I grew up in Carle Place, a
new suburban town on Long Island, outside of New York City. Young families
lived in inexpensive but well-constructed houses in quiet residential
neighborhoods with good schools. When I get together with my classmates at
reunions, we all agree that our little town offered a wonderful place to grow
up.
I never thought about black
kids, because I never saw one in my neighborhood or at my schools, right up
through high school. I knew black people lived in other towns, and sometimes we
faced black kids in athletic contests. I never wondered why they didn’t live
near me.
Now I know. I’ve been reading
a book titled “The Color Of Law” by Richard Rothstein, who explains how residential segregation
happened in America and in my home town.
In response to the
government-created Jim Crow discrimination in the South, millions of African
Americans moved north in the Great Migration
after World War I. At the same time, the nation’s population doubled from 1900 to 1950.
Facing growing population,
American cities used zoning laws to direct new construction and to control
where people lived. Across the country, zoning was designed to keep black and
white apart, to protect white neighborhoods against black people. For example,
in St. Louis zoning guided liquor stores, polluting industries, bars, and
rooming houses into African American neighborhoods, preserving real estate
values in white neighborhoods and creating black slums.
Private business supported
segregation. The National Association of Real Estate Brokers adopted a code of
ethics in 1924 warning its members that “a realtor should never be instrumental
in introducing into a neighborhood members of any race or nationality whose
presence would clearly be detrimental to property values.”
In the midst of the
Depression, the federal government used its enormous resources to promote home
ownership. In 1934, the Federal Housing Administration, part of the New Deal,
created affordable mortgages and made loans to encourage home ownership based
on color-coded maps of every city, where black neighborhoods were colored red,
meaning no help for residents. After World War II, the newly created Veterans
Administration offered mortgages to returning servicemen with no down payments
and low interest rates, but only for whites.
Collaborating with private
developers, banks, and realtors, the federal government helped create the new
suburbs which mushroomed around America’s cities. I lived in a suburb built by
William Levitt, whose name has become synonymous with suburbanization. His
signature project was Levittown, a
development with 17,500 mass-produced two-bedroom homes a few miles from where
I lived. He repeated this success in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Maryland. Behind
him stood the FHA and the VA, which financed Levittown on the condition that it
be all white. In 1953, the 70,000 residents of Levittown represented the largest all-white American community.
Carle Place was a microcosm
of postwar America. Young white men and women could begin their long climb into
affluence, security, and respectability through the American dream of
home-ownership. Realtors would guide families into the mushrooming modern
neighborhoods. Banks offered more favorable terms than ever before. And
everybody depended on governments to allocate local spaces for new
construction, advise the new projects, and guarantee the loans that bought the
houses.
For white people. Not for
black people.
So I grew up with no
relationships with black Americans, whom I first met in college during the
tumultuous years of the civil rights movement. By that time, for me and my
suburban baby-boomer peers, getting to know African Americans was awkward and
uncertain. We were all, black and white, deprived of the natural development of
friendships across lines of race.
Blacks were deprived of much
more than that. As I was growing up, Carle Place and much of Long Island
embodied a futuristic landscape of tens of thousands of identical houses in
geometric patterns on plowed over, treeless ground. Today shady streets, mature
landscaping, and countless home expansions and improvements have transformed
the aesthetics. The houses that cost about $10,000 to buy now sell for $400,000
to $700,000. Accounting for inflation, the
white families like mine, that bought in the late 1940s and early 1950s,
tripled or quadrupled their wealth through home ownership.
Instead, black families were
forced to live in urban neighborhoods, where discriminatory zoning rules kept
home values down. At least into the 1990s, toxic waste facilities continued to be built in minority neighborhoods. Urban highways
were typically built through minority neighborhoods. It is still common in
American cities to use zoning laws to place businesses that deal with alcohol,
firearms, pornography, and now marijuana into low-income neighborhoods, preventing minorities there from building up equity
as fast as in residential white neighborhoods.
The end of slavery in 1865
represented the beginning of other forms of government-enforced discrimination
for another century. By helping white families to build up wealth through home
ownership and preventing black families from doing the same, federal, state and
local governments have contributed to today’s racial disparities in wealth.
As Richard Rothstein wrote, “Government and private industry came together to create a
system of residential segregation.” All Americans have suffered from this history of racism.
Steve Hochstadt
Jacksonville IL
Published in the Jacksonville
Journal-Courier, December 12, 2017
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