Housing Inequality in America

Intro to Visualizing Housing Discrimination

Housing inequality in the United States, past and present, confounds us, maddeningly simple and stubbornly complex as a snowfall. Simple by blanketing our landscape so brightly as to be almost blinding, so that we easily see that some people have more easy access to better housing than others. Complex, in that the factors that contribute to this inequality seem almost beyond our ability to calculate, and indeed, even the situation of every person, every flake, involves both broad trends and unique circumstances. All this exists within greater weather realities of the inequality that is the greater social, economic, and cultural climate in which we live.
But, because of the long-term effects of slavery, the interaction of individual, corporate, and governmental actors at the local, state, and federal level, racial inequalities stubbornly persist, as Anika Fenn Gilman, Cathrine Discenza, and John Hessler's The Mapping of Race in America details.



North or South, East or West, rural or urban, housing in the United States has been largely segregated by race. And yet, there appears to have been few, or perhaps no, laws explicitly forbidding people of any race from living in a given area in the United States in the 20th or 21st centuries. Furthermore, much of that segregation resulted from actions taken or reinforced by government, as the Segregation by Design project shows us.
 

Segregated By Design from Silkworm on Vimeo.


How did it happen? Where does racial housing segregation continue, and why? What are its effects?

The following pages  provide resources to explain, and explore, one of those forms of housing inequality, that of Black/white racial disparities. Racial disparities constitute the most studied axis of housing inequality, resulting in greatly differential access to housing resulting from governmental policy, group prejudice, and implicit bias.

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