Author and academic Richard Rothstein spoke to the Rotary Club of Los Altos Oct. 29, sharing his perspective on some of the underlying causes of ongoing racial protests amid a polarized electorate.
Rothstein’s virtual presentation included a detailed discussion of how segregation in housing became officially maintained by the federal government after World War II. His recent book, “The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America,” chronicles the way federal housing policies in the 1940s and ’50s undermined the ability of Black families to own homes and build wealth. According to Rothstein, American cities from San Francisco to Boston became so racially divided not because groups voluntarily wanted to live with “their own kind,” but because federal, state and local laws created residential racial zoning, prohibiting minorities in suburban areas.
Rothstein, distinguished fellow at the Economic Policy Institute and senior fellow emeritus at the Thurgood Marshall Institute of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, explained two ways in which Black Americans were directly impacted: Federal lending authorities required that suburban housing tracts incorporate CC&Rs prohibiting anyone other than Caucasians to own property in a development, and, simultaneously, while white flight to the suburbs was occurring, urban neighborhoods became even less desirable as zoning laws reserved some of their neighborhoods for industrial plants and waste disposal – “blights” that were kept out of white neighborhoods.
Congress passed the Fair Housing Act of 1968, but it only prevented discriminatory housing in the future. In Levittown, N.Y., for example, Black families in 1947 could have purchased homes for $8,000, or $100,000 in today’s currency. Today, the homes sell for approximately $400,000, and the white families that had bought them earlier have gained tremendous appreciation over time. However, in 1947, most Black families were living in rented apartments, and as they were prohibited from purchasing homes due to redlining – the discriminatory practice of lenders refusing loans to residents of certain areas based on their race or ethnicity – they did not gain the equity appreciation of the white families.
The result was that racially purposeful government programs depressed Black incomes, making escape nearly impossible from neighborhoods of concentrated disadvantage. While today Black incomes are approximately 60% of white incomes, their wealth is only an estimated 5-7% of the wealth of whites due to Blacks’ failure to participate in housing equity appreciation over the decades.
Rothstein said the disparity is “attributable almost entirely to unconstitutional federal housing policy practiced in the mid-20th century.”
Discrimination in education has been tackled through laws and lawsuits, but much remains to be addressed to reverse decades of bias in housing, Rothstein said. Housing issues remain hot not-in-my-backyard topics in today’s politically divisive environment, with zoning and other prohibitions by municipalities designed to limit affordable housing, let alone prohibit that all new development be mixed-income.
While locally people can celebrate the objective of having integrated neighborhoods and schools, the economic demand to live in aspirational communities has created a harsh economic hurdle to developing affordable communities that are welcome to all. Rothstein proffered no specific solutions, but he encouraged a national conversation to design remedies to address a divisive social issue: how past housing policies walled off opportunity from those who were denied full participation in the post-war economic boom.
Harry Price is a member of the Rotary Club of Los Altos. For more information, visit losaltosrotary.org.
