Housing Inequality in America

ML: Inequality in Housing: Post-WWII Urban flight and the Creation of the Suburbs

Post-WWII Urban flight and the Birth of the Suburbs 

Post-World War II America saw a revolutionary change in habitation. A country healing from the devastation of the Great Depression bookended by two wars, Americans faced a national average income decrease of more than 50%, leading to foreclosures on businesses and homes alike. In response to this crisis, President Franklin D. Roosevelt established the FHA, or the Federal Housing Administration, as part of the New Deal, which provided federal loans and aid to increase homeownership. This began the national trend of the migration of American families out of cities and into new developments of more affordably-constructed homes, giving birth to a new habitat: the suburbs, which today make up the majority of American household developments.

While the FHA was certainly responsible for increasing homeownership in the United States. However, the benefits of this programming and development did not extend to all Americans—in fact, the FHA was explicitly made exclusively for white families only, and with the emphasis on conformity created by Levitt, Black couples and families were barred from residency in these neighborhoods. This exclusion took many forms, from bureaucratic and political policies such as redlining and access to loans to physical violence. The FHA’s deliberately racist policies were largely responsible for constraining Black individuals and families in communities with limited education, resources, and opportunities for employment. From the beginning, the creation of the suburbs was founded upon racist and discriminatory policies, the repercussions of which still sustain significant inequality in the housing landscape today.
A History of Racist Federal Housing (INSERT LINK)
SUBURBAN BEGINNINGS
Responding to the desires of Americans to live “beyond the noise, pollution, overcrowding, and disease of the city, while still close enough to enjoy the benefits of its industrial and cultural vitality” which had pervaded societies throughout the history of civilization, architect Frank Lloyd Wright began mapping out his personal vision for a new standard of living by 1910. He envisioned an efficient and affordable home which was large enough to accommodate the ‘average’ American family at the time, and with his architectural expertise he designed a plan that would create maximum benefits to the homeowner. He first published this proposal in the Ladies Home Journal in July of 1901.
(INSERT WRIGHT HOME ADVERTISEMENT HERE)
In the decades that followed, neighborhood development boomed, and the identity of “suburbanite” American moved toward the majority. “Consequently, the postwar exodus to the suburbs was part of a vast reorganization of power and money that affected American industry, race relations, and gender roles.” The development of the suburbs can largely be contributed to William Levitt, who “revolutionized the way Americans live and ushered in an age of suburbia by providing inexpensive housing outside the city.” Levitt applied the post-industrial standard of mass production to housing development and established formulaic approach to the construction of homes in the ‘cookie-cutter’ style, building multiple homes following the same floor plan at a rate that reached 36 homes constructed per day within a year of the plan’s implementation .
Many historical accounts will paint a picture of white picket fences, kept lawns, and families who were pioneers, looking to build a better life for themselves and their children:

Levittown: A Living History: (INSERT LINK)

Throughout this short documentary, which chronicles the reflections of a founding suburb’s first residents, many of which still reside there, the now-elderly people who share their stories are painted as brave forerunners who blazed the trail for a better way of living in America. Suburban development was instrumental during the ‘baby boom,’ in which families reunited with returned veteran WWII soldiers provided a massive increase in births and increased family size .[10] With larger families, homeownership provided necessary space for comfortable living. These neighborhoods seemed to be a shining example of progress and the path to achieving the American Dream, even for minorities, who for some had indeed seen a limited post-war upward mobility in economic status and moving into the middle class.[11] However, not only did the ‘cookie-cutter’ style of American suburbs emphasize a conformity that reinforced restrictive gender roles for women, restrictive covenants barred most African American and Asian American families from living in suburban neighborhoods at all.[12]
The brutal history of segregation and exclusion in the suburbs can be seen in two prominent case studies: The development of Trumbull Park in South Deering, Chicago, and Levittown, of which there were three (New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey).
LEVITTOWN
With 4000 acres of land purchased by Levitt’s company, Levitt and Sons, Levitt began to implement his designs on Long Island. “Levittown itself arguably embodied the best and worst of the postwar American story; it was a result of the entrepreneurship and ingenuity that has come to define the American spirit, but it also participated in the violent prejudice that has also been part of American history.”[13] According to U.S. History Scene, a home in this development went up in just 16 minutes.[14] For convenience and cost-effectiveness, Levitt built only two different housing models.[15] The homes in Levittown seemed to be stocked with ultimate luxuries: equipped with the most up-to-date appliances like refrigerators and even TVs, and the landscaping and streets were mapped with consideration, creating an almost paradise-like world away from the crowded city streets.[16] Why was suburbia viewed through such a fairy-tale lens? Some academics posit that “American families found stability and protection within the suburban home,”[17] which so many Americans clung to after the devastation of back-to-back World Wars and the destitution of the Depression. Families desired to achieve what their parents were robbed of during these times. As Franklin D. Roosevelt once said, “A nation of homeowners, of people who own a real share in their land, is unconquerable.”[18]




However, this utopia was not extended to all. The Levitts retained that Black families be refused homes, just one of the ways that Levitt and Sons stringently maintained control of their developments. Originally stated within Levittown leases that the buyer must not be and would not allow any home be “occupied by any other person other than members of the Caucasian race,”[19] this eventually was deemed unconstitutional, yet the status quo remained unchanged. Within just a few years, Levittown became the largest all-white community in the United States.[20]



Accounts such as the ‘Levittown: A Living History’ documentary blatantly ignore the inequalities and oftentimes brutal exclusion these developments caused. Although such explicit anti-Black policies outlined in housing contracts were subsequently outlawed, William Levitt still rejected any non-white applications to his developments.[21] This was eventually challenged when the NAACP filed a lawsuit against mortgage providers representing Black veterans who had been denied home applications. Thurgood Marshall himself represented these families in court, but the case was ultimately dismissed under the decision that preventing discrimination was not the duty of those agencies.[22] Despite this, Black families managed to secure homes in Levittown when the original buyers decided to sell, though they subsequently received backlash and harassment by fellow residents of the neighborhoods. One Black family bought their Pennsylvania Levittown home in 1957 from the original homeowners. However, they “faced endless harassment as well as implicit and explicit threats of violence from other residents in the community, with little help from the local police to keep the mobs of angry racists from congregating outside their home day and night.”[23]




Stories like these highlight how, even when Black families managed to secure suburban housing, they endured continual onslaught from white community members that oftentimes extended to violence.
TRUMBULL PARK HOMES
Located on the south side of Chicago,[24] Trumbull Park is arguably one of the most well-known suburban developments in the country. What makes this so? The Trumbull Park Homes development is the site of the infamous Trumbull Park race riots of 1953.[25] Trumbull Park, since its establishment in 1938, had maintained its efforts to remain a white-only neighborhood until 1953, despite the area having a population of Black workers who commuted to the area to work at the local steel plant.[26] The Howards, a Black family, had been approved to become residents there, after the Chicago Housing Authority, the organization responsible for the development of the suburban neighborhood, mistook Betty Howard as Caucasian due to her light-skinned appearance when she applied for housing.[27] It was only after a few weeks had passed before the CHA put out a phone call to the Chicago Commission on Human Relations, informing them that the recently settled family was actually Black.[28] What followed were an ongoing series of vicious onslaughts directed at the Howard family and their home. These violent events were so extensive that they made national news, even grabbing headlines in Time Magazine the next year.[29]
During the night of August 5, a large group of young white men descended upon the Howards’ home and attacked it, throwing objects at the house and damaging property. Over the next few weeks the crowds gathered in size, up to thousands at once occupying the lawn of the Howards, terrorizing the family members with verbal attacks and destruction of their home. Although police were present in controlling the situation, little was done to bring aggressors to justice.[30]

Digital archive of the Daily Calumet, 1953, displaying headline regarding the Trumbull Park Homes riots: (INSERT LINK)

Despite this tension and repeated pressure from local heads to remove the Howard family from Trumbull Park, the CHA decided to continue to deliberately integrate the neighborhood, allowing an additional 10 Black families to take up residence, thus prompting a new wave of racial onslaughts towards these individuals by white people that continued well into the next decade.[31] The race riots even captured the attention of members of the Socialist Worker’s Party, who have consistently been vehemently outspoken against racial oppression and inequality, and in 1954 Marxist leader in Illinois Howard Mayhew wrote on the events and published his thoughts condemning the violence in a booklet circulated through the public.[32]
(INSERT BOOKLET COVER HERE)
Mayhew’s booklet regarding the Trumbull Park riots: (INSERT LINK)
Frank London Brown was an author and former resident of Trumbull Park, his family having moved to the neighborhood in 1954, very shortly after its accidental integration. In his book Trumbull Park which was published in 1959, Brown drew from personal experience “of abuse from both white residents and the police supposedly there to protect them…[presenting] a powerful story of white supremacist hatred characterized by riots, death threats, brickbats, and nightly window-breakings and bombings.”[33] Through fictional characters written as stand-ins for his real-life family members and neighbors, Brown effectively captures the pain and distress experienced by the Howards and other Black families while enduring the riots:
The men looked even more stunned and stepped-on than the women; and it made me mad to see such despair. Yes, I guess that’s what I saw—despair, sitting like a big fat man on top of all these people. I pulled myself away from them in my mind. I pulled and pulled until I was far enough away from them to be angry at them for feeling only sadness and not boiling, scalding anger.[34]

While initial reviews of Brown’s book were supercilious (Kirkus Reviews once wrote: ‘Like many novels by Negro writers this is more a sociological study than an exercise of the novel’s art—detailed, overly long, lacking in narrative strength—but effective on its own terms.’)[35]
(INSERT BOOK COVER HERE)
An article highlighting Brown’s book and life’s work (INSERT LINK)
Brown’s book highlights an important yet forgotten account of the violent legacy of this suburban development and remains a significant example of suburbia as a vehicle for American housing inequality. The Trumbull Park Homes development’s decade-long racial unrest provides an illustration of the historic persistent discrimination seen in the suburbs in the U.S., while the darker, lesser-known history of segregation and exclusion of the Levittown neighborhoods highlights the inseparable history of racism with the very inception of American suburbs.
HOUSING INEQUALITY TODAY
The legacy of racism and racist practices has perpetuated into the housing market today. It has been consistently shown that home ownership is one of the best investments for households to accrue wealth.[36] This becomes a significantly more viable opportunity in the suburbs, from the availability of homes and land. Due to the persistent racial disparities in housing, people of color are disproportionately unable to utilize homeownership as wealth accumulation. The nonprofit organization Opportunity Starts at Home discusses how suburban developments are a major source of racial inequality:
[P]eople of color are more likely than white households to be extremely low-income renters and that people of color disproportionately struggle to pay rent compared to white households. In fact, 20% of Black households are extremely low-income renters as compared to just 6% of white households. A large part of this is persistent discrimination in the job market where, even as people of color climb the corporate ladder, they still make less than equally qualified whites. Lower wages, along with historical discrimination that prevented them from owning homes and building wealth, means that people of color are more likely to rent and are also more likely to struggle affording that rent. When people struggle to afford rent, they face greater risks of instability, eviction, and even homelessness, which research links to an array of negative life outcomes such as food insecurity, poor health, lower academic achievement, and lower economic mobility.[37]
(INSERT PIE CHART HERE)
Living in suburban developments requires economic stability beyond being able to afford a home. In the suburbs, there is often the challenge of wider geographical distance, which historically was the basis for the formation of America’s highway systems. Combined with a common lack of public transportation in smaller towns, a personal vehicle becomes an added necessity, and an enormous household expense, which is unattainable for families of color who face lower economic status.
Residents of very low-income neighborhoods must also manage with the struggles arising from food deserts—regions where residents do not have easy access to affordable groceries, particularly fresh produce and other nutrient-dense foods. According to the Annie E. Casey Foundation, an organization which provides aid to children in families across the U.S., food deserts “[create] extra, everyday hurdles that can make it harder for kids, families and communities to grow healthy and strong.”[38] In a study conducted at Johns Hopkins University and published in the National Library of Medicine, public health experts found that “poor predominantly black neighborhoods face a double jeopardy, with the most limited access to quality food,” which correlates to higher levels of obesity among the nonwhite population in the U.S.[39]
(INSERT BAR CHART HERE)
The FHA was responsible for providing private mortgage loans to families, but through the act of “redlining,” named so for the act of physically boxing in with red pen specific communities on maps,[40] Black families were refused these beneficial loans, and today, homes owned by minority individuals are more often lowballed in value and appreciate much more slowly than white-owned households.[41]

Race and Housing in 20th century United States: (INSERT LINK)

Although the practice of redlining has long since been banned, the legacy of this has had lasting effects on these formerly ‘boxed-in’ communities, limiting access to educational and extracurricular opportunities, employment opportunities, and even healthy food. According to the Primary Care Development Corporation:

In 1938, the Homeowner’s Loan Corporation created so called “residential security maps” to guide entities toward practicing “responsible lending.” Neighborhoods deemed “hazardous” for lending were outlined in red—a process we know today as redlining. These maps were used as the basis to systematically deny mortgages and services to residents of redlined neighborhoods, regardless of individual creditworthiness. Predominately Black, urban neighborhoods were redlined in NYC. Despite being banned in the Fair Housing Act of 1968, decades of disinvestment have contributed to long-lasting effects for residents of formerly redlined communities.

The practice of redlining has persisted because it’s been masked under less explicit practices, under the guise of legality. It has been shown that Black individuals are much more likely to be denied mortgages by loan service providers.[42]

Reveal News provides a study conducted from The Center For Investigative Reporting through the analysis of records of the Mortgage Disclosure Act: (INSERT LINK)

In addition, Redlining has had lasting healthcare effects on communities of color, particularly Black families, that still persist today. “These practices include unfair housing and lending discrimination, [resulting] in neighborhoods experiencing adverse effects due to poverty, including higher rates of uninsurance and obesity.”[43] These continuing inequalities are exacerbated by the continued racial imbalance between urban and suburban communities.
            According to the Urban Institute, “A middle-income Black family is more likely to live in a poorly resourced neighborhood with a high poverty rate than a low-income white family. And although households of all races and ethnicities increasingly say they prefer integration, discrimination against people of color in housing and lending persists and the effects of past racist public policies continue to be felt.”[44] These statistics endure through implicitly discriminatory policies in zoning, subsidized housing programs, inconsistent reinforcement of the policies outlined in the Fair Housing Act, and outright implicit bias among realtors and housing agency professionals, and “[a]lthough discrimination in housing and lending persists, merely prohibiting individual acts of discrimination cannot reverse entrenched patterns of residential segregation.[45] The poverty and lack of resources also contributes to the large amounts of crime oftentimes associated with these neighborhoods, which increase closer to urban and metropolitan areas. This in turn increases over-policing, which has been shown to have overwhelmingly negative consequences for these communities with unbelievably disparate levels of incarceration between whites and people of color.[46]
            Through a long, strong history of racist and discriminatory policies, suburbia has historically been and still remains a challenge at best and entirely inaccessible at worst for people and families of color. From its very establishment, with explicit exclusionary practices to enduring biases, middle-class suburban developments remain overwhelmingly white, with consequences for people of color ranging from environmental, financial, political, and educational disparities. To begin to remedy these disproportions, there must be deliberate and consistent re-evaluation of personal bias, enforcement of anti-discriminatory policies, and the development and implementation of new ones that not only can help decrease the racial gap in economics but also increase integration of suburban communities. Academics, professionals, and organizations such as The Brookings Institution have provided alternative solutions to these issues that pervade American society, outlining new policies that can narrow the wealth gap and improve the lives of people of color in America.[47]

“Rethinking homeownership incentives to improve household financial security and shrink the racial wealth gap”: (INSERT LINK)

American suburbs today represent almost a century of systemic inequality in housing. However, through systematic changes in policy and thoughtful shifts in thinking about the history and current state of homeownership in the U.S., suburban exclusion and discrimination can begin to be eliminated.
 
[1] Little, Becky, “How a New Deal Housing Program Enforced Segregation,” Mapping Inequality, History online, 2021. Accessed Oct. 2022. https://www.history.com/news/housing-segregation-new-deal-program.
[2] Ibid
[4] Little, Becky, “How a New Deal Housing Program Enforced Segregation,” History Stories, History, 2021. Accessed Oct. 2022. https://www.history.com/news/housing-segregation-new-deal-program
[5] Galyean, Crystal, “Levittown: The Imperfect Rise of the American Suburbs,” US History Scene. Accessed Oct. 2022. https://ushistoryscene.com/article/levittown/.
[6] “An Untimely History of Architecture and Real Estate,” House Housing, Columbia University, 2022. Accessed Oct. 2022. https://househousing.buellcenter.columbia.edu/#1910-Frank-Lloyd-Wright-Sells-His-Vision-for-Suburbanizing-AmericaBerlin-Based-Publication-Establishes-Architects-Reputation-in-Europe.
[7] Elliot, Kimberly Kutz, “The growth of suburbia,” in “The postwar era, 1945-1950,” Khan Academy, 2022. Accessed Sept. 2022. https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/us-history/postwarera/postwar-era/a/the-growth-of-suburbia
[8] “53b. Suburban Growth,” U.S. History, 2008-2022. Accessed Oct. 2022. https://www.ushistory.org/us/53b.asp#:~:text=Suburbia,Americans%20to%20flee%20to%20suburbia.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Elliot, Kimberly Kutz, “The growth of suburbia.”
[11] Corbett, P. Scott et al, “Post-War Prosperity and Cold War Fears, 1945-1960,” U.S. History, OpenStax, Rice University, 28.3: “The American Dream.” Accessed Oct. 2022. https://openstax.org/books/us-history/pages/28-3-the-american-dream.
[12] Elliot, Kimberly Kutz, “The dark side of suburbia,” “The postwar era, 1945-1950,” Khan Academy, 2022. Accessed Sept. 2022. https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/us-history/postwarera/postwar-era/a/the-growth-of-suburbia.
[13] Galyean, Crystal, “Levittown: The Imperfect Rise of the American Suburbs,” US History Scene. Accessed Oct. 2022. https://ushistoryscene.com/article/levittown/.
[14] Ibid.
[15] “Crabgrass Frontiers: Levitt and Sons and the Post WWII Housing Boom,” in the 2003 Levittown, Pa.: Building the Suburban Dream exhibit at the State Museum of Pennsylvania. 2003. Accessed Oct. 2022. http://statemuseumpa.org/levittown/one/b.html.
[16] Galyean, Crystal, “Levittown.”
[17] Ibid.
[18] Ibid.
[19] Ibid.
[20] Cohen, Lizabeth, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar American. (New York: Vintage Books), 2003, 217.
[21] Ibid.
[22] Ibid.
[23] Ibid.
[24] Husunupke, Janet Ami, “Trumbull Park Homes,” The Hal Baron Project, 2020. Accessed Sept. 2022. https://halbaronproject.web.illinois.edu/items/show/42.
[25] Ibid.
[26] “Trumbull Park Race Riots headline in The Daily Calumet, 1953,” The Daily Calumet, 1953, Southeast Chicago Historical Society, 2022. Accessed Oct. 2022. https://www.sechicagohistory.org/archive/browse/trumbull-park-riots-headline-in-the-daily-calumet-1953/.
[27] Hunt, Bradford D.,“Trumbull Park Homes Race Riots, 1953-1954,” The Electronic Encyclopedia of Chicago, 2005. Accessed Oct. 2022. http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/2461.html.
[28] Hirsch, Arnold R., “Massive Resistance in the Urban North: Trumbull Park, Chicago, 1953-1966,” The Journal of American History, 82, no. 2 (1995): 522. Accessed Nov. 2022. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2082185.
[29] Rooney, Kathleen, “How Trumbull Park Exposed the Brutal Legacy of Segregation,” JSTOR Daily,  https://daily.jstor.org/how-trumbull-park-exposed-the-brutal-legacy-of-segregation/.
[30] Hunt, “Trumbull Park Homes Race Riots.”
[31] Hunt, “Trumbull Park Homes Race Riots.”
[32] Mayhew, Howard, “Racial Terror at Trumbull Park, Chicago,” 1954 (New York: Pioneer Publishers), 1-16. Accessed Nov. 2022. https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/swp-us/pamphlets/1954-radical-terror-trumbull-park.pdf.
[33] Rooney, Kathleen, “How Trumbull Park Exposed the Brutal Legacy of Segregation.”
[34] Brown, Frank London, Trumbull Park, (Boston: Northeastern University Publishing), 2005, quoted in Rooney, Kathleen, “How Trumbull Park Exposed the Brutal Legacy of Segregation.”
[35] Rooney, Kathleen, “How Trumbull Park Exposed the Brutal Legacy of Segregation.”
[36] Asante-Muhammad, Derick, Jamie Buell, and Joshua Devine, “60% Black Homeownership: A Radical Goal For Black Wealth Development,” National Community Reinvestment Coalition, 2021. Accessed Oct. 2022. https://ncrc.org/60-black-homeownership-a-radical-goal-for-black-wealth-development/.
[37] “Racial Inequities in Housing Fact Sheet, Opportunity Starts at Home, 2022. Accessed Oct. 2022. https://www.opportunityhome.org/resources/racial-equity-housing/.
[38] “Food Deserts in the United States,” The Annie E. Casey Foundation, 2021. Accessed Oct. 2022. https://www.aecf.org/blog/exploring-americas-food-deserts.
[39] Bower, Kelly M. et al, “The Intersection of Neighborhood Racial Segregation, Poverty, and Urbanicity and its Impact on Food Store Availability in the United States,” Prev. Med, 58 (2014), 33-39. National Library of Medicine. Accessed oct. 2022. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3970577/.
[41] “Research Series: How does homeownership contribute to wealth building?” Habitat For Humanity, 2022. Accessed Nov. 2022. https://www.habitat.org/our-work/impact/research-series-how-does-homeownership-contribute-to-wealth-building.
[42] Best, Ryan and llena Mejía, “The Lasting Legacy Of Redlining,” FiveThirtyEight, 2022. Accessed Oct. 2022. https://revealnews.org/article/for-people-of-color-banks-are-shutting-the-door-to-homeownership/.
[43] “Points on Care: Today’s Health Inequities in New York City riven by Historic Redlining Practices, 2020. Accessed Oct. 2022. https://www.pcdc.org/resources/points-on-care-todays-health-inequities-in-new-york-city-driven-by-historic-redlining-practices/.
[44] Turner, Magarey Austin and Solomon Greene, “Causes and Consequences of Separate and Unequal Neighborhoods,” The Urban Project. Accessed Oct. 2022. https://www.urban.org/racial-equity-analytics-lab/structural-racism-explainer-collection/causes-and-consequences-separate-and-unequal-neighborhoods.
[45] Ibid.
[46] Ibid.
[47] Schuetz, Jenny, “Rethinking homeownership incentives to improve household financial security and shrink the racial wealth gap,” Brookings Blueprints for American Renewal & Prosperity, 2020. Accessed Nov. 2022. https://www.brookings.edu/research/rethinking-homeownership-incentives-to-improve-household-financial-security-and-shrink-the-racial-wealth-gap/.

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