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Residential segregation in the United States

Physical separation of two or more groups into different neighborhoods

  • 25 min read
  • 7 chapters

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Through Disinvestment and World War II

While overt segregation is illegal in the United States, housing patterns show significant and persistent segregation along racial and class lines. The history of American social and public policies, like Jim Crow laws, exclusionary covenants, and the Federal Housing Administration's early redlining policies, set the tone for segregation in housing that has sustained consequences for present-day residential patterns.

Trends in residential segregation are attributed to discriminatory policies and practices, such as exclusionary zoning, location of public housing, redlining, disinvestment, and gentrification, as well as personal attitudes and preferences. Residential segregation produces negative socioeconomic outcomes for minority groups, influencing disparities in wealth, educational opportunity, access to health care and food, employment, and safety. Public policies for housing reform, like the Housing Choice Voucher program, attempt to promote integration and mitigate these negative effects, but with mixed results.

History

In the early 1900s, U.S. cities were largely integrated, with working-class, typically immigrant, White families often living in the same neighborhoods as working-class Black families. However, the early 1930s marked the beginning of discriminatory housing policies. In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt instituted New Deal reforms that involved segregating some of these integrated working-class neighborhoods. To combat a housing shortage due to the Great Depression, FDR started public housing projects for working-class families, all of which were segregated, and most of which were limited to White people. World War II brought an influx of workers to cities looking for jobs, increasing the number of public housing projects. White projects tended to be built in already residential neighborhoods, while Black projects tended to be built on the outskirts of these areas, displacing Black families out of residential centers where they had previously lived. In 1949, Congress passed the 1949 Housing Act, which explicitly stated that the government could fund segregated housing projects. Beginning in the 1940s, the Federal Housing Administration created programs that encouraged White families to move into suburban neighborhoods by providing affordable mortgages, with racially restrictive covenants barring Black families from buying houses in these White neighborhoods. White families benefitted greatly from these programs, as it provided them with economic stability and accumulation of wealth due to increasing real estate values. As White families moved out of urban housing projects, previously White-only public housing projects allowed Black families to move in. Public housing became dominated by working-class Black families, who had limited access to employment and economic opportunities. These discriminatory housing policies are responsible for the racial wealth gap and persistent residential segregation between White and Black households today: the average Black family makes about 60% of the average White family's income, while the median net worth of a Black family is 10% of a White family's net worth.

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