’s on their own kind of thing, which
(33:17):
I’m sure most people who move into a community like
you know that is gentrifying probably would want to do.
They just don’t know how to do it, or they
don’t know how to contact anybody. People don’t just usually
go over to their neighbor’s house and knock on the
door and introduce themselves anymore. So that’s cool. Yeah, and
you know this is uh sometimes they are able to
sell their house for a pretty good you know, the
(33:39):
housing value does increase, so they’re able to get more
money than they might have before, which can be a
nice windfall. But I’ve also seen firsthand, literally with my neighbors, UM,
these sort of predatory home builders that come in there,
and while they think it’s probably decent money compared to
what they thought they could get, it’s still a lower
(34:00):
than what they would offer a white family. But even
if they were treated fairly and they walked away with
the big windfall from the sale, um and you know,
had a lot of money to retire on, that community
was still fractured. You know, the people who are having
to move and their neighbors who already had to move
may have lived there for generations or even you know,
(34:22):
just their whole lives and they formed a community. And
it’s not like that whole community just moves elsewhere together.
They all go to different communities, often towards the end
of their life, and it leads to alienation, isolation. Um.
It’s a that I mean, that’s a real problem. Even
even if they are being paid well for the the
houses they’re they’re being bought out of because they don’t
(34:43):
necessarily want to move, but they just can’t afford the
taxes anymore. Um. So there’s there’s that’s a big issue
with gentrification. It’s tough to get around sounds like that
neighborhood group that you’re talking about what’s the name again
that they that they’ve they’ve figured out a way or
round it. Do you know what there needs to be
dude is uh and this is chuck twenty two stuff. Okay.
(35:08):
I think if you live in a house long enough,
you shouldn’t have to pay property tax anymore. Yeah, I
think there are I mean, I have to be a lot.
Maybe it’s like twenty years or something, but that would
solve a lot of this problem. There is zero reason
why some elderly African American couple that’s been in a
home for forty years needs to be paying taxes at
(35:28):
all on that house, much less these jacked up rates. Yeah. No,
I think that’s that’s totally true. Um. Yeah, I think
there’s a if it’s not law, there’s a proposal in
Georgia to do that once you’re sixty five or something
like that. Maybe. I mean, I’m ad about property tax anyway,
just because it’s I don’t know, we pay so much
in taxes. Then you finally scrape up enough to buy
(35:50):
a place that’s your own, and the government’s then like, well,
if you’re going to have to pay tax on that,
do right? You know, I know, it’s seems unfair. Also,
you shouldn’t have to pay full price for coffee anywhere
once you reach sixty five or old agreed, especially after
three pm. Uh, All right, well, should we take a
break and then talk about the Fair Housing Act, which
(36:11):
solved everything. It totally did. It’s all great now, alright,
we’ll be right back up to this. Alright, spoiler, So
(36:41):
we ruined things. They passed the Fair Housing Act, and
racism has been solved in America. That’s right. Ninety eight
And we talked about the Fair Housing Act a little bit, UM,
and you know, it’s a good thing they passed it.
It did banned discrimination in housing practices officially, but it
just led to a little trickier way to get around
(37:03):
stuff by UM doing it on the download. Yeah, and
that is that is for if you’re studying systemic racisicism
in the United States. The passing of like the Voting
Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act UH,
and some other legislation UM during the sixties really changed
things in that no longer was the government in the
(37:27):
business of enforcing discrimination and segregation UM. And also now
you had recourse in the courts if you were discriminated
against UM. But it didn’t just a race racism in
the United States that that task of enforcing basically white
supremacy and racial discrimination and segregation and all the stuff
(37:48):
that comes along with it fell to um lesser institutions
in everyday people who carried out. And when you’re talking
about something like housing discrimination, UM, the people who now
are best able to continue enforcing segregation and discrimination in
the United States are people like lenders and real estate
(38:10):
agents and even people who are deciding where to buy
a house. Um. Everyday americans buying the house UM often
make choices that they don’t necessarily think our racist, and
they might they probably don’t think that they’re racist, but
they’re still they’re housing choices often reflect um inadvertent or
(38:32):
otherwise racial choices or choices along racial lines. Yeah, and
this you know this next bit, we’re we’re sort of
busting on real estate professionals a little bit. I have
very good friends that are real estate agents. They’re great
people for the most part. We don’t mean to just
paint everything with the big broadbrush, but the industry does
(38:54):
have a history of it, for sure. Yeah, and we
have to talk about it. So there was one in
the in the eighties, there was one practice called block
busting god um not having anything to do with video stores,
I know it was the eighties, but um literally busting
up a block. When a real estate agent would work
or sort of act as a speculator and say, either, hey,
(39:19):
you know what you know, there are some black families
that are moving into the area. You may want to
think about selling just to protect your home values before
they fall. Or they might sell to a black family
and introduce them to the area so they could then
turn around, um, buy these houses from the white residents
and then sell them to the black residents or you know,
(39:41):
hopefully black residents, but at a big mark up. Yeah,
which has insult to injury, Like they created a basically
white flight from an area just from the rumor of
black people moving in, and then they move black people
in and sell them sell to them at wildly inflated rates,
which is crazy. And I read one story to Chuck
of one of these real estate agents that was doing blockbusting.
(40:03):
They would have a black dad with the stroller walk
around the neighborhood, um like he had moved in or
was thinking of moving in or whatever, and apparently just
that was enough to get people to start to sell.
And again you’re like, you know, this is this is
terrible that real estate agents are doing it. But the
fact that it was effective really says a lot about
every day you know, white homeowners too. And also again
(40:27):
like it it doesn’t mean like that these white homeowners
hate black people like they were worried about their property values,
because it’s such an embedded myth in America that when
a black family moves into a neighborhood, they’re so bad
at taking care of their their house and their home
values that it’s going to drag the home values down
in throughout the entire neighborhood. And so everybody needed to
(40:49):
get out before that happened. That’s that’s again, that’s the
definition of systemic racism. Yeah, and you know this has
been busted up to a large degree officially, but up
until nineteen fifty, the official policy of the National Association
of Real Estate Boards UM said a realtor should never
be instrumental and introducing into a neighborhood members of any
(41:13):
race or nationality whose presence will clearly be detrimental to
property values in that neighborhood. That was like literal policy
up until nineteen fifty, and then there was a study
in two thousand six by the National Fair Housing Alliance
that said, and this is something else called steering, which
is not blockbusting, but it’s like, hey, like we want
(41:34):
to show you houses over here in this neighborhood because
we think it’s a better fit for you. Uh. And
you know here the financial instruments available to get mortgages
for you and maybe not just for everybody. And black
people historically have not given the full picture. They’re maybe
not shown white neighborhoods. Uh. And the study found that
steering occurred sent of the time when researchers posed as
(41:58):
buyers and we’re shown homes like these sort of undercover operations. Yeah,
and steering occurs, um not just you know, if you’re
if you’re a black home buyer, you’re not just going
to be shown a black neighborhoods. If you’re a white
home buyer, they’re probably not going to take you to
black neighborhoods either. So through this process of racial steering,
this is basically enforcing patterns of segregation still in the
(42:22):
United States. Yeah, there was another study by Brookings. They
found that black owned homes are undervalued by an average
of forty thou dollars. And this is one that’s controlled
by all the factors like home quality and amenities and everything. Exclamation, Yeah,
it’s forty eight grand literally because it is a home
(42:43):
owned by a black individual. When they control for amenities
where the home is the size of the house, everything
else about the house. If you compare apples to apples,
and it’s the same house owned by a white person
and the other house that’s exactly the same home by
a black person, the black person’s house is going to
be forty thousand dollars less in value just because it’s
(43:05):
owned by a black person. And that’s that’s just basically
that whole idea of um that black people drag home
values down becoming a self fulfilling prophecy, and um that
those same home values are all of that undervaluing that
same Brooking study found amounts to a loss of about
(43:27):
a hundred and fifty six billion dollars for Black Americans. Yeah,
for wealth they were not able to achieve. And uh,
you know, we talked a lot about the Great Recession
in the mortgage crisis kind of when it was going
on and shortly thereafter, Um, Black Americans back then were
likelier to receive subprime mortgages. These were the loans that
(43:47):
were really expensive to repay. They had higher fees, they
had higher interest rates, um they also had mechanisms built
in if you were a black loan owner that made
it easier for the lender to seize their collateral with
usually meant their house and so like, it makes sense
that if you are taking a greater risk lending to
somebody as the bank, you should be able to get
(44:10):
more money for it, right, But the problem is is
like subprime mortgages were doled out to black homeowners or
black home buyers at way higher rates than they were
to white home buyers. And that’s a problem in and
of itself if the if the rates are less favorable
and it’s easier for the bank to repossess the house.
But especially it proved to be a big problem during
(44:32):
the mortgage crisis when that bubble bursts, because if you
were a low income Black American, you were probably denied
a mortgage of any kind. But even if you were
a middle to high income black home buyer, you probably
got a subprime mortgage compared to say, a white buyer
(44:52):
with the same criteria that you had to offer. UM.
So that meant that when those foreclosures happened because the
bubble bursts, Black Americans, especially UM, wealthier Black Americans, were
disproportionately impacted, so that that subprime mortgage debacle erased way
more Black intergenerational wealth than it did for white people. Yeah,
(45:15):
I have my last three exclamation points. Stat during the
subprime mortgage crisis, there was a study that found black
and Latino families, because you know we’ve mentioned people of
color a few times, is not just solely African American
families affected? Um, And the study found that black and
Latino families making two hundred thousand dollars a year or more,
(45:39):
we’re still more likely to receive a subprime loan than
white families making less than thirty thousand dollars a year.
That nuts, and six point two percent of white people
with a credit score of six sixty or higher received
a subprime mortgage compared to twenty one point four percent
of black borrowers with that same credit score. So, Chuck, UM,
(46:00):
there’s a big problem with all this. And it’s kind
of like you said at the beginning, like when you’re
talking about race and especially discrimination by race. Um, people
tend to be like, especially white people tend to be like, well,
I don’t know about that. I mean, there’s a lot
of other factors involved, Like it could be anything. So
you really have to kind of prove that this is
a thing. And ever since the federal government got out
(46:22):
of discriminating on paper, um, it’s gotten a lot harder
to track. So back in the seventies, the Department of
Housing and Urban Development, they have an office of Research
and Policy. They came up with the way of testing
this to control for as many variables as possible and
just see if it’s just race that is being discriminated against.
(46:43):
And it’s called paired testing. It’s actually pretty clever from
what I understand. Yeah, that’s when you get to equally
qualified candidates to apply for homeown or to go to
a real estate agent and like look at apartments or
houses or whatever. Uh. They are trained to basically be
as identical as they can be to one another, to
(47:04):
respond to the questions in the same way, have the
same credit history, same job status, same income level, and
basically sort of be duplicates of one another except for
their skin color. Uh, they’re not working together so they
don’t even know, um, like there’s no bias there even
because they’re not like paired together, right, They’re not like,
oh they got too, I’m gonna try this with them.
Like they don’t. They don’t meet one another, they don’t
(47:26):
interact with one another. They’re just doing their thing and
they’re just trained to do it exactly the same way.
The only distinction between them is their their race. Right.
And so the Urban Institute, which is a think tank,
UM study this and they came up with kind of
four big points from this paired testing UH exercise, which
(47:47):
is UH. They found about discrimination and housing vouchers that
are intended to let low income renters choose from a
bigger pool a rental housing uh than the realtors even showed. UM,
there were fewer homes and apartments available to minorities like
we were, like I kind of mentioned earlier, like just
a smaller like no, you know, we’ll just look here. Yeah,
(48:09):
the racial steering usually results in fewer, fewer places being shown. Um.
They were steered again to primarily um, you know, neighborhoods
of their own ethnicity, and then given less information overall.
Like I mentioned about mortgage products, UM, different kinds of loans,
different kinds of ways of structuring a loan, just not
(48:31):
given that information at all. Right, Um, so the they
also found this paired testing turns up very frequently that um,
it’s not just even people of colors, not just black Americans,
but it’s people of color in general. But um, it’s
not even just down to to racial discrimination. There’s also
a lot of discrimination against people who are differently abled.
(48:53):
They actually sometimes fair worse than minorities when it comes
to housing discrimination. Paired testing is has turned that up
as well. So it’s still the upshot of all this
is that it’s still a problem and there is like
some silver lining to it. Um the I think. Uh.
That same think tank, the Urban Institute, also turned up
(49:14):
that there’s been a general decline overall. It’s not huge,
but it’s it’s noteworthy. It’s remarkable. Um of preference in
favoritism toward white white buyers over buyers of of like
minority buyers by about five percent between and two thousand.
It went from about so And there does seem to
(49:38):
be a general decline in racism or discrimination, I should say, uh,
in the United States. So that’s the good news, is
that America seems to be getting less racist. The bad
news is that America is still racist. Like, we still
have a long way to go. It’s, as the study
put the studies findings confirm a hard truth that America’s
(49:58):
long journey to end housing discrimination remains unfinished. Um. And
so there’s still a long way to go. And I
think it’s really important for everybody to realize that there’s
a long history of discriminating against people of color, but
also very specifically Black Americans, and that it’s still going
on today. And even though it’s in a slightly lesser form,
it’s very important if it’s going on at all, that
(50:21):
we we erase it. That’s right, agreed, You got anything else?
Nothing else? All right, Chuck, Well then that’s housing discrimination.
And since I said all right, Chuck, it’s time for
a listener mail. Well instead of reading a specific listener mail.
And because this episode is a little heavy, we thought
we’d have a little fun. Um. We got maybe more
(50:45):
emails than we have for any other episode in our
history down literally about Neco wavers Um. A lot of
support for the Neco for people, and a lot of
condemnation for yucking yums without giving having tried them. You
were all correct. We honor you all, and we’re gonna
Josh got some sent them to me. We’re gonna try
(51:06):
some necka wafers on the air. Listen there. I just
realized I think I made a grave mistake by not
having any water in the basement. Yeah, I just realized
this as well. Do you have a pipe to tap into?
I think we should eat the same color. Oh really? Okay,
all right, so we can kind of go, you know,
nose to nose. I’m never open one these before. Okay, exactly, already,
(51:29):
so nasty. You know, everybody was right about yucking people’s
yams in general, but also because we hadn’t tried them.
So that’s why we’re doing this. I mean, they’re just
falling apart when I opened the package. So to strike one,
I’ve got a mess on my table. What color are
we gonna do? I mean it’s hard to tell. This
looks sort of like a very pale yellow. That’s the
(51:51):
only whole one in my hand. Pale yellow. I don’t
even have that. I got white. I’ve got orange it
maybe maybe it is white, Okay, I’ll call it. Wait wait, wait, wait,
I might have a palio when I do, I do it. Okay,
apology to the people of Mesophonia, but here we go.
Oh my god, it’s just like it’s like a flatter um,
(52:18):
bigger candy heart. The conversation hart, it’s not bam like okay,
very hard, the crunches. I think what probably gets people.
I mean, the taste isn’t bad, but it’s not great. No,
they’re not great, But I mean, who’s crazy for conversation hearts,
sickos and weirdos? You know, the same goes for me. Well,
(52:40):
what’s the verdict? Would you ever buy and eat Neca
wafers after this? I will tell you what. I will
probably eat the rest of these. And I like sugar.
I like as atter fact, I’m gonna do one of
the gray ones real quick. What about you? Uh no, no,
that is not my up my alley. But I’m gonna
(53:02):
try one of those chocolates because those where I think
recommended steer clear, the dark gray ones, the liquorice ones.
They’re awful. It tastes Oh no, it is slightly different. Yeah,
I get a little hint up cocoa. I’ve come around
a little bit to the liquorice ones. At the end Wow,
I’m turning into an eco weirdo. Actually, the chocolate aren’t bad.
(53:23):
What about pink? Try pink? Well, that’s um, this is
winter green. I think people are so disgusted right now. Yeah,
this is all right. We’re literally the last two people
listening to this. Man, I think we should wrap this. Okay. Well, um,
if you want to tell us that we shouldn’t yuck
everybody’s jump, especially about something we haven’t tried, we need
(53:44):
to hear that whenever we do that. It’s totally true
and totally right. Thank you everybody who wrote him. You
can get in touch with us at Stuff podcast at
I heart radio dot calm Stuff. You should know it
is pretty action of I heart Radio. For more podcasts
for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
(54:05):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H
Older Episo
Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I’m Josh Clark,
and there’s Charles W Chuck Bryan over there, and this
is stuff you should know. Um the man oh man addition,
(00:25):
do you know what I love about this topic is
that it’s not just a bunch of like ranting about
how we think things are and how people think things are.
It’s like so studied and statistic heavy that you can
talk about how things are and then say, and here’s
(00:45):
the proof exactly, here’s a lot of data to back
it up. It’s really great. I love it when they
dovetail like this. Yeah. I get the impression, though, UM
that you when you’re talking about the studying race and
especially in America like you are, you have to back
it up with data like people are like, oh, yeah,
I don’t I don’t know about that. But um, I
want to give a shout out to actually to um
(01:08):
uh scholars both sell sociologists of race. UM Professor Villnabashi
Treatler from UC Santa Barbara and Professor Tricia Rose of
Brown University both are experts on this stuff and they
helped me out big time with this and some other
research on on racism I’ve done, um and they Dr
(01:28):
Bashi Treatler said, hey, make sure you mentioned this hashtag
we have going called site hashtag. Sorry, and I’m making
the hashtag symbol like justin Timberlake hashtag site black women
ce I t e black women. UM, and that leads
you to all sorts of good often overlooked research by
black scholars. Um, who are women that don’t always get
(01:51):
a lot of credit. So I’m glad you told me
about that one. I wanted to tell everybody else. So
when you, uh, that was a stutter when he said
so so sociologists, you didn’t mean they were just mediocre sociologists. No,
I was. I was sociologist. I could see how that
would be confusing. I was doing my impression of Phil
Collins saying sociologist so so studio. Yeah, well that’s the
(02:16):
last joke we’re gonna tell you. Oh yeah, probably. I
was warned by Dr Bashi Treatler not to do our
usual stick when we’re talking about race stuff, and I
was like, well, I mean, we we can handle ourselves.
She said. I I listened to your stuff. I listened
to the Braws episode just trust me on this. It’s like,
all right, So then that means the housing discrimination episode
(02:38):
officially starts. Now, that’s right. So that’s what we’re talking about, dude.
Housing discrimination and um uh in the United States, and
there is a very long history of housing discrimination. And
you might say, like, well, that really sucks. That sucks
that people have trouble buying a home or maybe they
get less favorable terms on their loans just because of
(02:59):
their race, and that does suck. That’s absolutely true. But
it’s even worse than that because in the United States,
one of the biggest ways of growing wealth intergenerationally, like
over the course of generations within a single family is
through a house. Yeah, I mean it’s sometimes people don’t
(03:19):
have a ton of money to invest in the stock market.
Some people think the stock market is not something to trust.
But one thing that has always been fairly reliable in
this country, you know, say, for a few moments in history,
is real estate and the idea that if you scrap
up and save enough money for a down payment for
a home, that house will eventually be worth quite a
(03:42):
bit more years later, and you can sell it and
use that extra windfall of cash to invest in the
stock market or to pass down to your kids so
they can then get in the housing market sooner than
they might have and then it just becomes a cycle
where it just builds wealth. Yeah, Like the average family
(04:02):
in America has most of their net worth tied up
in their house, and then you know, when it comes
time to sell it and the house is paid off,
that’s a lot of money. And then when you kick
the bucket, your kids get that money and maybe they
get a better house, and it just keeps growing and growing.
So if you put up barriers to housing, you’re actually
putting up barriers to passing along intergenerational wealth. And as
(04:24):
a big, big problem in America. UM Still today, I
saw a study from I think Brookings that found that,
um the median. Yeah, brooking study said that the median
net worth of a white family in America is a
hundred and seventy one thousand dollars. The median net worth
(04:48):
of a black family in America is seventeen thousand, one
hundred and fifty dollars, about a ten of what the
median is for white people. And that is largely because
of housing discriminate in the history of housing discrimination in
this country. Yeah, and as far as history goes, you know,
it started with literal racist laws where they said, if
(05:10):
you’re a black person or a black family, you cannot
live here. Um. That went on for a while, and
then those laws were sort of altered to the Jim
Crows Separate but Equal era, where they said, you know what, Um,
we’ll say things are better, but it’s really the same
effect in the end. And then they got rid of
(05:30):
those laws and said, all right, now we’ve really passed
the meaningful legislation, and now we can just racially discriminate
on the down low and very creative ways. Yeah, that’s
basically the pattern that it’s followed. Um. And what kind
of stuck out to meet Chuck is is that before
about nine hundred, before like the rise of like industrialization
(05:53):
to a really legitimate degree in the United States, like,
there wasn’t not nearly as much segregation as we saw
starting around nineteen especially in the North, because if you
had a trade or a craft in the North and
you were an African American, there’s a really good chance
that you were going to be serving white people as
well as black people, right and because you usually were
(06:16):
very closely your home was tied close to your shop,
you often lived above it if you were like a
cobbler or something like that. Um, you made live next
door to a white baker or something like that. So
the there wasn’t a lot of segregation until industrialization came
along and there was a big call for labor, which
drew a lot of African Americans, a lot of Black
(06:38):
Americans out of the South up to the north. And
all of a sudden, all of those people who were
living in integrated neighborhoods, all those white people I should say,
had had a problem with this influx of black migration
from the South to the north, and they responded with
a lot of really disgusting violence. Yeah. I mean, we’ve
talked about some of these, um race incidents and race
(07:01):
riots and race almost race wars really uh here and
there on the show, and they’re always hard to talk about.
But that was just sort of the reality of things
at the time. Um. In the nineteen thirties, the New
Deal comes along, and this is when legislation starts to
kind of kick in. When the government stepped in and said,
you know what, we think we should make it easier
(07:23):
for people to own homes. We really want to boost
home ownership because that’s a boon for the economy of
the country. And we’re going to create the home Owners
Loan Corporation, which is going to help people refinance their mortgages.
But we need some criteria here to sort of establish
a uniform way of like how to how to dole
(07:45):
out this assistance. And they reckoned, let’s let’s look at
every population of forty or more and let’s create a
color coded map that’s based on riskiness of these loans.
And they said, you know, they talked to real estate brokers,
they talk to bankers, and they said, help us out,
help us draw these boundaries, and they came up with
a one, two, three, four color graded system. Right, yeah,
(08:07):
that’s right. Because again this was like long before credit
scores were developed, so you couldn’t really look at you know,
if somebody came into your bank to ask for a loan,
you couldn’t be like, well, you’re your your credit scores this,
So I’m not gonna look at that start. I don’t
know we should do an episode on if we haven’t already.
I don’t think for sure. Um, but yeah, so the
four color codes they had were also um delineated by
(08:29):
grades Grade A, B, C, and D. Grade A was
the most desirable neighborhood. They were usually homogeneous, meaning white. Um,
there were um lots of professionals living in there. Grade
B was maybe a step down, but still largely homogeneous,
if not totally homogeneous, and they were considered still desirable.
And then it started to get into the lower grades
(08:50):
grades C and D, and C was um, I think
colored yellow on the map, right, Yeah, the first two
were green and blue, and then Grade C was rated
as declining and colored yellow and that sort of. In fact,
I think it even said infiltration of a lower grade
population in the document, which you don’t have to be
(09:13):
a genius to figure out what they were saying there.
It means people of color were moving in. And then
finally you end up with the color red Grade D,
which is least desirable. Um, very densely populated areas almost
always communities of color. Right. So um, the h O
l C created these maps, and then um, along came
(09:36):
the Federal Housing Authority and they said, well, we need
similar maps because we’re not we’re not here to help
stem the tide of foreclosures. We’re actually here to generate
new home ownership among Americans. Um, but we still have
the same issue. We got to figure out who’s credit
worthy and who’s not. So we’re going to base it
on where the people live. And they basically made identical
maps to the h O l C maps, and so
(09:58):
they probably used them. Right, there’s a lot of debate.
I don’t think anyone’s found the smoking gun yet. But
if you take an h O l C map in
an f h A map and you put them over
one another, they’re basically the same thing. And I I
it’s kind of all. It’s up for the debate still.
But the the the upshot was that because of these maps, Um,
(10:22):
if you lived in one of these red and often
yellow communities, they wouldn’t lend to you, for um, for
a new mortgage or even a second mortgage to say,
remodel your home. And they also wouldn’t assist you with
refinancing your existing mortgage, which means you’re subject to foreclosure.
And if you were in a red or yellow community,
(10:43):
you were probably um black or a person of color
or some other ethnic minority. And UM, that means that
they were shut out of this enormous housing boom that
generated a tremendous amount of prosperity immediately after the New
Deal in World War Two. As we’ll see, so African
Americans were left out of or on the fringes of
(11:04):
the New Deal anyway. And this is where we get
to shout out Francis Perkins. Perkins again, which is it’s
fun to now that we know so much about her,
to continually shout her out. But she did a lot
of work arguing in favor of inclusion for black people
in the New Deal. Um, I guess you know, sometimes successfully,
sometimes not. But at the end of the day, the
(11:25):
f h A imposed these rules through the New Deal. Uh.
Their maps were just like the UH the h O
l C. And the process of excluding these groups because
they were colored red was called redlining. That is that
like the where that whole term comes from. That’s exactly
where it comes from. So now today, any any time
you’re discriminated against, whether it’s buying insurance or anything like that, um,
(11:49):
based on your race or say your community. Um, it’s
called redlining now. But that’s where it grew out of
those h O l C maps and f A J maps. UM.
And I mean they would use terms and like their
their handbooks that like these communities had quote undesirable racial
or nationality groups in them, so you couldn’t you couldn’t
lend them any money or whatever. Um. And it was
(12:11):
I mean like this is still like a really big
problem today. Yeah, I mean back then basically and still today.
In many cases, that leaves you with a couple of
options as a person of color. You can rent uh
forever um often times back then and still now from
a white landlord who doesn’t live anywhere near that community,
(12:31):
not always, but usually, or just pay for the home
in cash, which is a stretch for anybody. Uh, it’s
it’s tough to do unless you’re like wealthy. And there
were there were, I have to say there were black
owned banks. But there was nine black own banks in
the entire United States in the thirties. So that is
a place where you could turn to if you’re lucky
enough to have one in your area. But that that
(12:53):
was not a solution to the general population for Black Americans. Yeah,
and like you said, also affected their ability to get
second mortgages, to do home improvements or to like expand
on their house and upgrade it, remodel it. So that
means that the properties are gonna deteriorate and decline over
(13:13):
the years, and it’s just it’s part of that systemic
racist cycle that is just prevalent. Yeah, because still today, eventually,
over time people from the outside looking in say, look,
black people can’t even take care of their communities. Look
at look at how their houses are. Um, just as
a result of this. That is definitely like the definition
(13:33):
of systemic racism for sure. It’s just by the way
into the structures. If you hear dogs barking, My dogs
are upstairs and they’re just very excited about this topic. Yeah,
and I don’t know what’s going on there, but they’re
not going to shut up. So let’s say we press on.
We’ll press on. Should we take a break, then press on.
We’re going to press on like some lee nails right
(13:53):
after a break. How about that? All right, it sounds good.
(14:19):
All right, we’re back and look, these things look amazing
on me. Yeah, they’re very nice. There’s a little bit
of cuticle showing. I didn’t put them right up against it,
but it’s still it’s passable. Well, I think if you
paint them just right, that’s not so noticeable. Right, fill ins,
that’s what I need. I need to get some fill ins.
So back to the topic at hand, joking is over. Um,
(14:43):
so here’s the deal. There’s, like you said, a lot
of debate whether or not or I don’t think we
said this part, whether or not the lenders actually use
these maps because these were government maps from government programs.
It’s not like they said, here, banks have these and
use these. Uh. If you look at the statistics, it
seems like they probably got their hands on some of
(15:03):
these maps. It does. And also, don’t forget the government
figured out, you know, how to draw these maps for
every city over forty people from the lenders, from the banks,
from the Yeah, so they knew this anyway, but now
the government has basically said it is okay to do this, um.
And so so yeah, if you if you look at
the outcome of this redlining, these red line maps, um,
(15:28):
it’s it’s really hard to say, no, this didn’t happen
like this definitely didn’t make it out of government hands
like forts here just great, let’s trade off. Between ninety
four and nineteen sixty two, over of all the federally
backed mortgages that were issued in the United States went
(15:49):
to white buyers. Between four and nineteen sixty two, that’s right,
because of this black ownership since then and can tinuing
today is lagged behind white homeownership in America, and seventeen
just a few short years ago, of black Americans own
their homes versus seventy of white Americans. And then the
(16:13):
other problem with redlining a community is you basically put
a pox on it. It’s cursed, because that means that
those houses are not going to get any kind of
attention UM, and so they’re going to continue to deteriorate.
And if you live in this community, as far as
a banker is concerned, you are a huge credit risk. Right,
And so still today UM sev of the neighborhoods that
(16:35):
were originally redlined in those maps are our redline UM
low income communities today, And which is I mean, that’s
pretty surprising. And I also saw that UM study found
that homes and red line neighborhoods we’re still worth less
than half of those in green neighborhoods. Yeah, and here’s
(16:57):
the one. I marked these as stats with an exclamation point,
just that’s how excited I get. But the ones that
I’m really floored by, I don’t even write anything except
for three exclamation points. I’ve got three exclamation points by
that of back federally back mortgages. For sure, that is
definitely one. Um here’s mine. If if you might say, well,
(17:18):
what about variables man and education level and income level
and stuff like that, Like you gotta factor all that in.
That’s a whole other side conversation as far as systemic
racism and being able to go to good schools and
afford a good education and get a good job and
all that. So just park that to the side. But
if you control for all those variables, college educated black
(17:40):
Americans are still less likely to own their home than
white Americans without a high school diploma. Yeah, That’s That’s
what really gets you is when they they’re like, well,
let us just control for all these factors and only
variable that remains is the race of the people applying
for a owner owning a home, and it’s still the case.
(18:02):
That’s when it’s like, well this is indisputable. Actually yeah,
and you know you can put a price on this.
Red Fen did a study um just last year in
twenty that black American families missed out on the opportunity
to accumulate an average of two hundred and twelve thousand
dollars of you know what, we’re talking about that intergenerational
(18:22):
wealth per household over the last forty years, just over
the last forty years. I mean we’re talking about stuff
that started, I mean back in the days of slavery,
but really started to take off in the nineteen thirties
with the New Deal. And this is just since nineteen
eighty they’ve lost out on that amount of money per household.
That’s nuts and still today, Chuck, here’s another one that
gets me. Black American is five times likelier to own
(18:45):
a home in a red line neighborhood than a white
American is. So this is still an issue today. Um.
So redlining these maps just set off this enormous amount
of um discrimination and I guess is all you can say.
And then all of the horrible effects that come out
of that that level of discrimination. But they weren’t the
(19:06):
only things that set it off. Um. The g I
Bill really kind of came in and said, well, hold on,
hold my beer, I want to mess things up to
what does hold my beer mean? It means that like
there’s some dude just kind of sitting there with like
his shirt, um just barely covering his gut drinking a beer,
watching somebody do something stupid and he says, hold my beer,
(19:26):
and then he doesn’t stupid. That’s right. Yeah, I thought
that’s what it meant. But you know me, I’m a
I’m an old man with a shirt barely covering his gut.
So I wasn’t quite short. You should spend more time
on Urban Dictionary. It should. I don’t drink much beer anymore, though,
although I do love it. What’s your favorite? I mean,
you know I love Tropicalia here out of Athens, Georgia.
(19:49):
The creature comfort. I still never had one. Well, you
should come over. I have a cagorator now on my deck.
Oh my god, I’m serving it up. But I don’t
know why I got it. I got it for friends
because I don’t drink. It’s on a beer. And then
the pandemic happened, and now I’ve just got a half
keg of beer sitting ship. All right. So yeah, the
(20:09):
g I Bill um this, you know, in theory, the
g I Bill is a great thing, and it has
done a lot of good. But in this case, it
did block access to home ownership among black Americans because,
uh they would come home from World War Two. The
g I Bill was passed. Banks are handing out mortgages
to veterans and they were actually allowed to discriminate based
(20:31):
on race. Yes, it’s shocking. Yeah, well it’s like whenever
you see that kind of thing, you’re like, this doesn’t
jibe with what I understand. Just look to the Dixiecrats,
the segregationists of the South, who were a very powerful
voting block and during the Jim Crow era, and they
were like to appease them and get them to vote
(20:52):
for something like a New Deal program or to not
do everything they could to block it. You had to say, okay,
well we’ll make sure that that blacks are excluded them
this that that that Black Americans won’t have access to
this amazing program. And they’d be like, okay, cool, let’s
let’s do it. That’s that’s that’s where a lot of
that came from. And I mean, it’s easy to blame
the Dixie Krats, but you can also be like, well,
(21:14):
you know, how hard did you try to go around
the Dixie Kratz too. I mean it was allowed to happen, yes, yeah,
by everybody, despite Francis perkins best efforts. Yeah, here’s the
stat For instance, in Mississippi in Uh, they build out
told out more than three thousand v A backed home
loans that year. Uh, and two of them were two
(21:37):
black veterans. Uh. Pretty startling. I don’t even know the
percentage on that point nine eight. Oh yeah, there’s got
to be a repeating something in there somewhere. Uh. And
you know this is a big deal because when World
War Two ended, they wanted a housing boom. There was
a lot of the supplies that would have gone to
home construction during the war went to the war effort.
(21:58):
So the f h A said, you know what, we
we need a housing boom here. We’re going to guarantee
construction loans to you like big construction companies out there.
And that’s when the suburbs popped up for the first time,
and that changed everything forever. Yeah. I mean, like they
they the birth of the suburbs were like a deliberate
(22:18):
program created by the federal government to to basically get
more people buying houses, to start that intergenerational wealth and
to create a middle class or to expand the middle
class dramatically. And they were able to do that partially
through just like when the f h came along and said, hey,
you know, we’re going to back these people’s loans as
(22:39):
long as they’re not in a red line neighborhood. That
says to the lenders, well, then you know that means
even if this person defaults, the government will buy the
loan from me. I’m gonna get paid back no matter what.
They did the same thing to these construction companies to
which created this huge housing boom. But there’s a caveat
to it. Just like with the v A loans that
said you can discriminate based on race for loans, even
(23:01):
though this is really important, Chuck. Even though the government
the v A would back the loan of a black
veteran just like they would back the loan of a
white veteran and you would be repaid no matter what,
you were still allowed to discriminate based on race. The
f h A, supposedly with the birth of the suburbs,
said we’re going to guarantee your construction loans, so you
(23:22):
can build suburbs, but you can’t sell two black Americans.
That’s another one that I don’t think there’s a smoking
gun that I saw, so I don’t know if that means,
like get the word out, like you can’t sell the
black people or else we’re not going to back these loans,
or if it was stated policy, that haven’t been able
to turn up. But it’s pretty well understood that the
(23:43):
f h A discriminated against black people basically moving to
the suburbs by not backing construction loans like that. Well. Yeah,
and there were neighborhood covenants in place that said that
black people cannot own homes in these neighborhoods they were
there were clauses that said you cannot resell your home
if you go to move, you can’t sell it to
(24:04):
a black family. Yeah, dude, if you want to be startled,
go search that um on Google Images. There’s like pictures
of these clauses and deeds that say you can’t sell
to anybody who’s not white, or even specifically, you can’t
sell anybody who’s black. It’s really jarring. Yeah, and it’s um,
I mean, it was sort of expressly understood that the
suburbs were being created for a reason, and that’s to
(24:26):
get white people out of the city to a place
where they could live among themselves. And it’s it’s something
that’s still going on. I mean, during the uh most
recent presidential election campaign, Donald Trump started playing praying on
these fears again. He was saying things like, literally, suburban
housewives of America, Biden will destroy your neighborhood and your
(24:49):
American dream. People living their suburban lifestyle dream will no
longer be bothered of fine or financially hurt by having
low income housing built in your neighborhood. And the these
are literal quotes, and it’s just he’s trying to to
garner a certain kind of vote, to be sure. But
you know, we’ll get to other stuff. I mean, Trump
(25:09):
has a long history and his and his family with
he and his father of housing discrimination. But the end
result of all this is white people. You know, people
call it white flight. They left the cities, moved to
the suburbs. People that were in the city still, these
African American families in these yellow and red line communities,
we’re sort of stuck there. So the government steps in
(25:32):
to build affordable housing, which at first were racially integrated.
There were black people and white people, but then even
the lower income white people, uh fled for the suburbs. Yeah,
because wages rose. Yeah, and they left cities in an
urban communities almost entirely black. Um. Yeah. So proportionately speaking,
there was a tremendous drain of white people from the cities.
(25:57):
I’m sure it was different on a city to city based.
As a matter of fact, I know it was. There’s
not a you can’t put a whole blanket of history
over every square inch of the United States, so different
cities had different experiences. But proportionately speaking, black people have
always made up a smaller amount of the American population overall.
(26:17):
But then if you look at the you know, percentage
of black people, say in a city in nine I
think is when it peaked. For Atlanta in particular, Um,
it’s like say black or something that’s a way larger
proportion or disproportionate amount of black people living in the
city than say, um, in the suburbs. And then conversely, Chuck,
(26:38):
when you look at the suburbs and the statistics about
race or demography in the suburbs, then it really kind
of all comes home. Yeah, and you know they’re living
in the suburbs. They decide, you know, we still need
to go into the city sometimes, so we need interstates
to get us there because we like going to concerts
occasionally or seeing a professional sports team play, right, and
(27:01):
so they built these interstates, Uh, they kind of barreled
through black neighborhoods built them there they often became a
dividing line. UH. And you know, these communities were set
up to fail. They had less frequent garbage pickup, they
had inadequate funding to keep up this public housing that
they built, UM, lower access to basic utilities, and they
(27:22):
were just in no position to to succeed basically. Now.
And I’m trying to remember what episode we talked about
prow I Go Housing UM project in in St. Louis.
I think it was the Environmental Psychology episode, if I’m
not mistaken, But that was a really good example of
this of how people pointed to that people from the
outside and we’re like, look, you can’t like black people
(27:43):
can’t take care of anything. Look at the degraded state
that this housing project is in. And it’s, like you said,
like they were set up to fail through all through
like a lack of attention, a lack of funding, UM,
just a lack of basically everything UM. And it’s it’s
that kind of seem to keep perpetuating these um uh biases.
(28:07):
For example, and this is a big one that we’ll
talk about later, that white people think if black people
move into an area, their housing values are going to
go down because of stuff like that. Yeah, I mean,
that’s sort of the I guess you’d call it the
dog whistle that everyone leans on there like, hey, we
you know, we don’t mind. Uh, we’re not bigoted at all.
(28:27):
We just want to keep our housing values up. That’s right.
That that so that one and then the the um
the myth that black people are just inherently um uncredit
worthy or not credit worthy are the two things that
seem to be used the most as cover for, like
you said, post civil rights are segregation in the United States,
(28:51):
the dog whistle, like you said, yeah, I mean, and
now is when we can talk a little bit about
um gentrification, because I mean, the way housing has worked
in this country is really fascinating and really gross in
a lot of ways, but just interesting to look at
from a bird’s eye point of view. The way people
move around and what eventually happened with the cities is that, uh,
(29:16):
you know, call them what you want, yuppies or dinks.
There’s a lot of name for upwardly mobile white people.
They’re like, Hey, I want to move into the city,
I want to be closer to to the concerts. Although
this is going to be controversial, I’m gonna get a
lot of cred for this, but one of the most
annoying trends of the last like fifteen years is building
(29:37):
all these concert venues out in the suburbs. It’s so annoying.
And I know they want their concert venues out there
so they don’t have to come into the city, but
I hate it when I one of my bands plays,
you know, thirty miles out into the suburbs. I won’t go. Yeah,
it’s kind of a pain. Although we did go out.
It’s a huge Motley Crewe thanks to that was Nita Strauss. No,
(30:02):
that’s true, So that was that was worth the trip
because it was Miley Crue and Alice Cooper. I just think,
I don’t know, I think all sports stadiums and all
concerts and you should be in the city. I’m with you.
That’s definitely traditional into the city for a big day out.
You know, when they start moving museums way out in
the exurbs and I’m done. Um. But the same thing.
(30:23):
You could make the same case. When they built the
highways and everything, they just kind of built them through
black communities. That’s what they did with with the stadiums
and all that as well too. Well, no, that’s true.
You know, think about Braves. They just plunked Braves Stadium
ted Turner out just right in the middle of Mechanicsville,
which is a historically black community, and said, everybody moves
(30:45):
move aside, and don’t harass all the white people who
come down to see the game on you know, same day.
We should do I mean, I love sports, but we
should do a There’s such a problematic side to pro
sports from that too. Um, these billionaire owners is using
city money to build new stadiums when their other stadium
is just like ten years old or whatever. That is
(31:06):
definitely problematic. It’s crazy, what a crazy amount of waste
that produces a loan just that alone. Yeah, um, alright,
so where was I? All right? Uh, white dinks are
moving into the neighborhoods again in the city because they
want good Thai food, and uh, these neighborhoods become a
(31:28):
little more attractive the more white people move into, other
white people to move in, and they start moving in
and increasing numbers, and the houses are generally renovated or
improved over time or sometimes they might bulldoze you know,
a pretty decent house with good bones just to build
you know, the biggest house possible on their postage stamp
(31:48):
of a lot. It’s crazy how close they build these
mammoth houses together. I’m sure it happens everywhere. Atlanta’s got
a real problem with it. But what happens is, you know,
home user going to increase, that’s gonna raise taxes on
the other homes around them. A lot of time, those
other homes are owned by UM, longtime lower income residents,
(32:10):
most times people of color, it becomes unsustainable. UM. We
have a great, great program here in my neighborhood and
east like called Neighbor in Need. That is UH Emily
and I have four main charities that we work with
and give to every year, and Neighbor in Need is
one of them because we like to stay really locally focused.
But Neighbor in Need basically addresses this head on and
(32:33):
they you know, raise a lot of money and they
use that money to take care of these people. UM,
if they hear about a neighbor that’s like, you know,
in need, like an older African American couple who’s been
here for forty years, they’re having to pay way too
much in property taxes so they can’t afford a roof
on their house. They’ll go put a roof on their house,
or they’ll pay their power bill, um whatever. I mean.
(32:56):
It’s a really really great grassroots organization, so UM very
happy to be working with them and uh, you know,
trying to fight the sort of ills of gentrification overall. Yeah,
that’s neat because it also draws the community together to
help the longest term residents of that community rather than
that whole everybody’s on their own kind of thing, which
(33:17):
I’m sure most people who move into a community like
you know that is gentrifying probably would want to do.
They just don’t know how to do it, or they
don’t know how to contact anybody. People don’t just usually
go over to their neighbor’s house and knock on the
door and introduce themselves anymore. So that’s cool. Yeah, and
you know this is uh sometimes they are able to
sell their house for a pretty good you know, the
(33:39):
housing value does increase, so they’re able to get more
money than they might have before, which can be a
nice windfall. But I’ve also seen firsthand, literally with my neighbors, UM,
these sort of predatory home builders that come in there,
and while they think it’s probably decent money compared to
what they thought they could get, it’s still a lower
(34:00):
than what they would offer a white family. But even
if they were treated fairly and they walked away with
the big windfall from the sale, um and you know,
had a lot of money to retire on, that community
was still fractured. You know, the people who are having
to move and their neighbors who already had to move
may have lived there for generations or even you know,
(34:22):
just their whole lives and they formed a community. And
it’s not like that whole community just moves elsewhere together.
They all go to different communities, often towards the end
of their life, and it leads to alienation, isolation. Um.
It’s a that I mean, that’s a real problem. Even
even if they are being paid well for the the
houses they’re they’re being bought out of because they don’t
(34:43):
necessarily want to move, but they just can’t afford the
taxes anymore. Um. So there’s there’s that’s a big issue
with gentrification. It’s tough to get around sounds like that
neighborhood group that you’re talking about what’s the name again
that they that they’ve they’ve figured out a way or
round it. Do you know what there needs to be
dude is uh and this is chuck twenty two stuff. Okay.
(35:08):
I think if you live in a house long enough,
you shouldn’t have to pay property tax anymore. Yeah, I
think there are I mean, I have to be a lot.
Maybe it’s like twenty years or something, but that would
solve a lot of this problem. There is zero reason
why some elderly African American couple that’s been in a
home for forty years needs to be paying taxes at
(35:28):
all on that house, much less these jacked up rates. Yeah. No,
I think that’s that’s totally true. Um. Yeah, I think
there’s a if it’s not law, there’s a proposal in
Georgia to do that once you’re sixty five or something
like that. Maybe. I mean, I’m ad about property tax anyway,
just because it’s I don’t know, we pay so much
in taxes. Then you finally scrape up enough to buy
(35:50):
a place that’s your own, and the government’s then like, well,
if you’re going to have to pay tax on that,
do right? You know, I know, it’s seems unfair. Also,
you shouldn’t have to pay full price for coffee anywhere
once you reach sixty five or old agreed, especially after
three pm. Uh, All right, well, should we take a
break and then talk about the Fair Housing Act, which
(36:11):
solved everything. It totally did. It’s all great now, alright,
we’ll be right back up to this. Alright, spoiler, So
(36:41):
we ruined things. They passed the Fair Housing Act, and
racism has been solved in America. That’s right. Ninety eight
And we talked about the Fair Housing Act a little bit, UM,
and you know, it’s a good thing they passed it.
It did banned discrimination in housing practices officially, but it
just led to a little trickier way to get around
(37:03):
stuff by UM doing it on the download. Yeah, and
that is that is for if you’re studying systemic racisicism
in the United States. The passing of like the Voting
Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act UH,
and some other legislation UM during the sixties really changed
things in that no longer was the government in the
(37:27):
business of enforcing discrimination and segregation UM. And also now
you had recourse in the courts if you were discriminated
against UM. But it didn’t just a race racism in
the United States that that task of enforcing basically white
supremacy and racial discrimination and segregation and all the stuff
(37:48):
that comes along with it fell to um lesser institutions
in everyday people who carried out. And when you’re talking
about something like housing discrimination, UM, the people who now
are best able to continue enforcing segregation and discrimination in
the United States are people like lenders and real estate
(38:10):
agents and even people who are deciding where to buy
a house. Um. Everyday americans buying the house UM often
make choices that they don’t necessarily think our racist, and
they might they probably don’t think that they’re racist, but
they’re still they’re housing choices often reflect um inadvertent or
(38:32):
otherwise racial choices or choices along racial lines. Yeah, and
this you know this next bit, we’re we’re sort of
busting on real estate professionals a little bit. I have
very good friends that are real estate agents. They’re great
people for the most part. We don’t mean to just
paint everything with the big broadbrush, but the industry does
(38:54):
have a history of it, for sure. Yeah, and we
have to talk about it. So there was one in
the in the eighties, there was one practice called block
busting god um not having anything to do with video stores,
I know it was the eighties, but um literally busting
up a block. When a real estate agent would work
or sort of act as a speculator and say, either, hey,
(39:19):
you know what you know, there are some black families
that are moving into the area. You may want to
think about selling just to protect your home values before
they fall. Or they might sell to a black family
and introduce them to the area so they could then
turn around, um, buy these houses from the white residents
and then sell them to the black residents or you know,
(39:41):
hopefully black residents, but at a big mark up. Yeah,
which has insult to injury, Like they created a basically
white flight from an area just from the rumor of
black people moving in, and then they move black people
in and sell them sell to them at wildly inflated rates,
which is crazy. And I read one story to Chuck
of one of these real estate agents that was doing blockbusting.
(40:03):
They would have a black dad with the stroller walk
around the neighborhood, um like he had moved in or
was thinking of moving in or whatever, and apparently just
that was enough to get people to start to sell.
And again you’re like, you know, this is this is
terrible that real estate agents are doing it. But the
fact that it was effective really says a lot about
every day you know, white homeowners too. And also again
(40:27):
like it it doesn’t mean like that these white homeowners
hate black people like they were worried about their property values,
because it’s such an embedded myth in America that when
a black family moves into a neighborhood, they’re so bad
at taking care of their their house and their home
values that it’s going to drag the home values down
in throughout the entire neighborhood. And so everybody needed to
(40:49):
get out before that happened. That’s that’s again, that’s the
definition of systemic racism. Yeah, and you know this has
been busted up to a large degree officially, but up
until nineteen fifty, the official policy of the National Association
of Real Estate Boards UM said a realtor should never
be instrumental and introducing into a neighborhood members of any
(41:13):
race or nationality whose presence will clearly be detrimental to
property values in that neighborhood. That was like literal policy
up until nineteen fifty, and then there was a study
in two thousand six by the National Fair Housing Alliance
that said, and this is something else called steering, which
is not blockbusting, but it’s like, hey, like we want
(41:34):
to show you houses over here in this neighborhood because
we think it’s a better fit for you. Uh. And
you know here the financial instruments available to get mortgages
for you and maybe not just for everybody. And black
people historically have not given the full picture. They’re maybe
not shown white neighborhoods. Uh. And the study found that
steering occurred sent of the time when researchers posed as
(41:58):
buyers and we’re shown homes like these sort of undercover operations. Yeah,
and steering occurs, um not just you know, if you’re
if you’re a black home buyer, you’re not just going
to be shown a black neighborhoods. If you’re a white
home buyer, they’re probably not going to take you to
black neighborhoods either. So through this process of racial steering,
this is basically enforcing patterns of segregation still in the
(42:22):
United States. Yeah, there was another study by Brookings. They
found that black owned homes are undervalued by an average
of forty thou dollars. And this is one that’s controlled
by all the factors like home quality and amenities and everything. Exclamation, Yeah,
it’s forty eight grand literally because it is a home
(42:43):
owned by a black individual. When they control for amenities
where the home is the size of the house, everything
else about the house. If you compare apples to apples,
and it’s the same house owned by a white person
and the other house that’s exactly the same home by
a black person, the black person’s house is going to
be forty thousand dollars less in value just because it’s
(43:05):
owned by a black person. And that’s that’s just basically
that whole idea of um that black people drag home
values down becoming a self fulfilling prophecy, and um that
those same home values are all of that undervaluing that
same Brooking study found amounts to a loss of about
(43:27):
a hundred and fifty six billion dollars for Black Americans. Yeah,
for wealth they were not able to achieve. And uh,
you know, we talked a lot about the Great Recession
in the mortgage crisis kind of when it was going
on and shortly thereafter, Um, Black Americans back then were
likelier to receive subprime mortgages. These were the loans that
(43:47):
were really expensive to repay. They had higher fees, they
had higher interest rates, um they also had mechanisms built
in if you were a black loan owner that made
it easier for the lender to seize their collateral with
usually meant their house and so like, it makes sense
that if you are taking a greater risk lending to
somebody as the bank, you should be able to get
(44:10):
more money for it, right, But the problem is is
like subprime mortgages were doled out to black homeowners or
black home buyers at way higher rates than they were
to white home buyers. And that’s a problem in and
of itself if the if the rates are less favorable
and it’s easier for the bank to repossess the house.
But especially it proved to be a big problem during
(44:32):
the mortgage crisis when that bubble bursts, because if you
were a low income Black American, you were probably denied
a mortgage of any kind. But even if you were
a middle to high income black home buyer, you probably
got a subprime mortgage compared to say, a white buyer
(44:52):
with the same criteria that you had to offer. UM.
So that meant that when those foreclosures happened because the
bubble bursts, Black Americans, especially UM, wealthier Black Americans, were
disproportionately impacted, so that that subprime mortgage debacle erased way
more Black intergenerational wealth than it did for white people. Yeah,
(45:15):
I have my last three exclamation points. Stat during the
subprime mortgage crisis, there was a study that found black
and Latino families, because you know we’ve mentioned people of
color a few times, is not just solely African American
families affected? Um, And the study found that black and
Latino families making two hundred thousand dollars a year or more,
(45:39):
we’re still more likely to receive a subprime loan than
white families making less than thirty thousand dollars a year.
That nuts, and six point two percent of white people
with a credit score of six sixty or higher received
a subprime mortgage compared to twenty one point four percent
of black borrowers with that same credit score. So, Chuck, UM,
(46:00):
there’s a big problem with all this. And it’s kind
of like you said at the beginning, like when you’re
talking about race and especially discrimination by race. Um, people
tend to be like, especially white people tend to be like, well,
I don’t know about that. I mean, there’s a lot
of other factors involved, Like it could be anything. So
you really have to kind of prove that this is
a thing. And ever since the federal government got out
(46:22):
of discriminating on paper, um, it’s gotten a lot harder
to track. So back in the seventies, the Department of
Housing and Urban Development, they have an office of Research
and Policy. They came up with the way of testing
this to control for as many variables as possible and
just see if it’s just race that is being discriminated against.
(46:43):
And it’s called paired testing. It’s actually pretty clever from
what I understand. Yeah, that’s when you get to equally
qualified candidates to apply for homeown or to go to
a real estate agent and like look at apartments or
houses or whatever. Uh. They are trained to basically be
as identical as they can be to one another, to
(47:04):
respond to the questions in the same way, have the
same credit history, same job status, same income level, and
basically sort of be duplicates of one another except for
their skin color. Uh, they’re not working together so they
don’t even know, um, like there’s no bias there even
because they’re not like paired together, right, They’re not like,
oh they got too, I’m gonna try this with them.
Like they don’t. They don’t meet one another, they don’t
(47:26):
interact with one another. They’re just doing their thing and
they’re just trained to do it exactly the same way.
The only distinction between them is their their race. Right.
And so the Urban Institute, which is a think tank,
UM study this and they came up with kind of
four big points from this paired testing UH exercise, which
(47:47):
is UH. They found about discrimination and housing vouchers that
are intended to let low income renters choose from a
bigger pool a rental housing uh than the realtors even showed. UM,
there were fewer homes and apartments available to minorities like
we were, like I kind of mentioned earlier, like just
a smaller like no, you know, we’ll just look here. Yeah,
(48:09):
the racial steering usually results in fewer, fewer places being shown. Um.
They were steered again to primarily um, you know, neighborhoods
of their own ethnicity, and then given less information overall.
Like I mentioned about mortgage products, UM, different kinds of loans,
different kinds of ways of structuring a loan, just not
(48:31):
given that information at all. Right, Um, so the they
also found this paired testing turns up very frequently that um,
it’s not just even people of colors, not just black Americans,
but it’s people of color in general. But um, it’s
not even just down to to racial discrimination. There’s also
a lot of discrimination against people who are differently abled.
(48:53):
They actually sometimes fair worse than minorities when it comes
to housing discrimination. Paired testing is has turned that up
as well. So it’s still the upshot of all this
is that it’s still a problem and there is like
some silver lining to it. Um the I think. Uh.
That same think tank, the Urban Institute, also turned up
(49:14):
that there’s been a general decline overall. It’s not huge,
but it’s it’s noteworthy. It’s remarkable. Um of preference in
favoritism toward white white buyers over buyers of of like
minority buyers by about five percent between and two thousand.
It went from about so And there does seem to
(49:38):
be a general decline in racism or discrimination, I should say, uh,
in the United States. So that’s the good news, is
that America seems to be getting less racist. The bad
news is that America is still racist. Like, we still
have a long way to go. It’s, as the study
put the studies findings confirm a hard truth that America’s
(49:58):
long journey to end housing discrimination remains unfinished. Um. And
so there’s still a long way to go. And I
think it’s really important for everybody to realize that there’s
a long history of discriminating against people of color, but
also very specifically Black Americans, and that it’s still going
on today. And even though it’s in a slightly lesser form,
it’s very important if it’s going on at all, that
(50:21):
we we erase it. That’s right, agreed, You got anything else?
Nothing else? All right, Chuck, Well then that’s housing discrimination.
And since I said all right, Chuck, it’s time for
a listener mail. Well instead of reading a specific listener mail.
And because this episode is a little heavy, we thought
we’d have a little fun. Um. We got maybe more
(50:45):
emails than we have for any other episode in our
history down literally about Neco wavers Um. A lot of
support for the Neco for people, and a lot of
condemnation for yucking yums without giving having tried them. You
were all correct. We honor you all, and we’re gonna
Josh got some sent them to me. We’re gonna try
(51:06):
some necka wafers on the air. Listen there. I just
realized I think I made a grave mistake by not
having any water in the basement. Yeah, I just realized
this as well. Do you have a pipe to tap into?
I think we should eat the same color. Oh really? Okay,
all right, so we can kind of go, you know,
nose to nose. I’m never open one these before. Okay, exactly, already,
(51:29):
so nasty. You know, everybody was right about yucking people’s
yams in general, but also because we hadn’t tried them.
So that’s why we’re doing this. I mean, they’re just
falling apart when I opened the package. So to strike one,
I’ve got a mess on my table. What color are
we gonna do? I mean it’s hard to tell. This
looks sort of like a very pale yellow. That’s the
(51:51):
only whole one in my hand. Pale yellow. I don’t
even have that. I got white. I’ve got orange it
maybe maybe it is white, Okay, I’ll call it. Wait wait, wait, wait,
I might have a palio when I do, I do it. Okay,
apology to the people of Mesophonia, but here we go.
Oh my god, it’s just like it’s like a flatter um,
(52:18):
bigger candy heart. The conversation hart, it’s not bam like okay,
very hard, the crunches. I think what probably gets people.
I mean, the taste isn’t bad, but it’s not great. No,
they’re not great, But I mean, who’s crazy for conversation hearts,
sickos and weirdos? You know, the same goes for me. Well,
(52:40):
what’s the verdict? Would you ever buy and eat Neca
wafers after this? I will tell you what. I will
probably eat the rest of these. And I like sugar.
I like as atter fact, I’m gonna do one of
the gray ones real quick. What about you? Uh no, no,
that is not my up my alley. But I’m gonna
(53:02):
try one of those chocolates because those where I think
recommended steer clear, the dark gray ones, the liquorice ones.
They’re awful. It tastes Oh no, it is slightly different. Yeah,
I get a little hint up cocoa. I’ve come around
a little bit to the liquorice ones. At the end Wow,
I’m turning into an eco weirdo. Actually, the chocolate aren’t bad.
(53:23):
What about pink? Try pink? Well, that’s um, this is
winter green. I think people are so disgusted right now. Yeah,
this is all right. We’re literally the last two people
listening to this. Man, I think we should wrap this. Okay. Well, um,
if you want to tell us that we shouldn’t yuck
everybody’s jump, especially about something we haven’t tried, we need
(53:44):
to hear that whenever we do that. It’s totally true
and totally right. Thank you everybody who wrote him. You
can get in touch with us at Stuff podcast at
I heart radio dot calm Stuff. You should know it
is pretty action of I heart Radio. For more podcasts
for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
(54:05):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H
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Released: 2023
Series: Short Wave
When Dr. Chloé Schmidt was a PhD student in Winnepeg, Canada, she was studying wildlife in urban areas. She and her advisor Dr. Colin Garroway came across a 2020 paper that posed a hypothesis: If the echos of systemic racism affect the human residents of neighborhoods and cities, then it should affect the wildlife as well. Short Wave Scientist in Residence Regina G. Barber talks to Chloé and Colin about their findings of how redlining and biodiversity are intertwined.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy
Sabah Usmani on making cities healthy and just
Duration: 00:39:44
Released: 2023
Series: Agents of Change in Environmental Justice
Sabah Usmani joins the Agents of Change in Environmental Justice podcast to discuss the role of urban planners in tackling environmental injustice.
Video Clips
A history of redlining in Omaha
KMTV 3 News Now, 09 14, 2021
Video (2:20)
Description
3 News Now reporter Danielle Davis visited the Union for Contemporary Arts where a display outlines the history of redlining with a call.
Transcript
0:01 · a top Nixon adviser was r Nixon White House had two left and black people. We make it illegal to be eit or black, but by getting the hippies with marijuan heroin and then criminali we could disrupt those co a reading from one of the un designed.
0:25 · The red line the beginning and how som of Omaha’s near north and systematically segregated the city. They did this b and discriminatory home l with coded racial languag of allowing banks to lend but when you translate th it’s basically picking wi a community in a city bas race.
0:56 · Um, that also tend parts of the city. So it of institutionalized raci it the blueprint here in rather red and white. You were literally drawn on c funded home owner’s loan identified predominantly immigrant communities as for investment.
1:22 · Redlining schools, even during blac when, you know, the histo can better understand the to bring about change und opens up discussions abou and power in an honest co about guilt or blame.
1:40 · Um so I learned like America and freedom and and fairn about all these things li so I get hope from at eve fighting back and working for fairness and that tha spirit of like this isn’t like a little kids like t can we include everyone?
2:08 · educating and uniting. We leaders, raid their homes
Greenlining Fund Invests in Omaha’s Historically Redlined Neighborhoods
The Omaha News, 03 12, 2025
Video (1:32)
Description
The Omaha News streams live every Wednesday at 4 p.m. on YouTube, Facebook and The Knowledge Network (TKN) during the academic year. The half-hour newscast also airs state-wide on NET reaching all of Nebraska’s 1.9 million residents.
Our mission is to fully immerse University of Nebraska at Omaha journalists into the business of reporting and investigating live, local stories that impact our region. Located in the Community of Public Affairs and Community Service building, our newsroom is home to state-of-the-art facilities and award-winning journalism.
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Transcript
0:02 · front porch Investments green lining fund is helping homeowners in historically Redline areas invest in their properties and enhance the community redlining is the practice of denying loans and services to minority neighborhoods which led to long-term disinvestment and though outlawed in 1968 its effects still linger Yolanda
0:19 · Williams housing Justice and grants manager at front porch Investments says this impact is still evident today how can this impact North Omaha residents particularly the black North Omaha residents that’s struggle to find affordable housing that are struggling with home ownership and just the valuations of these homes are much lower than counterparts in you know Midtown or West Omaha in 2023 the green lining fund launched a program providing 0% interest loans of up to $5,000 per property to
0:48 · help homeowners with critical repairs These funds support Home Improvements and Renovations aiming to stabilize households and address critical housing needs etel Lopez CEO of the Latino Economic Development Council says many homeowners are forced to choose between basic maintenance and other essential costs and it’s expensive I mean you talk about you know replacing a window all of this windows in my home office have not been replaced and it’s really cold here do I want to replace the windows which is you know going to cost me so much or
1:17 · do I want to pay a higher monthly bill the green Ling fund isn’t just about fixing homes it’s about restoring investment empowering residents and ensuring North and South Omaha communities can Thrive for generations for the Omaha news I’m marry mitoff
Housing Segregation and Redlining in America A Short History Code Switch NPR
NPR, 04 11, 2018
Video (6:36)
Description
In 1968, Congress passed the Fair Housing Act that made it illegal to discriminate in housing. Gene Demby of NPR’s Code Switch explains why neighborhoods are still so segregated today.
• Read “How Segregation Shapes Fatal Police Violence” at https://n.pr/2Ic6A1Q
• Read or listen to: “‘The Color Of Law’ Details How U.S. Housing Policies Created Segregation” at https://n.pr/2HgqATh
WHAT’S CODE SWITCH?
It’s the fearless conversations about race that you’ve been waiting for! Hosted by journalists of color, our podcast tackles the subject of race head-on. We explore how it impacts every part of society — from politics and pop culture to history, sports and everything in between. This podcast makes ALL OF US part of the conversation — because we’re all part of the story.
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Transcript
0:00 · Chris Rock: You know what’s so sad, man?
0:00 · You know what’s wild?
0:01 · Martin Luther King stood for nonviolence.
0:03 · Now what’s Martin Luther King?
0:05 · A street.
0:07 · And I don’t give a f*** where you at in America, If you on Martin Luther King Boulevard there’s some violence going down.
0:13 · Gene: That, of course, is Chris Rock’s famous joke about streets named for Martin Luther King Jr., which tend to be in – let’s say distressed areas.
0:22 · And he’s not wrong, because if you look at the way housing segregation works in America you can see how things ended up this way.
0:28 · Once you see it, you won’t be able to unsee it.
0:31 · OK, let’s look at MLK Boulevard in Baltimore.
0:35 · I want to show you how to see housing segregation in schools, in health, in family wealth, in policing.
0:41 · But first, an explanatory comma.
0:45 · It’s the 1930s in the wake of the Great Depression.
0:47 · FDR is president.
0:48 · He wants to bring economic relief to millions of Americans through a collection of federal programs and projects called The New Deal.
0:54 · One part of that “new deal” was The National Housing Act of 1934, which introduced ideas like the 30-year mortgage and low, fixed interest rates.
1:03 · So now you have all these lower-income people who can afford homes, but how do you make sure they don’t default on their new mortgages?
1:09 · Enter the Home Owners Loan Corp.
1:12 · The HOLC created residential security maps.
RESIDENTIAL SECURITY MAPS
1:15 · And these maps? They’re where the term redlining comes from.
1:20 · Green meant “best area, best people,” aka businessmen; blue meant “good people,” like white-collar families; yellow meant a “declining area,” with working class families; and red meant “detrimental influences, hazardous,” like “foreign-born” people, “low-class whites,” and – most significantly – “Negroes.”
1:41 · Again and again on these HOLC maps, one of the most consistent criteria for redlined neighborhoods is the presence of black and
brown people.
1:49 · Let’s be clear.
1:50 · Studies show that people who lived in redlined areas were not necessarily more likely to default on their mortgages.
1:57 · But redlining made it difficult — if not impossible — to buy or refinance.
2:02 · So landlords abandon their properties.
2:04 · City services become unreliable.
2:06 · In most places, crime increases.
2:09 · And property values drop.
2:11 · All of these conditions fester for 30 years as white people flee to the brand new suburbs popping up all over the country.
2:18 · Many of those suburbs institute rules, called covenants, that explicitly forbid selling homes to black people.
2:23 · And all of this was perfectly legal.
2:27 · Now it’s 1968.
2:29 · And MLK is assassinated.
2:31 · News Report: Good evening.
2:32 · The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, 39 years old, The apostle of nonviolence in the civil rights movement has been shot to death in Memphis, Tenn.
2:39 · Martin Luther King was shot and was killed tonight in Memphis, Tenn.
2:42 · In the aftermath, Congress passes the Fair Housing Act of 1968.
2:47 · It’s a policy meant to encourage equal housing opportunities regardless of race, or religion or national origin.
2:52 · And it offers protections for future homeowners and renters, but does little to fix the damage already done.
2:58 · Over the next 50 years, the Fair Housing Act is rarely enforced.
3:02 · So you can still see housing segregation and its effects, in Baltimore and often along any MLK Boulevard in any U.S. city.
3:11 · Like its effects on wealth.
WEALTH
3:13 · So homeownership is the major way Americans create wealth, right?
3:16 · Well, discrimination in housing is the major reason that black families up and down the income scale have a tiny fraction of the family wealth that white families do – even white families with less education and lower incomes.
3:28 · For almost 30 years, 98 percent of FHA loans were handed out to white borrowers.
3:33 · Not only were black neighborhoods redlined, and not only was the Fair Housing Act selectively enforced, if at all, but it is still today much harder for a black person to get a mortgage or home loan than it is for a white person.
3:46 · John: Families are fearful of speaking up about a basic human right that should be afforded to everyone in the world but definitely in the richest country in the world.
3:59 · And housing segregation in schools.
4:02 · The primary way that Americans pay for public schools is by paying property taxes.
4:07 · People who live in more valuable homes have better-funded local schools, better-paid teachers, better school facilities and more resources.
4:15 · Here’s a feedback loop: The better the schools in a neighborhood, the more those homes in that neighborhood are worth.
4:21 · And the higher the property values of those homes, the more money there is for schools.
4:25 · And so on and so on.
4:27 · And housing segregation in health.
4:29 · Because of urban planning that benefited those richer, whiter neighborhoods, people of color are more likely to live near industrial plants that spew toxic fumes; they’re more likely to live far away from grocery stores with fresh food, and in places where
the water isn’t drinkable.
HEALTH
4:43 · They’re more likely to live in neighborhoods with crumbling infrastructure, and in homes with toxic paint.
4:49 · Karen: When you’re living with rats, roaches, and things like that – that’s deplorable.
4:53 · You cannot have that kind of stuff with children running around in the building.
4:56 · A building that may be full of lead.
5:00 · And, not coincidentally, people of color have higher incidences of certain cancers, asthma and heart disease.
5:08 · And housing segregation in policing.
POLICING
5:11 · Housing segregation means we are having vastly different experiences with crime and vastly different experiences with policing.
5:17 · Because our neighborhoods are so segregated, sometimes racial profiling can be camouflaged as spatial profiling — where living in certain areas can make you more likely to be stopped by the police.
5:29 · And it means people have a lot of unnecessary contact with the criminal justice system just because of where they live.
5:38 · Reggie: The problem in our city?
5:41 · The police and the citizens are fighting.
5:43 · They keep targeting my brothers and sisters who don’t really have nothing.
5:49 · And that heavy, aggressive kind of policing that you see in black neighborhoods in particular makes people feel like they can’t trust the police.
5:55 · And when people don’t trust the police, crimes go unsolved and people have to find other ways to keep themselves safe.
6:03 · But, of course, it’s not just Baltimore.
6:05 · Because housing segregation and discrimination fundamentally shape the lives of people in nearly every major American city.
6:14 · It really is in everything.
6:18 · To hear more about how race shapes American life, visit npr.org/codeswitch.
6:23 · I’m Gene Demby. Be easy.
How ‘green gentrification’ is pricing out longtime East Boston residents
PBS NewsHour, 06 06, 2022
Video (7:56)
Description
The city of Boston faces two enormous problems: Sea level rise in its harbor that is getting worse with climate change and a dearth of affordable housing, pricing out many longtime residents. Solutions to one of the problems may compound the challenge of solving the other, a phenomenon researchers have called this “green gentrification.” Paul Solman reports.
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Transcript
Boston’s twin crises
0:04 · The city of Boston faces two enormous problems, sea level rise in its harbor that is getting worse with climate change, and a dearth of affordable housing, pricing out many longtime residents.
0:13 · Solutions to one of the problems may compound the challenge of solving the other.
0:18 · Researchers have called this green genritication.
Luxury waterfront development
0:23 · – Green gentrification.
0:25 · Paul Solman reports on the fallout in Boston.
0:29 · Paul in east Boston, long home : To the city’s latest wave of immigrants, sparkling new waterfront apartments where abandoned piers once rotted.
0:34 · A brief ferry ride away, downtown Boston.
0:39 · Convenient.
0:40 · Stunning.
0:41 · We unlocked a part of the waterfront that had been fenced off from the community and reintroduced it to the people free to calm use the place. Paul: And to folks dying to live here, says developer Nick iselin.
1:03 · We thought there was not such a thing as a one million-dollar condominium in Boston. Paul: Which came to a startling $1 million for just 1500 square feet. But a major selling point for those who can afford it, the project is carbon neutral. As it says on its website, climate change ready. A newly created living shoreline, with the stabilization of existing sea walls.
1:34 · New public open spaces support wildlife habitats, promote community gatherings, a kayak launcher, highlight recreational and programming opportunities. There are even a few dozen affordable housing units.
Community displacement
1:48 · What is not to like?
1:52 · Are you from around here?
1:54 · I live here.
1:56 · Paul: What about all these condos going up?
2:00 · They created a ghetto, a white ghetto.
2:04 · Paul: He feels unwelcome. A group of students from east Boston high school, possibly more so.
2:10 · Last summer me and my friends were skipping rocks and they said we were disturbing them.
2:18 · They are snobby people.
2:21 · They say you can’t be here, but it is not private property. Paul: In fact, it’s a public area, with public bathrooms, mandated by state law.
2:30 · We finally got the leasing office.
2:34 · Paul: But, challenges community activist Kannan thiruvengadam – Do I know there is a public restroom I can use?
2:45 · Those things have to be obvious, that makes a space welcoming. The sign is writing here. Paul: Public restroom in port said lobby.
2:58 · And if you can’t find a bathroom, how public is the space?
3:00 · Is it open?
3:03 · It is locked.
3:07 · In fact, guitar player Rios and the students, off after a half day at school, were among the very few non residents on these 9 acres of public space.
3:12 · We used to live here and we were forced to move out.
3:20 · Paul: You could not afford it?
3:22 · We were forced to move out, there is a lot of gentrification. Paul: Gentrification the age-old , problem of urban redevelopment.
3:33 · People are getting displaced, there is not enough opportunity for people with middle to lower income or even a bit above. Paul: This is gentrification with a new twist, green development greening. Green gentrification, adding appeal to a project, and cost, implying – There will be, little by little, a removal of socially more vulnerable groups, working class, middle-class groups. Paul: Researcher Isabelle anguelovski champions climate control but enclaves like this, in her words – Become islands of resilience, privatized.
Defining green gentrification
4:16 · Paul: While their 47,000 or so east Boston neighbors are discouraged from coming near, if not forced out of town, as so many of the students we ran into were.
4:25 · I have to walk to school now, it is like an hour.
4:31 · Paul: You walk an hour a day to school?
4:34 · It used to be 10 minutes.
4:37 · My shoes are messed up.
Unmet climate promises
4:38 · Paul: How long have you had those?
4:39 · A month.
4:41 · Paul: Meanwhile, those who get to stay will be at the mercy of time and tide. East Boston, once five separate islands, is mostly landfilled. The sea level will rise 40 inches by 2070, creating a flood risk to half the neighborhood. Low tide not a problem, but a few hours away, storm surges like one in 2018 which flooded this complex.
5:16 · It got up to the sidewalk?
5:17 · It came onto the ground level.
5:22 · I could not step on without being in the water.
5:24 · Paul: And the east bostonians behind the development?
5:28 · This is a ramp.
5:30 · If rain falls, it will be here.
5:33 · Paul: As for the promised amenities, that public kayak launch has become a tavern – the living shoreline?
5:39 · This is meant to be the living shoreline.
5:44 · Where are the kids, the grass, the blue hair?
5:51 · Paul: The fact is this very , project is now vulnerable to climate change.
5:58 · Nobody built in anticipation of the vulnerability because why?
6:01 · Because they were not required to.
Seeking equitable solutions
6:06 · The assessments had not been done.
6:07 · Paul: So, any fixes?
6:10 · Boston now has a new mayor, Michelle Wu, who ran on a platform of economic equity. She has reverend mariama white-hammond to help implement it.
6:17 · I went to a little, all girls private school and the girls were afraid to come to my house, said they were worried they would get shot. Paul: White-hammond actually protested this project when it was first proposed some seven years ago.
6:32 · We marched because we were deeply concerned the units built were not billed for the residents that were currently here. Paul: But how does she see east Boston development now, as the mayor’s top climate adviser.
6:44 · It is not the melding of the old and new, it is the old being overwhelmed by the new.
6:50 · If people live near a good part, the prices are higher, which means poor people live in the places nobody wants to live.
7:00 · Do not improve those neighborhoods?
7:02 · It is a real catch 22. My family has as much a right to live near a great park as the people who live downtown. The problem is, if I upgrade the park in that community, property values rise.
7:15 · Gentrification is a problem.
7:20 · It is happening for many reasons. Market forces, people are getting displaced. Whether or not we have green spaces here, that gentrification would be happening. Paul: And thus the last question, to community activist la Battaglia.
7:38 · Green gentrification compounds the problem?
7:39 · It exacerbates it.
7:42 · Paul: Exacerbates the problem of choice venues versus this land. – A problem facing choice urban venues all over this land. For the pbs newshour, Paul
How redlining prevented Black and Brown families from becoming home owners
Harvard Kennedy School, 09 19, 2023
Video (4:28)
Description
The term “redlining” refers to the practice by banks of excluding Black and Brown Americans from receiving loans to buy homes and make improvements to their communities. Redlining arose during the Great Depression, when the federal government sought to boost homeownership by encouraging banks to lend to more Americans. Many neighborhoods, specifically those with majority Black and Brown residents, were deemed undeserving of these loans. Though redlining was made illegal by the Fair Housing Act, the effects of this practice still reverberate to this day.
In this video, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, Ford Foundation Professor of History, Race, and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School and director of the Institutional Antiracism and Accountability Project, provides background on the history and legacy of redlining.
About Harvard Kennedy School:
The John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University is a graduate and professional school that brings together students, scholars, and practitioners who combine thought and action to make the world a better place.
Our mission is to improve public policy and public leadership across the United States and around the world so that people can lead safer, freer, and more prosperous lives. Harvard Kennedy School teaches current and future leaders the skills they need to effectively advance the public purpose in the public, nonprofit, and private sectors. Our renowned faculty and trailblazing research centers pioneer bold new ideas. And as the most international school at Harvard, we convene global leaders in the Forum, host visiting experts in the classroom, and attract a diverse community of faculty, students, and staff.
Transcript
0:00 · In every way imaginable, the consequences of redlining to many black and brown communities across America meant that those communities had the least and the last of everything.
0:16 · So I want to talk about redlining, because this is a term you may have heard, but most people don’t actually know the history.
0:24 · In 1933, in the midst of America’s Great Depression, when unemployment rates were 25% and millions of people were not only out of work, but many of them were houseless, the federal government under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt established an agency called the Home Owners Loan Corporation.
0:42 · Basically, it tried to make home buying much more affordable by subsidizing the cost of building and lending such that people would be able to afford to buy for the first time.
0:55 · Millions of Americans participated, except that when the Home Owners Loan Corporation began to issue mortgages, it came up with a scheme to decide which communities were deserving of loans and which ones weren’t.
1:10 · They made maps and used a color coded scheme.
1:14 · Green meant this was a community that you could lend to and red you could not.
1:19 · The basic decision they made was to determine that any community with the presence of black people or brown people or people who, perhaps, spoke Italian, in certain parts of the country could not receive support from the Home Owners Loan Corporation.
1:36 · This created a system that came to be known as redlining because communities that were deemed risky by the mere presence of people of color, most especially black people, were disqualified from getting direct support from the federal government to purchase homes.
1:53 · This policy lasted until 1968, when the federal government passed the Fair Housing Act, which made all forms of discrimination in the buying and selling or renting of homes illegal.
2:08 · But the truth is that the legacies of redlining from that moment to the present meant that black people were subjected to other forms of exploitative lending.
2:18 · A system called contract buying grew up as a way to sell black people homes on a layaway plan.
2:26 · You made set payments over an extended period of time, but you never owned the home until the very last payment.
2:34 · It was very common for unscrupulous sellers to withhold that final payment in an effort to take back the home from a person who had worked incredibly hard to buy it.
2:45 · Home ownership has been the most important asset that a typical white family has in order to do simple things like borrow money to send a child to college.
2:58 · But most importantly, they have financial freedom.
3:01 · But for communities that have been subjected to redlining, they didn’t have those advantages.
3:08 · Not only that, the very communities that they lived in suffered from divestment, including the lack of grocery stores, the lack of businesses, the imposition of federal highways that often bisected their communities.
3:24 · In every way imaginable, the consequences of redlining to many black and brown communities across America meant that those communities had the least and the last of everything.
3:38 · And to this day, the median wages and income of those communities, and the financial insecurity that people who live in redlined communities face, has long term health consequences for families, has educational consequences for young people whose schools often don’t have the tax basis to give them the same resources that communities that were never redlined actually have.
How systemic racism shaped the ecosystems of U.S. cities
Science Magazine, 10 09, 2020
Video (4:08)
Description
Historically Black and immigrant communities are more vulnerable to environmental stressors
Read the research: https://scim.ag/3nzjnQE
Credits
producer
Meagan Cantwell
supervising producer
Joel Goldberd
research
Schell et al., Science 2020
DOI: 10.1126/science.aay4497
special thanks
Elizabeth Pennisi
Pratheek Rebala
Sacha Vigneri
video footage
Meagan Cantwell
Pond5
Videoblocks
Videvo
archival footage
Dynamic Films
Encyclopedia Britannica Films
FDR Presidential Library
Prelinger Archives
photos
Library of Congress
Ted Etyan/Flickr
Will Parson/Chesapeake Bay Program
Enoch Pratt Free Library/Maryland’s State Library Resource Center
illustrations
British Library/Flickr
maps/data
Howard Center for Investigative Journalism/CNS/NPR
Johns Hopkins University
Library of Congress
Meagan Cantwell
Portland State/SUPR Lab
Robert K. Nelson et al., 2020 “Mapping Inequality”
music
“Vultures” by Chris Burns
Transcript
0:01 · The urban environment is a feat of human decision-making— from where to develop street grids lined with large glass office buildings, to which green spaces to preserve for outdoor recreation.
0:13 · How humans make these choices, and the natural environment’s response, can create extremely different ecosystems in neighborhoods just a few blocks away from each other.
0:23 · Researchers delved into dozens of studies to understand what drives these variations.
0:29 · One well documented phenomenon in cities is the relationship between wealth and biodiversity.
0:35 · More affluent areas generally have greater canopy cover, with larger, mature trees, as well as a higher diversity of birds.
0:45 · This is known as the “luxury effect.”
0:48 · Low-income areas typically have more man-made surfaces— including major heat-absorbers like asphalt and concrete, compared to higher-income areas.
0:59 · The lack of shade from trees and vegetation, combined with more asphalt and concrete, makes it hotter in these neighborhoods— a phenomenon known as an “urban heat island.”
1:10 · These communities are also more likely to be near sources of air pollutants, like expansive interstates pumping car exhaust.
1:19 · Although wealth can sometimes predict the outcomes of an urban ecosystem, there isn’t always a clear relationship.
1:26 · In some cases, the racial make-up of a neighborhood is better than income when forecasting canopy cover.
1:33 · Researchers explored studies that highlight how systemic racism shaped our build environment.
1:39 · One glaring example in the United States is residential segregation.
1:44 · From 1933-1968, the federal government limited access to homeownership among Black Americans through a practice known as redlining.
1:55 · Neighborhoods were graded based on the riskiness of providing a mortgage in the area.
2:00 · The grades ranged from A, the most desirable areas, full of wealthy businessmen, to D, neighborhoods considered high-risk investments due to a combination of factors: from their environmental quality and distance from large industrial factories to the main determinant, the presence of foreign-born and Black people.
2:22 · The inability for Black people to buy homes in these neighborhoods meant many types of capital investments left— landlords abandoned their properties, and public services, such as transportation and park maintenance, weren’t prioritized.
2:36 · Today, many U.S. cities still exhibit long-lasting environmental impacts from this discrimination.
2:42 · Neighborhoods which had a “D” grade in the 60s have about half the canopy cover of historically white communities.
2:50 · Some studies evaluate how the current environment relates to historically redlined communities, but researchers did not find any research that traces how ecosystems changed over time because of this segregation.
3:03 · They propose that because habitable regions are more spread out in these areas, animal populations struggle to breed since they are cut off from each other.
3:14 · The reduced breeding options for animals could have decreased gene diversity, an important way for animals to adapt to changing environments.
3:23 · And decreased gene flow of native species could promote the abundance of pest species, like mosquitos and brown rats, which carry diseases that can infect humans.
3:34 · The combination of all these outcomes— from urban heat islands to increased pests— make low-income, marginalized communities far more vulnerable to risks like climate change.
3:47 · Scientists say such evidence shows that conservation and social justice cross paths— especially along neighborhood streets.
How the U.S. Government Segregated Chicago Inside Chicago, Part 1
AJ+, 05 25, 2017
Video (8:24)
Description
Chicago has a long history of racist housing policies that have led to a racially divided city – a major factor behind the city’s reputation of violence.
Check out this similar video from AJ+: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ert_qPXQGQA
Senior Producer: Maggie Beidelman
Producers: Jun Stinson, Omar Duwaji, Emily Gibson
Executive Producer and Narration: Sarah Nasr
Editor: Michael Ngyuen
Animator: Kai Tang
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Transcript
0:00 · there are two faces to the city of Chicago first you see its spectacular downtown next to Lake Michigan with its famous theaters and incredible architecture top that off with some of the most passionate sports fans in the country you get the picture but the other face of Chicago is known for its violence and the thousands of lives lost in recent years one child is killed in Chicago every week and this is the face of Chicago that seems to dominate the headlines and the national conversations surrounding the city you walk down the street you get shot in Chicago they’ve
0:33 · had thousands of shootings thousands and I’m saying where is this is this a war torn country but this Narrative of Carnage of endemic violence is incomplete I know this because I’m from Chicago it’s a beautifully diverse place with a population almost evenly split between black white and Latino Americans
0:52 · but chai toown is also one of the most racially divided cities in the United States most of these ethnic groups live in different neighborhoods seated by geography segregation is like air and water we just live it we just breathe it we don’t really think about it it’s just sort of how things are I wanted to find out how Chicago got this way and how its segregation led to so many of its [Music]
1:19 · problems Chicago segregation is best explained on a map you have your North Side you have your south side and you have your west side to the east is the lake those terms North South and West have subtle meanings that relate to the racial segregation of Chicago and so when you say the north side people are sometimes subtly meaning the white side and the South Side especially today is
1:44 · predominantly black and so when you say the South Side you are subtly meaning the black Side Chicago is very territorial like for me growing up it was okay I know not to go to Bridgeport like this is a place that’s not really welcoming to African-Americans this graphic segregation is no accident it was engineered over years of deliberate policies in the early 1900 Chicago was
2:09 · largely a city of white immigrants The Great Migration of the 20th century brought millions of black Americans out of the violent gym Crow South hoping for a better life by the end of the 1940s nearly half a million black Americans lived in Chicago mostly in a small Corridor on the South Side called the black belt as the black population
2:27 · increased they faced housing practices that were completely racist and yet completely legal one of the worst was a practice called redlining which allowed Banks to refuse Home Loans to Black residents wanting to move into mostly white neighborhoods this happened to cities Nationwide from Chicago to Oakland to Baltimore Realtors and
2:46 · homeowners signed restrictive covenants saying they wouldn’t sell to black families in those white neighborhoods and after World War II the federal government subsidized white veterans with low interest loans for fresh new homes in Suburbia complete with big yard yards and highways to get there the federal government was basically saying neighborhoods that are racially integrated are a high are highrisk neighborhoods and so we’re not going to ensure those mortgages in those neighborhoods um so they were um supporting a suburbanization that led to
3:16 · predominantly white suburbs and predominantly black urban neighborhoods meanwhile Realtors often participated in Shady practices there were Brokers that would go into a block and they may move move a minority female
3:32 · with her four five or six children into a two-bedroom house and they would go down to block telling folks well they’re here your values are going to depreciate your daughters will be raped and which meant now what we can do is we can help you get out of here before it’s too late Brokers would cheat those white homeowners by buying those Homes at a low price and then turn around and cheat
3:56 · the black homeowners by selling them those same Homes at an in at ated rate these practices continued even after the Fair Housing Act of 1968 which made it illegal to refuse to sell or finance a home based on someone’s race but not all Realtors were so deceptive Frank who opened his real estate office in 1971 has often been credited with integrating the Beverly neighborhood on Chicago South Side our office windows were being broken and there was demonstrations uh and that very year the community
4:26 · organization was asking that I would sign a anti an solicitation list which meant that I would not solicit nor sell within those communities but Frank refused to back down and continued to sell to black families the neighborhood retaliated
4:43 · mobs marched on his real estate office neighborhood ladies would call and tie up his phone lines all day long so he couldn’t get business Frank was investigated multiple times over the years in an effort to stop his work and things got worse when Frank and his wife who’s white decided to buy their own home I was prepared to do what was necessary to buy it but we rejected for
5:06 · our loan they still managed to buy it and a year later in 1975 that home was targeted it was one evening uh I guess about about 8:00 you know the sun was going down Etc and uh you know my wife and I and the two girls and and our and our number two son was in the house number one son had not gotten home yet and boom at the front door that was a bomb a moltov cocktail you know that was placed
5:35 · you know within the mailbox and boom Frank’s family survived the incident but the front of the house was destroyed and the kids who placed the bomb they were never prosecuted so if black families couldn’t get loans to move to the suburbs or white neighborhoods in the city what was left for them black folks were living in the older parts of the city where overcrowding had very much led to the
5:58 · deterioration of hous housing in black neighborhoods and so black Chicagoans needed decent safe affordable housing the answer in the post-war era was public housing public housing was welcome these were brand new buildings built in a style that at that time was awesome these highrises with elevators
6:16 · and with big green spaces in in front of them so public housing began as Paradise for many families it was an escape from what was deteriorating housing after many decades of overcrowding um so that was the Golden Age of public housing in the 194 40s 50s early 60s but these
6:32 · paradises were also isolating and by the 70s and ’ 80s these highrises became as bad as the housing they sought to replace with a concentration of poverty that led to violence gangs and drug abuse as a result support for public housing waned through their sheer force of humanity had to maintain their own
6:51 · Community because the city and the federal government had very much abandoned them I remember these high-rise buildings like Cabrini Green and the Robert Taylor homes which everyone called the projects family and friends told us not to go there my high school English teacher called them prisons for the poor in 2000 the city started demolishing them to try to clean up the neighborhoods but today while the projects may be gone many of the people who lived in them are still suffering from the effects of poverty what happens is that people think that this is only a Chicago issue you know Baltimore Detroit
7:23 · Philadelphia urban places in this country are all dealing with these same issues of leg Legacy of segregation that has roots in housing inequity and violence comes along with that these cities continueed to suffer from their divisions from 1955 to 1970 62% of
7:42 · blacks and only 4% of whites Across America were raised in poor neighborhoods half a century later those numbers haven’t changed yes the whites only signs are gone and the rate of black poverty has decreased but the scars of a segregated City Run Deep from poor healthare access to of jobs and yes violence and all of this makes me wonder how do these color lines affect the city’s most vulnerable its
8:09 · kids Chicago is so segregated that more than half of the city’s black population lives in 20 of its 77 communities in the next video we’ll take a look at what segregation does to a city and how it affects the lives of those living there
How the US made affordable homes illegal
Vox, 08 16, 2021
Video (9:41)
Description
The rules that keep American housing expensive.
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Over the past year, housing prices in the US rose precipitously. Low interest rates and millennials’ entry into the market spiked demand across the nation, leading housing prices in some cities to increase by more than 20 percent in one year, and crushing the dreams of many would-be homeowners.
But housing prices in the US were a problem long before 2020 — and while demand is a big part of the story, there’s an even bigger reason it’s increasingly difficult for Americans to find affordable housing: We don’t have enough houses. According to one estimate, the US is now facing a nearly four-million-home shortage. And the primary reason for that shortage is what’s called exclusionary zoning.
Zoning laws are the local rules and regulations that decide what types of homes can be built where. These rules can sometimes have good intentions. But they also have a dark history in the United States as a tool to keep certain races, religions, and nationalities out of white neighborhoods. And while zoning laws in the US are no longer explicitly racist, their effect remains basically the same: to keep affordable housing, and the people who need it, away from the wealthiest Americans.
Today, in the majority of the US, especially in cities with good jobs, it’s illegal to build many affordable types of housing. And it’s led to a widespread affordability crisis. Watch the video above for more.
Sources:
Jerusalem Demsas reports on housing policy for Vox, and she’s written a ton about this issue:
Houses are getting more and more expensive. There’s a simple fix for that: https://www.vox.com/22464801/housing-bubble-market-crash-supply-shortage-great-recession
What it’ll take to fix America’s housing rules: https://www.vox.com/22252625/america-racist-housing-rules-how-to-fix
The housing shortage is making discrimination a lot easier: https://www.vox.com/2021/5/26/22453293/housing-supply-shortage-discrimination-real-estate-cover-letters
Why the housing market boomed despite the recession: https://www.vox.com/22264268/covid-19-housing-insecurity-housing-prices-mortgage-rates-pandemic-zoning-supply-demand
The zoning maps in the video came from UC Berkeley’s Othering & Belonging Institute: https://belonging.berkeley.edu/single-family-zoning-san-francisco-bay-area
Other data sources:
Redfin: https://www.redfin.com/us-housing-market
Freddie Mac: http://www.freddiemac.com/research/insight/20210507_housing_supply.page
US Census Bureau: https://www.census.gov/construction/nrc/historical_data/index.html
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Vox.com is a news website that helps you cut through the noise and understand what’s really driving the events in the headlines. Check out http://www.vox.com.
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Transcript
The national housing crisis
0:01 · So I spend a lot of time looking at houses on Zillow.
0:05 · And lately, I noticed that, even in places where houses are usually expensive…
0:10 · they seem even more expensive.
0:15 · Like here, in the San Francisco Bay Area.
0:19 · What has the last year been like?
0:34 · For years, the Bay Area has been an extreme example of how difficult it is to find affordable housing in the US.
0:41 · It’s where Silicon Valley bus drivers sleep in their cars at night, because they can’t afford housing near work.
0:48 · And where school teachers can’t afford to live in the counties they teach.
0:53 · But it’s not just the Bay Area.
0:55 · The lack of affordable housing is a national problem.
0:59 · And right now, it’s worse than ever.
1:02 · We’ve seen, over the last year, housing prices reach a level they’ve never reached before in American history.
1:08 · They kind of just look like a rocket ship going to the moon: housing prices reaching a median of $350,000 for the median American home.
1:16 · Those prices have made rents more expensive, and have made homeownership less attainable for millions of Americans.
Supply and demand imbalances
1:25 · So why is this happening?
1:27 · And how do we bring that rocket ship closer to Earth?
1:33 · We can think of today’s housing prices in terms of a supply-and-demand problem.
1:38 · On the demand side, there are a few things happening.
1:41 · The first is a generational shift in who’s buying homes.
1:45 · Millennials are the biggest generation in American history, and they’re aging into their prime home-buying years.
1:51 · On top of that, mortgage rates are at an all-time low, which means it’s very cheap to borrow the money needed to buy a house.
1:58 · That’s enticed more people to buy if they can, making demand for houses even higher.
2:04 · The problem is that supply isn’t matching that demand.
2:10 · From 2010 to 2019, there were fewer homes built in the US than in any decade since the 1960s.
2:18 · In particular, the construction of smaller, entry-level housing, the kind made for first-time home buyers, has dropped dramatically.
2:25 · In the 1980s, those “starter” homes made up around 40% of all homes built.
2:30 · Today, it’s closer to 7%.
2:33 · In 2018, one estimate said the US housing market was 2.5 million homes short of meeting demand.
2:41 · By the end of 2020, it was 3.8 million.
2:44 · And that’s driving a big part of the problem, both for renters and for people who want to be homeowners.
2:49 · The shortage is worst in the places where demand is highest, near good jobs, transit, and schools.
2:55 · And one pretty straightforward solution to that is to just build more homes in those places.
Impact of zoning regulations
3:02 · But for years, there’s been one big obstacle to that: we aren’t allowed to.
3:08 · Take a look at this map of the Bay Area.
3:11 · It’s showing something called zoning, or local regulations that decide what can be built where.
3:16 · This much of the region is zoned for residential housing.
3:20 · In blue are areas zoned to allow multi-family housing, while the areas shaded in pink are zoned for single-family housing only.
3:30 · That’s 82 percent of all residential land in the Bay Area.
3:35 · What it means is that you’ve banned the ability for anyone to build anything other than a single unit of housing on that lot of land.
3:43 · And in many towns, like Atherton, they’ve excluded all multi-family housing from their neighborhoods.
3:50 · And that doesn’t just mean a giant apartment building.
3:52 · It means things like duplexes, things like fourplexes…
3:56 · Things like that are illegal in the majority of the country.
3:59 · This is an example of something called “exclusionary zoning.”
4:03 · It’s a big part of the reason for the housing supply shortage in the US.
4:07 · And single-family-only zoning is just one way local laws limit how much housing we can build.
4:13 · Many places also employ height restrictions.
4:16 · In Cupertino, California, some areas are zoned for multi-family buildings, but they don’t allow any buildings over two stories.
Zoning barriers and segregation
4:27 · Parking requirements are often written into zoning laws, too.
4:30 · Cupertino requires developers to set aside space for two parking spaces for each unit of multi-family housing.
4:37 · That means, if you were building an apartment complex that had 100 units, you’d need to find space for 200 parking spots.
4:45 · Which usually means buildings that size don’t get built at all.
4:49 · They lower the number of units they’re actually building so they can save space for those parking spaces.
4:55 · And then, those units become more expensive because the land still stays the same cost to the developer.
5:00 · And you then get a situation where potentially more affordable units turn into higher-income-servicing units.
5:09 · Another feature of many zoning laws is minimum lot sizes.
5:12 · It means builders are legally required to allot a minimum amount of land for each home.
5:18 · Often a large amount of land.
5:21 · In Cupertino, most single-family lots must be at least 5,000 square feet each.
5:26 · Starter homes are usually around 1,400 to 1,500 square feet.
5:31 · And so you’ve basically banned all that type of housing.
5:34 · In Atherton, the minimum lot size for homes is one acre: more than 43,000 square feet.
5:41 · Which makes it virtually impossible to build any kind of affordable home there.
5:46 · Together, exclusionary zoning laws like this push builders across the country to focus on bigger, luxury homes, instead of smaller starter homes, or multi-family housing.
5:57 · Essentially creating gated communities in public spaces.
6:00 · What you are saying is that you are only allowing people who have already been able to partake in the wealth of this country, and to grow their income, and have access to high opportunity jobs and education, to live in our neighborhoods.
6:11 · Historically, some of the first zoning laws in the US were engineered for that exactly: to block people of color, and in particular Black Americans, from living in predominantly white neighborhoods.
6:22 · Today, the laws don’t explicitly mention race, but they continue to worsen segregation.
6:28 · In the Bay Area, the more single-family zoning in a neighborhood, the whiter it is.
6:34 · But all this has another effect as well: By shrinking the pot of new housing getting built, while demand keeps rising, it drives up the cost of housing for everyone.
Resistance to local changes
6:46 · Changing zoning laws can be difficult.
6:49 · And often, the biggest obstacles are the wealthiest residents.
6:52 · The process is usually defined by who shows up to these public meetings.
6:56 · And what you have is often a much whiter, wealthier crowd, the ones who come and say, “I don’t want this in my community,” “I’m concerned about what will happen to my property values.”
7:05 · And then there’s this kind of code word, “neighborhood character.”
7:09 · Remember those teachers I mentioned, who can’t afford to live in the counties where they teach?
7:14 · Well in 2018, one local school district proposed a solution: building affordable housing units for teachers in San Jose.
7:22 · It caused an uproar among San Jose parents, who petitioned against “changing the neighborhood.”
7:28 · It may not seem like a big deal when one wealthy neighborhood blocks one multi-family development.
7:34 · The problem is that it happens all the time: Communities block new housing everywhere.
7:39 · People are, when they hear this kind of rhetoric, very confused.
7:42 · Because they’re like, “I don’t want to live in a place with ten thousand apartment buildings.
7:47 · It doesn’t make sense to do that.”
7:49 · And they’re right. No one is saying that every neighborhood in every city should be ten thousand-foot apartment buildings or anything like that.
7:58 · But even small, gradual changes to zoning laws can have an impact.
8:02 · For example, allowing smaller homes on smaller lots, or simply allowing duplexes, would double capacity for housing in some areas.
8:12 · In recent years, some cities like Berkeley, Minneapolis, and Portland have taken the huge step of ending single-family zoning.
8:20 · But the problem is nationwide.
Statewide and federal solutions
8:22 · The real fix is going to happen when these decisions start being made, and start being regulated, at the statewide level or at the federal level in some capacity.
8:31 · Today, the Biden administration is attempting to tackle exclusionary zoning through a five billion-dollar program, that would give money to localities that remove exclusionary zoning policies.
8:41 · But even that may not be enough.
8:44 · This is more than any presidential administration has done on this topic, either Democrat or Republican.
8:51 · It is also very small in the face of this problem.
8:54 · They want to take action, they recognize how big of a deal it is, but they are not actually willing to create the kind of political blowback from often very high-value voters living in suburban environments.
9:06 · Ending America’s housing shortage will require real political willpower.
9:11 · And it’ll require people across the country to take a look at their own neighborhoods: what gets built, who gets excluded, and how to make homeownership achievable for the millions who are shut out.
How Urban Heat Impacts Communities of Color
Did You See This?, 07 21, 2021
Video (7:14)
Description
The urban heat island effect is a phenomenon affecting more than 100 cities across the U.S. — here’s how it works and why it disproportionately impacts communities of color.
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Transcript
How zoning can restrict, or even prevent, affordable housing
PBS NewsHour, 01 30, 2021
Video (11:29)
Description
In this next installment of our series, “Roads to Recovery,” Christopher Booker reports on efforts to reform Connecticut’s land use laws, and the complicated mix of history, politics, and racial dynamics that impact who gets to live where. Advocates say restrictive land-use laws have led to inequality and a lack of affordable housing, while some local officials worry about losing a say over what can be built and where. This segment is part of the initiative, Chasing the Dream: Poverty and Opportunity in America.
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Transcript
North Omaha Legacies & More
North Omaha Legacies North Omaha Legacies & More Nebraska Stories Nebraska Public Media
Nebraska Public Media, 04 11, 2023
Video (8:03)
Description
Launched in January of 2022, Preston Love, Jr. guides us on a tour of his beloved North Omaha that celebrates the past and embraces the future. Come along and learn about this historic neighborhood, including a visit to “The Street of Dreams.”
Transcript
0:00 · (light jazz music) (light jazz music) (light jazz music) (light jazz music) [Preston] Well, the truth of
the matter is I’m passionate about my beloved
community, North Omaha, and that passion has taken
on the form of me wanting everyone who comes in
contact or who does not to learn more about
our community, its history and its culture.
0:31 · (mellow jazz music) [Narrator] Writer, activist
and native Nebraskan Preston Love Jr., is
on a mission to change people’s perspectives on
the North Omaha community and he’s found an innovative
way to do it by bringing them to the historically African
American neighborhood.
0:49 · it’s[Preston] That’s why I’m
doing the tour for the purpose of educating
and hopefully waking up people and making them more
aware of this wonderful, my beloved, but wonderful,
glorious community.
1:04 · [Narrator] Called the
North Omaha Legacy Tour it focuses on the
rich heritage, legacy and historical contributions
of the community.
1:13 · It begins with a short
orientation to provide context for the tour, followed
by a drive through areas that are culturally significant.
1:23 · (light jazz music) [Preston] The Omaha Star
is historic in so many ways but it tells a story
about a community, like communities
all over this nation who grew their own things because of racism and
discrimination and bigotry.
1:42 · The Omaha Star was
founded in 1938 by a very eccentric woman by the name of Mildred Brown.
1:51 · Mildred Brown was a
unique lady in her day because she was an African
American business woman in a day where
there weren’t a lot and she was a go-getter,
she started that business.
2:04 · It is still going, but The
Star has quite a history.
2:08 · It was started with the idea
that it would only write the good news about the
residents of North Omaha and it has stayed
with that all along.
2:20 · You have the most
current edition in your pack that I gave you.
2:24 · (light jazz music) [Preston] The Great Plains
Black History Museum is a chronicle in itself.
2:30 · It’s a tour within four
walls, if you will.
2:34 · And so, it has great, great
value for people to learn about the past and how it
connects with the future.
2:42 · Many things I’m going
to turn you over to the executive director of the Great Plains Museum, Eric Ewing.
2:54 · [Eric] As you look around
the exhibit that you’ll find in this space is the
history of historically Black colleges and universities.
3:01 · This is a year long
exhibit, so actually, even what you see right now
by the end of this week, it will be 10 to
eight new institutions because there’s so many schools we couldn’t feature
’em all at once, so what we decided to do was
make it a year long exhibit and each month we change
out the institutions that are on display.
3:23 · [Narrator] But this
tour isn’t just about North Omaha’s past, it’s about revitalizing this
once thriving community.
3:31 · [Preston] We visit some
of our community gardens which are propping up.
3:36 · We visit and comment on
the amount of vacant lots that are unutilized
property in the community.
3:45 · We visit the many wonderful
new and exciting murals in the community and then we visit the
significant residuals of this long-term
community disinvestment, the community’s
economic devastation.
4:02 · All of that is caught up and is mentioned and
part of the tour as well.
4:08 · [Narrator] It also
includes a stop at the site that was once home to
the first Black honoree in the Nebraska Hall of Fame.
4:16 · [Preston] The Malcolm X
Center speaks for itself in my mind because people
are interested and some are just learning that the
iconic Malcolm X was born in this community and so
we go to his birth site.
4:33 · It’s a natural and
it is significant.
4:36 · [Schmeeka] Thank you everyone
for being on this great tour for stopping to visit us here at the Malcolm X
Memorial Foundation.
4:45 · We want everyone to come and
learn the truth of who he was as a man, as a child, as
a husband, as a father, and learn and help
support our mission in uplifting this community.
4:57 · [Narrator] Opening minds
and changing opinions is what Preston Love Jr. hopes
to achieve through the tour, and it seems to be working.
5:05 · Well, the things with
the Malcolm X thing at the end of the tour
was interesting to me.
5:11 · I mean, the things that we
heard about Malcolm X years ago were not very nice
to say the least, and so to see what’s happened and how the people here
have taken an interest in showing what he really did and things that have happened
and are trying to make changes in this whole area based
on his foundation here.
5:35 · So, I think that’s fantastic.
5:37 · Probably one of the
most exciting things that I can mention
about the tour, which was expected,
but underestimated was the economic impact
that we’re having on this poverty
stricken community.
5:54 · Since we’ve started,
our estimate is that we have impacted financially over
$50,000 of money that has come into the community
that would not have come if it weren’t for the tour.
6:07 · That’s the tours, buying from
our retail since they’re here, having meals here
since they’re here returning after the tour.
6:18 · (upbeat jazz music) [Gladys] What being a part
of the Legacy tour has done for Big Mama’s is, you know,
continue my mom’s vision of bringing people
together over great food.
6:31 · The tours bring folks
from all over the state, from all walks of life
and in these crazy times that we live in, we need
things to bring people together and my mother always felt that
you could change the world if you prepared
somebody a great meal.
6:45 · (upbeat jazz music) [Preston] I think the tour
is serving a great purpose.
6:50 · I want people to come
and take this tour because they will
learn about a community when they come from
outside the community that they don’t know.
7:00 · Several times I said,
I didn’t know that.
7:04 · The red line delineating
white neighborhoods from black neighborhoods,
I found very interesting.
7:11 · It never occurred to me
that there was an exact dividing line between
neighborhoods.
7:16 · I didn’t know that.
7:18 · You know, one of the
things I’m really proud of, somewhat unexpected but
it is that we really are really making a difference as
it relates to bridging the gap between communities and
culture within the city.
7:34 · We are really making the
difference and I’m proud that as people learn
about our community then they have a tendency to
wanna learn more, number one and reach out and
develop new relationship.
7:46 · (upbeat jazz music) (upbeat jazz music) (upbeat jazz music)
Omaha Explained Redlining
Cameron Logsdon, 10 09, 2020
Video (11:00)
Description
This (long-ass) video explores the history of redlining in Omaha, NE, the effects of which have lead to Omaha being one of the most segregated cities in the United States. The long-lasting impact of racist redlining practices in Omaha parallel many cities across the country. Learn about your city’s history, find out if there are people trying to improve your community, and donate or get active. Find out more about Omaha in the links below.
Great Plains Black History Museum
https://gpblackhistorymuseum.org
The Union for Contemporary Art
https://www.u-ca.org
Culxr House
https://www.culxr.house
Purpose Built Communities
https://purposebuiltcommunities.org
Seventy Five North
http://www.seventyfivenorth.org
Southside Redevelopment Corporation
https://www.southsideomaha.org
(And hey, Go Vote)
https://www.vote.org
Transcript
Why did we build high-rise public housing projects
City Beautiful, 10 17, 2017
Video (6:48)
Description
Watch this video ad-free on Nebula: https://nebula.tv/videos/city-beautiful-why-did-we-build-high-rise-public-housing-projects
In the spring of 2007, the Chicago Housing Authority demolished the last of the 28 buildings in the Robert Taylor Homes housing project. Robert Taylor Homes is one of several high profile housing project demolitions, from St. Louis’s Pruitt-Igoe to fellow Chicago project Cabrini Green. The demolitions serve as an admission that high-rise public housing wasn’t a good idea. The housing that replaced them are all low rise projects better integrated within existing neighborhoods. So why did anyone back then think it was a good idea? Why did housing authorities build these high rise projects in the first place?
Resources on this topic:
Hunt, D. B. (2001). What Went Wrong with Public Housing in Chicago? A History of the Robert Taylor Homes. Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, 94(1), 96–123.
“Demolished: The End of Chicago’s Public Housing” by David Eads and Helga Salinas. https://apps.npr.org/lookatthis/posts/publichousing/
“When Public Housing Was Paradise” by Joy Connelly https://openingthewindow.com/2011/06/13/when-public-housing-was-paradise-2/
“Elizabeth Wood, 93, Innovator In Early Days of Public Housing” by Bruce Lambert http://www.nytimes.com/1993/01/17/us/elizabeth-wood-93-innovator-in-early-days-of-public-housing.html
“A Brief History of Public Housing” by Jennifer Amy Stoloff https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jennifer_Stoloff/publication/228789405_A_brief_history_of_public_housing/links/5643a68008ae9f9c13e05df6/A-brief-history-of-public-housing.pdf
Video sources: - Archive.org, Prelinger Archives
Photo sources: - Wikimedia Commons - Flickr user Samuel A. Love - Zahiri, N., Dezhdar, O., & Foroutan, M. (2016). Rethinking of Critical Regionalism in High-Rise Buildings. Buildings, 7(1), 4. https://doi.org/10.3390/buildings7010004
Filmed in sunny Sacramento, California.
Transcript
The fall of public housing
0:00 · in the spring of 2007 the Chicago Housing Authority demolished the last of the 28 buildings in the Robert Taylor homes housing project Robert Taylor homes is one of several high profile housing project demolitions from st.
0:12 · Louis’s pruitt-igoe to the fellow Chicago project cabrini-green the demolitions serve as an admission that high-rise public housing wasn’t a good idea the housing that replaced them are all low-rise projects better integrated within existing neighborhoods so why did anyone back then think this was a good idea why didn’t housing authorities build these high-rise projects in the first place to understand why these high-rise
Roots of American housing
0:36 · projects were built we’re gonna have to go back in time all the way back to the Great Depression this is when the US government really began to get seriously involved with the construction of public housing prior to the Great Depression the private market was against the idea of government competing against them but the unprecedented economic climate subdued their protests now contrary to
0:55 · what you might think public housing in this era was not designed to house the poorest of the poor but instead help the middle class that was now struggling thanks to the depression activists and housing advocate Katherine Bowers shaped the nation’s vision for public housing in this era and literally wrote the 1937
1:10 · law that really kicked off public housing in the United States she envisioned large-scale projects on the edges of communities she favored modern architectural techniques but did not favor high-rise projects this general approach of housing workers in low-rise buildings lasted until the end of World War two housing not just public housing
Post-war urban renewal
1:28 · changed dramatically in the post-war years middle class white families moved to the suburbs enduros buying single-family homes they left behind black and immigrant families who could not leave the city either because they could not afford homes or because white neighborhoods would not tolerate black families moving in banks went loan to
1:45 · minority families and real estate agents wouldn’t show them homes in white communities white families were allowed to have a home an asset that increased in value and cemented their place in the middle class black families in the city became poorer and poorer and the federal government was about to make their lives even worse Harry Truman signed the Housing Act of 1949 which was intended to provide vast amounts of federal funding to cities to eradicate what he called slums where five million American
2:09 · families were living at the time and build new modern housing while upgrading the living conditions for millions of Americans may sound like a good idea in practice it was a disaster planners refer to this period of time as urban renewal but for many poor black urban residents it was known at the time as Negro removal as black neighborhoods
2:27 · were demolished but only some housing was rebuilt and much of that housing was actually intended for upper income white residents the full effects of urban renewal are far-reaching and will certainly be the subject of its own video Sunday but here’s this relevant to our discussion of housing projects urban and rural directed funding at the inner cities meaning the kind of projects Katherine Bauer advocated for nice developments in the suburbs just weren’t possible inner-city neighborhoods would be destroyed and replaced with completely new housing now nothing about
The rise of modernism
2:55 · that plan suggests that public housing authorities had to build high-rise buildings they could have replaced existing low-rise neighborhoods with low or medium rise buildings but the architectural style known as modernism was popular modern architects had already developed solutions for the slums and that solution was rows of bleak high-rise buildings lekar Busey a was the most famous of the modern architects who aimed to create a modern city his plan for Paris called for the demolition of the historic Central City in its place would be eighteen identical
3:23 · skyscrapers within super blocks of lawn and trees these towers in the park as the urban form came to be known were meant to serve as a cure for the ails of the city instead of enduring a dark dirty place with a confusing Street Network Parisians could enjoy plentiful light air and views in their Tower then take the elevator down to the park located right at the front door as the towers were identical and each floor was more or less identical they would be very efficient to build and be able to house many people that sounds pretty good right well when coreboot presented the idea back in 1925 Parisians hated it
3:56 · like really hated it it never came close to being built but 25 years later his ideas didn’t sound so crazy anymore two reasons for this first housing advocates wanted to replace old and dilapidated housing with something better and modern towers are pretty much the opposite of slum conditions at the time remember in the area Chicago where
Implementing high-rises
4:15 · Robert Taylor homes was built many did not have private baths and 1/3 of housing units were overcrowded some of these residents look forward to the new modern homes with private baths new appliances Envy in fact high-rise towers may have been a good place to live if local governments and housing authorities would have maintained and policed them well enough and second modern towers can be built relatively cheaply now in the case of the Robert Taylor homes Chicago Housing Authority officials strongly preferred low-rise designs like townhouses for
4:45 · their new housing Elizabeth would the progressive director of the CH a at the time had tried high-rise elevator buildings in the past she was influenced by the modern tower in a park model of lick her Busey a but after criticism from friend Katherine Bauer would admitted that she wasn’t comfortable putting people in high-rises they instead experimented with four-story buildings that were essentially two two-story townhouses stacked on top of each other unfortunately federal officials thought those plans were too costly and required Chicago to cut costs and build high-rise
Failure and new approaches
5:15 · buildings the marginal cost of adding floors to elevator buildings is relatively low so up those buildings went it’s worth noting that the federal government does not deserve all the blame one of the reasons Chicago’s plans were so expensive is because the Chicago City Council responding to the desires of their white constituents refused to
5:34 · allow any new public housing on the outskirts of Chicago where white families were moving in droves and land was cheaper the progressive Chicago Housing Authority had long advocated for sites in white neighborhoods but the racism of white residents halted those plans enforced the mostly black residents of Robert Taylor homes into cheaper and worse high-rise buildings and that brings us back to the wrecking ball the instincts of the Chicago Housing Authority were right the towers didn’t work when st.
5:59 · Louis tore down the pruitt-igoe project in 1972 an architectural historian called its destruction the day modern architecture died the federal government entirely rethought its approach to public housing at that point two new public housing projects were low-rise mixed income and integrated into communities the federal government also created a voucher program so families in need can rent homes on the private market I think it’s safe to say the air of the high-rise public housing project is over hey
6:28 · everyone thanks for watching just a personal side note Katherine Bower and her husband William Wurster co-founded the College of Environmental Design here at UC Berkeley it’s one of the first schools to put architecture Landscape Architecture and city finding under one roof it’s actually this roof right back here so thank you catherine bower for your humane vision for social housing and for my current educational institution
Zoning Matters How Land-Use Policies Shape Our Lives
Urban Institute, 06 12, 2019
Video (2:28)
Description
Zoning is a way for communities to separate land by use or form. But from the start, zoning has separated more than just land uses. It has also separated people. As a result, we pay the cost in public health, racial and economic injustices, higher housing costs, and more. Learn more at http://www.urban.org/zoning
Transcript
0:00 · ♪♪♪ Zoning is a way for communities to separate land by use or form.
0:07 · For example, an area could be dedicated to commercial or industrial use, or there could be a restriction on how many housing units can be built.
0:16 · Zoning shapes the places where we live, but it also shapes our lives.
0:20 · Local zoning regulations determine where we can find housing, schools, and parks, and who gets to use them.
0:26 · Policymakers initially created zoning codes to protect public health- for example, to stop residents from getting sick from living too close to factories.
0:35 · But from the start, zoning has separated more than just land uses.
0:39 · It has also separated people.
0:41 · In the early 20th Century, many communities explicitly used zoning ordinances to racially segregate neighborhoods— effectively declaring that different skin colors were as incompatible as a family’s home and a smokestack.
0:54 · By the late 20th century, civil rights legislation outlawed overt housing discrimination.
1:00 · But those explicit racial barriers were quickly replaced by subtler methods.
1:04 · Even today, exclusionary zoning policies that restrict lower-cost or higher-density housing limit racial and economic diversity and raise housing costs.
1:14 · By driving up housing costs, restrictive zoning can exclude people from equal access to public resources, like schools and parks, and leave lower-income workers unable to afford housing close to available jobs.
1:27 · When regions are more economically and racially segregated, everyone loses.
1:32 · Local economies see slower growth and residents of all races are less upwardly mobile.
1:38 · And finally, despite being created to protect public health, zoning often pushes multifamily buildings closer to highways and areas with higher concentrations of air pollutants.
1:48 · As a result, low-income people and people of color are more likely to live in places that could make them sick.
1:55 · It doesn’t have to be this way.
1:57 · When done thoughtfully, zoning can connect people and places, not divide us.
2:02 · Communities across the US are beginning to reexamine the role of zoning and change their restrictive zoning rules— opening neighborhoods to multifamily housing, walkable densities, and more.
2:14 · For more information and resources, and to find out what other communities are doing to improve their zoning policies, go to urban.org/zoning.
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