The Original Housing Crisis: Suburbanization, Segregation, and the State in Postwar America

Abstract

During the recent housing market meltdown, as nonwhites and women bore the disproportionate brunt of subprime loans and foreclosures (even adjusting for income), many critics decried the lack of governmental oversight over the mortgage market.1 For students of residential segregation in American history, the charge that suffered from too much market and too little government during the housing bubble is rich with tragic and historical irony. After all, during the long post-World War II boom, federal housing policy systematically excluded millions of from access to the mortgage market and exacerbated the inequalities that supposedly justified discriminatory lending practices in the first place. Despite some improvement since the 1960s, housing segregation remains intractable. For example, the average white American in a metropolitan area resides in a neighborhood that is 80 percent white and 7 percent African American.2 Perhaps the only major institutions in American life more segregated are churches.3 The historical problem of white America's postwar resistance to residential integration is wrapped up in an array of questions related to the conservative ascendancy in the final third of the twentieth century. Disentangling the various strands of this complicated history, as David Freund suggests in the introduction to Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban America, usually begins by ascribing racism a causal role in the conservative triumph. If scholars agree on nothing else, Freund writes, there is some consensus that the early postwar era saw the emergence of a new kind of white racial conservatism, a precursor to the better-known backlash politics of the 1960s and the rise of the New Right, fueled by whites' preoccupation with protecting their neighborhoods, status, and privileges from minorities (p. 6). Historians are less sure, however, about the extent and nature of the racism that lay beneath this conservatism. There is widespread agreement,