It turns out not to be necessary for me to write about the Federal Housing Authority, redlining, and housing discrimination, since Ta-Nahisi Coates, who is far more articulate than I am, already wrote extensively about those things last week. His article is a really cogent and well researched explanation of how the US system has prevented African Americans from "making it" over and over again, in ways including but not limited to legalized housing discrimination, North and South. He uses this history as a well-argued defense of Representative Conyers's proposed House bill to allow Congress to discuss the issue of reparations to African Americans: it's a great piece, and I'd encourage you to go read it.

Other online writers have picked up on Coates's topic: if you want to see how residential segregation practices in the 1930s and 40s impacted the place where you live, you can take a look at Rebecca Onion's list of places to see redlining maps here. (The image below is of the area in Brooklyn where I grew up). Even if you aren't from Richmond, VA, I'd particularly recommend taking a look at the University of Richmond's Redlining Richmond site, which maps current levels of neighborhood poverty and segregation onto redlining or "neighborhood security" maps created by the Home Owner's Loan Corporation in the 1930s. The patterns of both have remained astonishingly stable--or maybe that shouldn't be astonishing. The fact is that when your skin color itself is considered to lower the property values wherever you live, any neighborhood you live in will be a poor neighborhood and, eventually, a segregated neighborhood. When the federal government conspires to make sure that a non-segregated neighborhood isn't a place where builders can get loans to build (the Federal Housing Authority in the 1930s and 40s would not lend money to builders who intended to sell houses to members of "incompatible races" in the same neighborhood), then neighborhoods segregate. And then when everything else--school quality, insurance prices, car insurance prices, interest rates, availability of garbage pickup, availability of jobs--is based on the income levels and skin color of people in your neighborhood, you're stuck. Sometimes for generations, as has been the case for people Coates interviewed for his story. (The first person he quotes, interestingly, was a black WWII veteran who wasn't able to get a government backed loan through the GI Bill).



It's not just the geography of those neighborhood security maps that persists into the current day; it's the very idea of racially based "neighborhood security." Go to any forum on city-data.com and look at the kind of questions people ask before they move. Every one wants to live in a "good" neighborhood, a "safe" neighborhood, precisely because they know that everything from school quality to property values depends on it. And what is a "good, safe" neighborhood? A predominantly white, middle class neighborhood. Just the way those old redlining maps said. Those maps became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

But maybe, you say (as indeed some scholars have said), the maps were just illustrating what was there. After all, poor neighborhoods do have more crime than middle class ones.  But no, I don't think so. And while I'll freely admit that redlining is not my area of expertise, here's why I don't think so. Black neighborhoods were not the only poor neighborhoods around in the 1930s and 40s. Remember the Jewish and Catholic immigrants? The ones who lived in ethnic neighborhoods like the Lower East Side and the Bronx in New York? (I use these areas as examples because they're the places my ancestors lived, but the truth is that every sizeable city had analogous neighborhoods). In a lot of cases, depending on the city, those neighborhoods weren't the same as the black ones--but they, too, were poor and full of crime. This is something a lot of people forget nowadays, now that we've all been socialized to believe that black=poor and black=criminal. Jews not only committed the same crimes, but had the same kinds of gangs--something that my African American students flat-out refused to believe when I told them. Yet those immigrant neighborhoods, while they were not given top security rating on the HOLC's maps, were not redlined. They were rated as somehow less dangerous than the more heavily black neighborhoods. And the people who grew up in them, as I've said, were able to obtain mortgages through the GI Bill. They were broadly able to move to the newly built suburbs (the FHA apparently did not consider "whites" and Jews to be "incompatible races," so builders who sold houses in white neighborhoods to Jews still could get loans). It wasn't that poor Jewish neighborhoods and poor black neighborhoods were somehow radically different in terms of their crime levels in the 1930s. It was that the maps had rated them that way. And when Jews and blacks wanted to move to the suburbs, it wasn't that one family was somehow inherently more dangerous than another. It was that the FHA had decided that blacks and whites were "incompatible," and so it wouldn't loan money to build neighborhoods that housed both. It was that the HOLC had created a rating system which stated that black people made a neighborhood more risky-both as a place to live and as an investment.

So the maps became self-fulfilling prophecies in a real way--they created categories that shaped how things turned out. It turned out that having black neighbors, if you were white, did bring your property values down--not because of anything your neighbor had done, but because the maps dictated that neighborhoods where black people lived were riskier bets, and it would be harder to re-up your mortgage or get a home improvement loan. So white people fought, sometimes violently, not to have black neighbors. Black neighborhoods did end up being more dangerous, in many cases--because they were overcrowded, because they weren't considered a useful investment, because they contained such concentrated poverty. Because the people in them had no way out. And this has continued to this day. Because a bunch of real estate agents created these categories of neighborhood safety. Of course, the hatred behind the categories had a pretty deep history-that's why people went along with them. But did Jews do something especially laudable to get into the suburbs, instead of being stuck in the ghetto (which word, after all, was used to describe places we lived long before it was used to describe Harlem)? Nope. That good old roulette wheel spun, and we were just on the right side. That's all.

I close with a quote from a book I was reading this week on the Jewish Mafia, which, like the Italian Mafia, flourished during the years of Prohibition: "Blocked from entering respectable avenues to success and status, many Jews selected alternate routes to fame and fortune, such as sports (especially boxing), and the entertainment industry. And some tough young Jews may have been angry enough at American society to choose crime" (Rockaway, 1993: 52). Sound like any other much-stereotyped group you know? But then WWII came, and the GI Bill, and American Jewish guys had job options beyond being boxers or gangsters. We got lucky. Not everyone did.

Reference that I haven't linked to:
Rockaway, Robert A.1993. But-- He was Good to His Mother: the Lives and Crimes of Jewish Gangsters. Geffen Publishing House: Jerusalem.