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To provide a historical context to the identified community problem, I seek to explore some past policies and programs in the United States and their contribution towards laying ground for the problem. If we observe the way housing segregation works in the United States, we can identify how things ended up this way. I focus on how housing segregation in school, health,
family wealth and policing were the factors that disproportionately affected the African Americans. In the wake of the Great Depression in the 1930s, the then US President Franklin D Roosevelt wanted to bring economic relief to millions of Americans through a collection of federal programs and projects called The New Deal. One part of this deal, was the National Housing Act of 1934, which introduced ideas like the thirty-year mortgage and low-fixed interest rates. This allowed a number of low-income families who could afford homes. And to ensure that they don’t default on their mortgage, government sponsored Home Owners Loan Corporation (HLC) was created. The HOLC created residential security maps and introduced the term “redlining”. Different colored zones represented housing segregation. For example, green color meant “best area and best people” like the businessmen, yellow for “declining area” with working class families and red meant “detrimental influences, hazardous” like foreign-born people and African Americans. One of the most consistent criteria for redlined neighborhoods on the HOLC maps was the presence of black and brown people. Studies suggested that people living in the redlined areas were not necessarily more likely to default on their mortgage (Berkovec, 1994). But redlining made it difficult, if not impossible, to buy or refinance. So, landlords abandoned their properties, city services became unreliable and, in most places, crime increased and property values dropped significantly. All of these conditions festered for thirty years as white people fled to the brand-new suburbs mushrooming all over the country. Many of these suburbs instituted rules, called covenants, that explicitly forbade selling homes to African Americans. Later on, in 1968 Congress passed the Fair Housing Act of 1968 which meant to encourage equal housing opportunities regardless of race, religion or national origin. It also offered protection for future home owners and renters, but it did very little to remedy the damage that was already done. Over the next 50 years, the Fair Housing Act is rarely enforced.
As a result of redlining, there were major effects on wealth as homeownership was the major way Americans created wealth. But discrimination is housing was the major reason that African American families up and down the income scale had a tiny fraction of the family wealth that white families did.
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