For decades, discriminatory housing policies in the U.S. restricted the ability of black citizens to purchase homes outside of predominantly black ghettos. From the 1950s through the 1970s, real estate speculators called “blockbusters” made some progress opening up white-only neighborhoods to black families until an odd coalition of segregationists and left-wing activists succeeded in regulating blockbusters out of existence. Tragically, the U.S. housing market has remained largely segregated even until today. Moreover, because a family’s access to a quality education is determined primarily by the location of their home, black children are disproportionately assigned to low-performing district schools, depriving them of opportunity.
Sadly, misguided suspicions about the market led left-wing leaders to support paternalistic regulations that harmed the very people they intended to help — a disastrous mistake that many modern progressives are now repeating in education policy.
In a recently updated version of his 1998 paper, “A Requiem for Blockbusting,” Dmitri Mehlhorn of the Progressive Policy Institute details the sordid history of discriminatory housing policy in the U.S. When Southern agricultural jobs dried up in the early 20th century, black workers began migrating to the industrial North. The response was ugly:
White Americans mostly reacted to this migration with coordinated and violent hatred. Driven by xenophobia, they used physical, political, and economic power to drive blacks into strictly circumscribed ghettos. The ugliness was a team sport, including local governments, state and federal agencies, courts, businesses, and the media.
At the federal level, the Federal Housing Administration encouraged racial covenants, stating that they “provide the surest protection against undesirable encroachment and inharmonious use.” These covenants contractually prohibited homes from being resold to black families. By the 1940s, integrated neighborhoods had ceased to exist in every major city in the United States.
The U.S. Supreme Court eventually ruled against racial covenants in housing, but racists found workarounds. As Mehlhorn details:
For instance, both federal and local agencies encouraged white flight by steering resources to whites seeking segregated suburban houses and schools, while cutting those resources for black families. So-called “urban renewal” laws were used to raze expanding black neighborhoods that threatened white institutions. Federal funds were used to construct massive public housing projects for the displaced black residents.
We are still feeling the effects of these discriminatory policies today, particularly in education, which is intimately linked with housing policy. According to a 2012 study by the UCLA Civil Rights Project, “80% of Latino students and 74% of black students attend majority nonwhite schools (50–100% minority), and 43% of Latinos and 38% of blacks attend intensely segregated schools (those with only 0–10% of whites students) across the nation.”