Race matters (even more than you already think): Racism, housing, and the limits of The Color of Law

ABSTRACT

As any good American urbanist knows: race matters. But precisely how does it matter? How have the pervasive and enduring modalities of racism (especially anti-Blackness) shaped the American metropolis over the last decades? Several influential attempts to answer these questions have focused heavily on racism’s momentous impacts on housing and related spatial practices. Such accounts have garnered intensified attention with the appearance of Richard Rothstein’s widely heralded The Color of Law. My central contention is that most conventional treatments of how racism impacted mid-century housing and spatial practices (including Rothstein’s) are deeply flawed. While almost obsessively centering racism as determinative, they nevertheless underestimate how fundamental it is to America’s institutions. I focus particularly on market institutions as they shape residential property values. Doing so reveals both a significant historical rereading of mid-century urban America’s highly racialized housing and spatial practices, as well as a more powerful account of ongoing racial dispossessions.

Acknowledgments

My deep gratitude goes, once again, to these dear friends and generous colleagues: James DeFilippis, Ed Goetz, Bob Lake, Amanda LeDuke, Preston Quesenberry, Tim Weaver, and Elvin Wyly. I also thank another generous colleague, Rich Schragger, for his support of the project and incisive feedback and Aneri Taskar for bibliographic and editorial assistance.

Notes

1. Rothstein’s (2017) The Color of Law recounts how America’s high level of racial residential segregation (and racial inequality more generally) was the result of explicit government actions (de jure, or by law) rather than other forces. Coates (2014) article, focusing mostly on the city of Chicago, advances a similar account of racial inequality that builds to an argument for governmental compensatory measures to address past racial injustices (especially in area of housing).

2. By conventional I mean those accounts considered to be in the mainstream of popular and academic discourse. Ideologically, such accounts are, generally, “liberal” in the American political sense of the term, as well as rooted philosophically in liberal theory more broadly. In epistemological and ontological terms, inquiry is heavily focused on readily observable empirical phenomena rather than deeper structures. Accordingly, conventional accounts are best understood as juxtaposed against those of a more “critical” nature (see, for example, Brenner et al., 2012; Davies & Imbroscio, 2010; Delgado & Stefancic, 2017).

3. Two prominent examples of other major conventional accounts are Massey and Denton (1993) and Oliver and Shapiro (2006).

4. Roughly the period from the mid-1930s to the mid-1960s.

5. As of summer 2020 Rothstein’s (2017) book has been cited well over 1,000 times in the three short years since its release (according to Google Scholar).

6. Critical race theory (CRT) understands racism to be normal (or quotidian) in American society, not an aberration (or accident). Racism is seen as deeply embedded (and structural) in ways that reproduce White supremacy. CRT thus sees many claims to objectivity (or neutrality) as being specious (Smith, 2010); more generally see, for example, Delgado and Stefancic (2017). For applications to urban studies, see Goetz et al. (2020), Taylor (2019a), and Smith (2010).

7. For some key recent writings on racial capitalism, see Melamed (2015), Pulido (2017), Bonds (2019), and Williams (2020). While the idea of racial capitalism—that capitalist accumulation depends decisively on racialized inequalities—is broader in scope, the racist theory of value can be seen as a constitute part of it, as “differences in value become critical in the accumulation of surplus—both profits and power” (Pulido, 2017, p. 527).

8. As quoted in Walker (2019), emphasis added.

9. As explained below, the evidence for the racist theory of value is strong, as in city after city anti-Black prejudices drove property values in Black neighborhoods lower (see, for example, Flippen, 2004; Perry et al., 2018; D. Harris, 1999). Rothstein (2017, p. 94), however, suggests the new presence of Black residents in the 1940s and 1950s did not (at least initially) always cause property values to fall in formerly all-White neighborhoods. But he also notes that this effect was likely caused by exploitative FHA policies that left middle-class Black families with “few other housing alternatives” and hence “they were willing to pay prices far above fair market values” for formerly White-owned homes. Outright “blockbusting” also caused a similar, temporary dynamic. As Rothstein (2017, p. 96) explains the “full [blockbusting] cycle” happened like this: when neighborhoods were originally integrated “property values increased” as Black homebuyers needed “to pay higher prices for homes than whites.” But shortly after “property values fell once speculators had panicked enough white homeowners into selling at deep discounts.”

10. See Beauregard (2001) for an appropriately nuanced view.

11. A title that also cleverly plays on the older legal principle of acts done “under the color of law.”

12. The quote is from the first FHA administrator, James Moffett.

13. As Shertzer and Walsh (2019, p. 416) summarize: their results suggest “that segregation would likely have arisen even without the presence of discriminatory institutions as a direct consequence of the widespread and decentralized relocation decisions of white individuals within an urban area.”

14. I thank Rich Schragger for this astute framing of the key dynamic at work.

15. Estimate is adjusted for both inflation and the increase in housing costs as a percentage of household budgets.

16. Note that Coates (2014, p. 65) vaguely attributes this decline to “housing policy,” not the racist property market more generally, but without explanation.

17. On this point, Rothstein (2017, p. 266) speculates that the 90–95% figure is “exaggerated,” mostly based on the shortages of housing in the postwar period. Yet, as the suburbs rapidly built out with massive increases in housing construction during the 1950s, such storages abated (see von Hoffman, 2012). Similarly, Rothstein (2017, p. 267) also speculates that, “if the FHA had made nondiscrimination a condition of all developments,” White homebuyers “would have had few, if any, options” but to purchase in an integrated Levittown. This claim is belied, however, by the many decades of White flight from integrating suburbs after nondiscrimination laws were in force (see below).

18. As a recent piece in the New York Times concluded of Agnew: he “heralded a new kind of virulent racial politics in America, one that pretends to moderation and equality but feeds on division and prejudice—one that, 50 years later, we are still unable to move beyond” (Risen, 2018).

19. Whereas “only 18% of African Americans lived in suburbs in 1970 … the percentage rose rapidly in the ensuing decades with little sign of slowing down,” reaching 40% by 2010 (Massey & Tannen, 2018, p. 1599).

20. Edsall (2019) recently reported a particularly stark example: “the 36 suburban jurisdictions of South Cook County, Illinois [suburban Chicago] … went from 10.7% black in 1970 to 55.4% black in 2017. … As the black share of South Cook’s population rose, the area began to fall sharply behind Chicago and other suburbs of the city. … Median home values fell steeply…[for example], from roughly $151,903 in 2000 to $116,778 in 2017 …”

21. The number of conventional accounts embracing this proposition is considerable. For examples, see Lipsitz and Oliver (2010), Shapiro et al. (2013), Coates (2014), and Hanks et al. (2018).

22. On racial capitalism, see especially Robinson (2000). Also see Pulido (2017), Bonds (2019), Markley et al. (2020), Melamed (2015), and Williams (2020).

23. For some notable apologies, see Peterson (1981) and Collins and Shester (2013). Of the multitude of extant discussions of the dispossessions, see Fullilove (2004) and Elkin (1987).

24. For more recent discussions of this same phenomenon applied to the HOPE VI program, see Greenbaum (2015) and Goetz (2013).

25. As Turner et al. (2009, p. 88) report, “very few predominantly African American communities fully meet the definition of an opportunity community.” Among the 100 largest United States metropolitan areas, only one percent of predominately minority census tracts “are low poverty and have a substantial number of middle- or high-income households.”

26. For a stark example, see Polikoff (2006); for an updated version, see Ellen and Torrats-Espinosa (2019).

27. As quoted in the reportage of Sulaiman (2017), in regards to a Webinar held in Los Angeles, CA on Rothstein’s (2017) book, The Color of Law.

28. This finding is especially notable because the work of Chetty is so often marshaled in favor of the “opportunity paradigm” (see Goetz, 2018). Moreover, Chetty’s national studies on U.S. mobility rates (e.g., Chetty et al., 2018) also show the incredible power of race: “areas with large black population shares are the areas where black individuals experience particularly low levels of economic mobility,” demonstrating “the striking relationship between the spatial distribution of the black population and the economic mobility of that population” (Hardy et al., 2018, p. 2). What Chetty attributes to racial segregation other researchers more parsimoniously attribute simply to the large size of the Black population in most areas with low mobility rates (see Cohen, 2014), something that any look at the map of low mobility rates vis-à-vis the map of high Black concentration clearly evinces.

29. One widely cited study by Chetty et al. (2016) did find some gains to those who moved to low poverty neighborhoods when young (under age 13) but the gains were modest, and stand out not in absolute terms but rather in contrast to the dismal conditions experienced by those living in high poverty neighborhoods—the difference between being “very poor instead of extremely poor” (Vale & Kelly, 2016).

30. While sharply critical of this remedy, Markley et al. (2020, pp. 14–15) explain the needed dynamic this way: “…Black households must constantly be prepared to move to non-majority Black neighborhoods. Further, those neighborhoods must remain non-majority Black” (emphasis in original). Also see Goetz (2018).

31. See, for example, Shertzer and Walsh (2019) who show that White flight took off in a major way almost as soon as Black Americans arrived in northern cities during the early decades of the 20th century.

32. On the other hand, as I write—during the uprisings of summer, 2020—seemingly dramatic political shifts in response to the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor are lending hope to the idea that anti-Black racism might finally diminish. Yet, while many keen observers are cautiously optimistic, others remain incredulous (see Edsall, 2020).

33. See https://democracycollaborative.org/

34. See https://democracycollaborative.org/learn/blogpost/movement-Black-lives-policy-agenda

35. I thank Bob Lake both for this point as well as this particularly sharp construction of it.

36. In contrast, for more grounded, ethnographic accounts, see Shelby (2017) and Manzo et al. (2008).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

David Imbroscio

David Imbroscio is professor of Political Science and Urban Affairs at the University of Louisville. The author or editor of six books, including Urban America Reconsidered: Alternatives for Governance and Policy (Cornell University Press), he is a past recipient of the College of Arts and Sciences Award for Outstanding Scholarship, Research, and Creative Activity at the University of Louisville.