But even before the pandemic, research showed that the neighborhood where children grow up shapes how likely they are to go to college and to make more money than their parents.
It determines their access to medical care and good schools. Integration is good for everyone: children who grow up in multiracial surroundings tend to be less anxious about racial differences, more empathetic and more caring about others. White people who grow up in highly segregated communities of color have lower incomes than white people who grow up in highly segregated white neighborhoods.
But as many affluent Americans get the freedom to work remotely and live where they like in the aftermath of the pandemic, it calls into question whether the country will only get more segregated as wealthy people flee cities for suburbs.
The Fair Housing Act of prohibited discrimination in the sale or rental of housing on the basis of race, but it had few provisions that would force integration in the same way the Brown v.
Board of Education Supreme Court decision did. Its one shot was a provision that directed the U. It came after a Supreme Court case that found that the state of Texas erred in placing affordable housing in highly segregated neighborhoods.
Likewise, for all blacks, age-adjusted mortality relative to non-Hispanic whites was better in moderately segregated regions 1. Part of the reason for better outcomes, the authors of the study suggest, is that blacks are more likely to live in concentrated poverty in metropolitan areas with high levels of racial segregation than those with moderate levels of racial segregation.
The researchers found, for example, that 17 percent of low-income blacks living in moderately segregated metro areas reside in concentrated poverty, compared with 33 percent of low-income blacks living in highly segregated areas. Both currently and historically, segregation is best understood as a tool used to promote and preserve white supremacy, deployed to make it easier to isolate, divest from, surveil, and police black and brown people concentrated in certain communities.
The ingenuity of this racist tool is that its evil use creates its own justification—that is, once employed, it creates perspectives and data that seem to support its further use. As communities of color suffer under the deprivations that come with segregation—economic disinvestment, political disenfranchisement, educational inequity, and unfair, ineffective policing practices—those who build and install resilient and enduring racist systems that sustain segregation explain their decisions in terms of protecting and promoting safety, strong schools, and stable housing markets.
These indeed are desirable neighborhood attributes—but they are the very same attributes that the conditions of segregation disrupted for blacks. In fact, regarding neighborhood characteristics, African Americans express the same values and desires as most Americans, even though they have much more difficulty in realizing them.
Yet only 16 percent rated their local public schools as excellent , and 43 percent of residents reported feeling that their local government services were not a good value for the taxes that they pay. Extensive evidence suggests that black residents in many segregated communities do not believe that their needs and desires are met in their current environments.
For African Americans, an integrated community is one where between 20 to 50 percent of residents are African American. White definitions of integration indicate that they accept diversity only when they can continue to dominate, defining integration as a scenario where only 10 percent of neighborhood residents are black.
Certainly, integration is not a panacea for past and present injustices. In fact, pro-integration advocates should respect the ways that integration might lead to new hardships for black folks—increased discomfort and fear of police encounters, elevated levels of surveillance and suspicion from neighbors, disproportionate discipline of black children in predominantly white schools, and so on. And so one challenge of contemporary housing integration efforts becomes how to dismantle the racist system of policies that created and continue to sustain residential segregation without simultaneously destroying valuable cultural and economic institutions that black and brown communities have created in response to it.
Integration best functions and is best incentivized when public policies and private citizens tackle the myriad of inequities and indignities that complicate, and sometimes limit, the lives of African Americans.
Despite this caveat, it remains true that 1 both historically and currently, black people have risked their comfort, livelihoods, and sometimes lives to gain access to integrated spaces; and, most importantly, that 2 segregation itself is a white supremacist practice that has proven both durable and highly effective at limiting black wealth and opportunity.
Racial housing segregation, residential poverty concentration, and diminished housing access did not emerge accidentally. Sign up for updates. Sign Up Follow us. Members of government and private entities began to deliberately segregate residential areas by race in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, largely by prohibiting blacks from purchasing homes in majority-white neighborhoods.
After the Civil War, those newly liberated black people dispersed throughout the United States, but an abrupt end to Reconstruction ushered in an era of heightened white paramilitary violence, exploitative sharecropping arrangements, and Jim Crow laws.
As anti-black discrimination formalized and intensified, many communities systematically expelled African Americans, excluded them from public goods and services, and adopted policies that forbade blacks from residing in towns, or even remaining within town borders after dark. Pioneered by Baltimore in , racial zoning quickly emerged as an effective way to further subjugate and segregate black folks.
Louis, and others. The U. Supreme Court in struck down explicit racial zoning with its decision in Buchanan v. Warley , arguing that such ordinances interfered with the rights of property owners. Localities quickly found a way to circumvent the ruling and preserve the racial caste system in housing. Some localities created and enforced laws in flagrant violation of Buchanan. Richmond, Virginia, for example, passed a law prohibiting anyone from moving onto a block where they could not marry the majority of people on that block.
Because the state had then-enforceable anti-miscegenation laws on the books, the ordinance effectively prevented neighborhood integration without explicitly mentioning race.
Other localities were slightly more subtle. These policies rapidly proliferated. In , just eight cities had zoning ordinances; by , that number had risen to 1, Supreme Court affirmed the practice of exclusionary zoning in Euclid v. Ambler , finding that zoning ordinances were reasonable extensions of police power and potentially beneficial to public welfare. In order to continue to exclude middle- and upper-class blacks from white neighborhoods, public and private interests conspired to establish a web of racist policies and practices surrounding housing and homeownership.
One practice for many white homeowners was to band together and adopt racially restrictive covenants in their neighborhoods, which forbade any buyer from reselling a home to black buyers. Initially upheld in Corrigan v. Buckley , the U. Supreme Court reasoned that covenants were private contracts not subject to the Constitution.
In city after city, courts and sheriffs successfully evicted African Americans from homes that they had rightly purchased in order to enforce racially restrictive covenants. Supreme Court declared them unconstitutional in Shelley v.
Of all of the homeownership loans approved by the government between and , whites received 98 percent of them. Supreme Court ultimately struck down racially restrictive covenants in Shelley v. Kramer , but even then, many black families faced grave risks when attempting to move into white neighborhoods. Extralegal violence became an all-too-common method of maintaining segregation through intimidation and fear.
Shortly after, several whites rented a unit next door to the family, hoisting up a Confederate flag and blaring music throughout the night. Law enforcement largely declined to intervene, with one sergeant suffering a demotion to patrolman after objecting to his orders not to interfere with the rioters.
When the black family arrived, a mob of gathered outside of their home, threw bricks at the house, and burned a cross in the front yard. As in Pennsylvania, the police refused to step in for several days, only intervening after the NAACP pressed the governor to do so. In , when Charlotte opened its first city-owned recreation ground, the local government passed a law stipulating that black people were not allowed inside.
In , North Carolina passed a law requiring segregated seating on all inter-urban trolleys in the state. They were a direct reaction to the short-lived political alliance between blacks and whites.
In , for example, African Americans were scattered throughout the First Ward the center of downtown in Charlotte. Only three blocks of the ward were all black, according to Hanchett. But between and , segregation accelerated. Charlotte today is an extremely segregated city. Census tracts in the north and west parts of the city are 70 percent black or more. And 43 of the 51 tracts that are 70 percent or more black or Hispanic are high poverty, according to Census data.
This segregation has proven an increasingly uncomfortable fact for a city that prided itself on racial harmony in the s, as my colleague David Graham has written. In September, the city experienced demonstrations and riots after a police officer shot black resident Keith Lamont Scott.
Segregation plays a central role in that. Redlining in the s made it difficult for black homeowners to get loans to buy or repair their homes.
Federal highway construction in the s and s decimated traditionally black neighborhoods and displaced whole communities to the outer edges of town including the neighborhood where former transportation secretary Anthony Foxx grew up. Gentrification continues to displace black and Latino Charlotte residents from neighborhoods where they had long lived. But the policies that continue to segregate Charlotte and other Southern cities have their roots in the nasty racial battles of the late 19th century.
To segregate residents, there had to first be an idea that white people were superior and that black people deserved less. In the third phase, racially restrictive covenants were made illegal in , and explicit housing discrimination as of , when the Fair Housing Act goes into effect.
But municipalities maintained segregation through superficially race-neutral mechanisms: through blocking development, environmental regulations, zoning authorities and discretionary review.
Have there ever been any national attempt to desegregate residential neighborhoods? There was an assumption that if we just prohibit discrimination that people will integrate, and that assumption was flawed. We know that from the education context. After Brown v the Board of Education, the supreme court required school districts to proactively integrate.
From to the early s, we had massive progress desegregating schools, but schools have been resegregating ever since. We never had the kind of progress in the housing context that we had in the school context. Why not? Segregation is the most efficient way to do that. You can spend all the money you want to try to compensate it: you will never fully overcome the disparity.
When have things ever been separate but equal? White people are not going to tolerate spending eight times as much in a black school as in a white school to create equality of opportunity. We did a series on segregation in the Bay Area , which has a section on solutions. There are a lot of things we can do.
We need to have state level and even federal reform of municipal land use policy.
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