Fair Housing Legislation Research Articles

The reemergence of land contracts in Chicago: Racialized class-monopoly rent as a recursive objective in capitalist property markets

The practice of selling homes on contract—typically on onerous terms and comparatively riskier for the buyer than traditional mortgage financing—was commonplace in the US postwar era when Black households were systematically cut off from mainstream mortgage financing. Assumed to be relegated to an era of de jure segregation after the passage of fair housing legislation, contract selling has reemerged since 2008. By forensically recreating the ownership and financing histories for 515 properties in Cook County, Illinois that were sold on contract between 2011 and 2015 and a close reading of recorded land contracts, the paper connects these properties to the foreclosure crisis after 2008, and to two earlier periods of subprime lending, in the early 2000s and late 1990s. The paper uses this historical property analysis to deepen understanding of class-monopoly rent as a recursive capitalist objective within racialized property markets. In the simplest terms, class-monopoly rent is the portion of rent that owners secure through establishing and maintaining barriers to access to property. The paper describes three processes that produce racialized class-monopoly markets. First, the continued production of “group-differentiated vulnerability” to precarious housing is a premise and a product of the process of racialized uneven development. Second, the role of the state in the management of financial risk intensifies risks for communities made vulnerable by previous rounds of racial and class dispossession. Third, these two processes structure urban space so that the land contract serves as a tractable legal tool in creating and consolidating racialized class-monopoly market spaces. The result is the proliferation of racially-contingent forms of unstable housing tenure.

Foreshadowing the Civil Rights Counter-Revolution

AbstractAfter overseeing the adoption of two landmark civil rights proposals in 1964 and 1965, the Johnson administration and its allies in Congress sought to implement the third item of its broader agenda: a legal prohibition on racial discrimination in the sale and rental of housing. Enacting fair housing legislation, however, proved to be a vexing process. Advocates had to win support from northern White Democrats skeptical of the policy, as well as Republicans who were often (and increasingly) unreliable allies. Fair housing legislation failed in 1966 (89th Congress) but passed two years later, during the 90th Congress. We provide a legislative policy history detailing how, after three tumultuous years, Congress came to enact the fair housing provision of the Civil Rights Act of 1968. Overall, the battle to enact fair housing legislation presaged a dynamic that would take hold as the Great Society gave way to the Nixon years: once federal civil rights policies started to bear directly on the lives of White northerners, they became much harder to pass and implement. It also showcased the moment at which the Republican Party in Congress first moved to the right on civil rights and explicitly adopted a position of racial conservatism.

Urban Decolonization

National fair housing legislation opened up higher opportunity neighborhoods to multitudes of middle-class African Americans. In actuality, the FHA offered much less to the millions of poor, Black residents in inner cities than it did to the Black middle class. Partly in response to the FHA’s inability to provide quality housing for low-income blacks, Congress has pursued various mobility strategies designed to facilitate the integration of low-income Blacks into high-opportunity neighborhoods as a resolution to the persistent dilemma of the ghetto. These efforts, too, have had limited success. Now, just over fifty years after the passage of the Fair Housing Act and the Housing Choice Voucher Program (commonly known as Section 8), large numbers of African Americans throughout the country remain geographically isolated in urban ghettos. America’s neighborhoods are deeply segregated and Blacks have been relegated to the worst of them. This isolation has been likened to colonialism of an urban kind. To combat the housing conditions experienced by low-income Blacks, in recent years, housing advocates have reignited a campaign to add “source of income” protection to the federal Fair Housing Act as a means to open up high-opportunity neighborhoods to low-income people of color. This Article offers a critique of overreliance on integration and mobility programs to remedy urban colonialism. Integration’s ineffectiveness as a tool to achieve quality housing for masses of economically-subordinated Blacks has been revealed both in the historically White suburbs and the recently gentrified inner city. Low-income Blacks are welcome in neither place. Thus, this Article argues that focusing modern fair housing policy on the relatively small number of Black people for whom mobility is an option (either through high incomes or federal programs) is shortsighted, given the breadth of need for quality housing in economically-subordinated inner-city communities. As an alternative, this Article proposes, especially in the newly wealthy gentrified cities, that fair housing advocates, led by Black tenants, insist that state and local governments direct significant resources to economically depressed majority-minority neighborhoods and house residents equitably. This process of equitable distribution of local government resources across an entire jurisdiction, including in majority-minority neighborhoods, may be a critical step towards urban decolonization.

From Legal Doctrine to Social Transformation? Comparing U.S. Voting Rights, Equal Employment Opportunity, and Fair Housing Legislation

National Science Foundation [SES-0963418]; University of Arizona Social and Behavioral Sciences Research Professorship; Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University

Educational Attainment in a High Performing School District: The Relative Significance of Class

INTRODUCTIONThis paper sheds light on the considerable weight social class incurs in determining different rates of educational attainment within racial and ethnic groups in suburban public schools. The intersection of race, ethnicity, and class to analyze the growing complexities of inequalities in educational outcomes is a popular topic for social scientists and a growing concern for policy analysts4. We take a unique approach in analyzing educational attainment, as our focus is on educational differences for students within the same racial and ethnic groups in suburban schools rather than among these groups.Perhaps one of the least expected consequences of the fair housing legislation enacted to end housing segregation during the civil rights era was the flight of middle-class African- Americans and other minorities to the suburbs (Wilson, 1987). According to recent data released by the Maryland Department of Planning, the three counties most adjacent to Washington, DC have a minority population ranging from 42 percent in Montgomery and Charles counties to 81 percent in Prince George's County in 2010. The Washington, DC inner suburbs are not an anomaly with regard to this type of demographic breakdown. As of late, increased racial and ethnic diversity in many suburban areas have been further stratified by class after recent immigrants and other disadvantaged populations priced out of inner city neighborhoods by gentrification, urban renewal, and the changing character of solidarity among many traditional neighborhoods in cities around the country relocate outside cities boundaries.One of the most significant consequences of the stratification process pertains to how proficiency levels, once exclusively experienced by decaying city public schools, are now evident in many inner suburbs throughout the nation. Even in highly successful school districts serving affluent populations, profound inequalities in educational outcomes have emerged. 5 Once student outcomes are desegregated by income, the achievement picture discussed publicly by educational officials from suburban school districts with high educational attainment rates begins to change drastically.In Montgomery County, our particular case study, population movement and the structure of displacement have manifested in one of two ways. At the county level, there is a skew pattern of income disparity that runs along the county's East/West corridor. There are high concentrations of affordable housing and lower middle-class quarters in the Eastern end bordering Prince George's County while the more affluent residents congregate on the Western side of the county. For reasons related to affordability and accessibility, the Eastern region also serves as a gateway for new immigrants. At the neighborhood level, patterns of social networks, friendships, and generosity ties, have resulted in the clustering of low-income residents in more affordable housing districts changing the social composition of mixed neighborhoods and public schools.The town of Wheaton is an example of the extent to which these demographic changes manifest themselves in some suburban municipalities. A town of about fifty thousand, Wheaton came to life in the 1950s as a result of the explosion of federal workers and war veterans who took advantage of low interest and accessible home mortgage loans to escape the city for suburbia while still enjoying a relatively short and pleasant commute to work in downtown Washington, DC. According to a recent article in the Washington Post, in 1990, 61 percent of Wheaton' s population identified themselves as White, 15 percent as African American, 13 percent as Hispanic, and 10 percent as Asian. In just ten years, however, the White population decreased by half. Twenty years later, Whites only accounted for 26 percent of the population, while African Americans accounted for 18 percent, and Asians for 12 percent. Once a minority among Wheaton' s residents, the Hispanic population has grown to 42 percent of the total town population (Washington Post, February 15, 2010, ? …

Sunbelt Rising: The Politics of Space, Place, and Region (review)

Reviewed by: Sunbelt Rising: The Politics of Space, Place, and Region Char Miller Sunbelt Rising: The Politics of Space, Place, and Region. Edited by Michelle Nickerson and Darren Dochuk. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001. Pp. 480. Illustrations, tables, notes, index. ISBN 9780812243093, $49.95 cloth.) The Sunbelt, as this volume's deft title suggests, is ever on the rise. However broadly defined as a place, and the editors here embrace the prevailing wisdom that its geographical reach extends from Southern California to Northern Virginia, the region's political muscle has been precise and pronounced: its favorite sons have captured the White House in all but two elections since 1960. Its political religiosity has also had a profound impact on public life and private belief, just as its auto-centricism has spawned a new kind of city, a sprawling dynamic that pushes outward and depopulates the central core (think Atlanta, Houston, and Los Angeles). And its service economy—fueled by a demographic surge and capital flow to the south and west—has been the mainstay of the nation's growth since the 1970s. There is a reason why in popular culture its foil has been dubbed the Rustbelt. But as the editors and contributors to Sunbelt Rising know well, the uncritical conceptions of the region's import are flawed. The deep-seated belief that it is the center of white, right-wing politics is only partly true: in Texas, for example, the GOP dominates state politics, but Democrats govern its major cities. Orange County, California, once synonymous with the John Birch Society, is increasingly Hispanicized, a pattern that holds true across the Sunbelt; this change in particular, as Sylvia Manzano notes, will prove paramount in the coming years. Indeed, to read her chapter against those that assess civil-rights politics and policies in the mid-twentieth century is to bear witness to the dramatic alterations in communal aspirations, economic opportunities, and social justice that have occurred over the past sixty years. It is also to recognize that these real gains have come with no-less-real complications: notably, the emergence of a color-blind conservatism that is "a late-century means of entrenching racial inequality in the logic of economic and civil rights" (18). This logic was evident in the mid-century battles over California fair-housing legislation and Miami's urban-renewal projects. It is also richly explicated in Carl Abbott's examination of southwestern literature, in which real-estate development becomes symbolic of the "modern methods of dispossession" (289). At the heart of these stories, factual or fictional, are the ubiquitous boosters. Usually male, invariably rich, and always well connected, these figures draw on dense networks of like-minded (and self-interested) colleagues—developers, media magnates, business bigwigs, automobile dealers, political elites—to forge coalitions that have wielded public capital and private investment to build up the modern city state. San Antonio's Good Government League had its analogs in Dallas, Albuquerque, and Denver. These local power bases, as Andrew Needham demonstrates, also could extend their authority into the national legislative arena. In probing the capacity of Phoenix's growth machine to pursue energy production on tribal and federal lands, he focuses on the emerging collective clout of three individuals: Barry Goldwater, a Phoenix city councilman turned U. S. senator; attorney Orme Lewis, who became assistant secretary of the interior for Public Lands; and Lewis's appointee, banker Walter Bimson, who was charged with reorganizing the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Among other ambitions, in Goldwater's words, they wanted "to unlock the natural resources known to exist on the reservations" (244), to power their hometown's growth and development. They succeeded. Sunbelt Rising succeeds in turn precisely because its individual chapters offer [End Page 84] sharp new interpretations of this most powerful region's foodways, its mega-cities and monster churches, its contested landscapes. As such, the anthology offers as well a wonderful tribute to the late great David Weber, who as director of SMU's Clements Center for Southwest Studies, helped nurture its creation. Char Miller Pomona College Copyright © 2012 The Texas State Historical Association

Opening Doors: How to Cut Discrimination by Supporting Neighborhood Integration

The last few years have witnessed a quantum leap in the enforcement of fair housing and fair lending legislation. The 1988 Fair Housing Amendments Act gave newe enforcement powers to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the Department of Justice. For example, HUD can how initiate complaints against housing agents who discriminate. Moreover, several events, including release of the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data, which show wide disparities in loan acceptance rates between whites on the one hand and blacks and Hispanics on the other, have led financial regulatory agencies such as the Federal Reserve Board and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to increase their anti-discrimination enforcement. These commendable enforcement efforts may fall short of the mark, however, because they are likely to have little impact on one of the principal sources of discrimination by real estate brokers and landlords, namely residential segregation. This policy brief argues that: (1) residential segregation, the physical separation of racial or ethnic groups, is a principal cause of continuing discrimination in housing; (2) enforcement efforts directed toward people who commit discriminatory acts are unlikely to have much effect on segregation; and (3) the federal government needs programs to attack segregation directly, that is, to support integration, as part of its anti-discriminational arsenal. The brief concludes by proposing the Stable Neighborhood Initiatives Program (SNIP), a nondiscriminatory federal program to support community integration efforts, which is designed to fill the current policy void.

Frontlash: Race and the Development of Punitive Crime Policy

Civil rights cemented its place on the national agenda with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, fair housing legislation, federal enforcement of school integration, and the outlawing of discriminatory voting mechanisms in the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Less recognized but no less important, the Second Reconstruction also witnessed one of the most punitive interventions in United States history. The death penalty was reinstated, felon disenfranchisement statutes from the First Reconstruction were revived, and the chain gang returned. State and federal governments revised their criminal codes, effectively abolishing parole, imposing mandatory minimum sentences, and allowing juveniles to be incarcerated in adult prisons. Meanwhile, the Law Enforcement Assistance Act of 1965 gave the federal government an altogether new role in crime control; several subsequent policies, beginning with the Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 and culminating with the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, ‘war on drugs,’ and extension of capital crimes, significantly altered the approach. These and other developments had an exceptional and long-lasting effect, with imprisonment increasing six-fold between 1973 and the turn of the century. Certain groups felt the burden of these changes most acutely. As of the last census, fully half of those imprisoned are black and one in three black men between ages 20 and 29 are currently under state supervision. Compared to its advanced industrial counterparts in western Europe, the United States imprisons at least five times more of its citizens per capita.

The Political Economy of State Fair Housing Laws before 1968

The combined influence of the Great Migration of African Americans and the civil rights movement propelled the drive for fair housing legislation, which attempted to curb overt discrimination in housing markets. This drive culminated in the federal Fair Housing Act of 1968. By that time, 57 percent of the U.S. population and 41 percent of the African American population already resided in states with a fair housing law. This article uses hazard models to analyze the diffusion of state fair housing legislation and to shed new light on the combination of economic and political forces that facilitated the laws' adoption. Outside the South, states with larger union memberships, more Jewish residents, and more NAACP members passed fair housing laws sooner than others. Including controls for a variety of competing factors does not undermine the estimates, and historical accounts of the legislative campaigns support the article's interpretation.

The Surprising Career of Federal Fair Housing Law

Unlike the breakthrough civil rights legislation of 1964–65, which dismantled the South's Jim Crow system and led to rapid advances in job access and educational opportunity for minorities throughout the nation, the federal fair housing legislation of the 1960s produced little substantive change. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 quickly became case studies in the dominant tradition of presidential leadership in legislative reform, joining such modern classics as Social Security and the Marshall Plan. The Open Housing Act of 1968, however, belongs to a different era of national policy development.

The Surprising Career of Federal Fair Housing Law

Unlike the breakthrough civil rights legislation of 1964–65, which dismantled the South's Jim Crow system and led to rapid advances in job access and educational opportunity for minorities throughout the nation, the federal fair housing legislation of the 1960s produced little substantive change. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 quickly became case studies in the dominant tradition of presidential leadership in legislative reform, joining such modern classics as Social Security and the Marshall Plan. The Open Housing Act of 1968, however, belongs to a different era of national policy development.

The Emerging Philadelphia African American Class Structure

In The Philadelphia Negro, W.E.B. Du Bois presented a four-class typology of the black community. Today the situation has changed greatly. The enormous social changes of the twentieth century, culminating in the civil rights movement and followed by civil disorders occurring on a wide scale in urban America, resulted in attempts by the wider society to incorporate black Americans through federally mandated social programs such as affirmative action, fair housing legislation, set-asides, and major civil rights legislation. These initiatives helped to defuse much of the tension of the 1960s, but they also set the stage for much greater black participation in American society, leading to tremendous growth in the black middle class. At the same time, these measures of black incorporation, as realized over the past 30 years, have greatly changed the traditional castelike system of race relations. In conjunction with deindustrialization and the simultaneous growth of the global economy, these changes have contributed to a more complex class configuration among blacks.

Discrimination in Mortgage Lending: A Critical Review of the Literature

This article surveys the diverse research that examines racial disparities in mortgage lending markets in the context of the fair housing legislation of recent decades. A review of the theoretical models, data, and empirical methods reveals deficiencies in all three areas. A new research agenda focusing on development of more complete models of mortgage lending together with panel data tracking mortgage loan performance over time is needed.

Discrimination in Mortgage Lending: A Critical Review of the Literature

This article surveys the diverse research that examines racial disparities in mortgage lending markets in the context of the fair housing legislation of recent decades. A review of the theoretical models, data, and empirical methods reveals deficiencies in all three areas. A new research agenda focusing on development of more complete models of mortgage lending together with panel data tracking mortgage loan performance over time is needed.

Housing discrimination is still worth worrying about

Several scholars claim that racial and ethnic discrimination in housing is now relatively infrequent and has little impact on the lives of black and Hispanic households. They conclude that money spent on fair housing enforcement will do little or nothing to help people in these groups. This article examines these claims. The article concludes that these claims are not consistent with the evidence, which shows that discrimination in housing is still a common experience for blacks and Hispanics and that the cost of discrimination is still high. Moreover, discrimination constrains the opportunities of people in these groups to go to good schools, to find jobs, and to accumulate home equity. Thus, improved enforcement of fair housing legislation not only promotes principles that are at the heart of our democracy but also attacks one pillar of the system that perpetuates large intergroup disparities in earnings and wealth.

Michigan and Housing Discrimination, 1949-1968

Although the Michigan Committee on Civil Rights, just before G. Mermen Williams was inaugurated as Michigan's governor in 1949, pointed to segregated housing as a civil rights issue with which the state ofMichigan should deal, Michigan did not enact a state fair-housing law until 1968.1 This was not because the state's governors during the period of inaction lacked a commitment to civil rights issues?quite the contrary?but largely because ofthe widespread opposition in the state to fair housing legislation. As Burton Levy, director of community services ofthe Michigan Civil Rights Commission, declared in 1965, although the state's whites at least claimed that they favored merit employment, there was vocal opposition to equality in housing from many segments ofthe community, including 'respectable' individuals and organizations.2 The delay in enacting a state fair-housing law did not mean that no progress had been made in Michigan in the preceding two decades in dealing with housing discrimination. By 1968 the state government had banned discrimination in public housing, the Michigan Civil Rights Commission had mounted a major attack on housing discrimination, and several Michigan cities had adopted fair housing ordinances. Just as the

Housing Barriers: Trends in the Nation's Fourth-Largest City

While many barriers to decent and affordable housing in the United States have fallen, many Americans still do not enjoy complete freedom in selecting a place to live. Over five decades of federal housing policies, programs, and legislation have achieved mixed results in providing equal access of all Americans to decent and affordable housing. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Title VIII of the Civil Rights Act of 1968 (i.e., the Fair Housing Act) were the two major pieces of federal legislation designed to remove the barriers to free choice in the housing market. Most recently, the 1988 amendment to the Fair Housing Act was enacted to plug some of the gaps left in the earlier fair housing legislation. Despite the efforts at the federal level, the problem of individual and institutional discrimination remains a major obstacle for many African-Americans and other ethnic minorities seeking decent and affordable housing (see Bullard, 1983, 1984; Bullard & Tryman, 1980; Feins & Bratt, 1983; James, McCumming, T Kain, 1979, 1980; Krivo, 1982; Lake, 1981; Pearce, 1979; Pol & Guy, 1982; U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, 1979; U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, 1979; Wilson, 1979). Discriminatory practices complicate the housing search for millions of Black families. The various forms of discrimination have

THE INFLUENCE OF BLACKS IN STATE AND LOCAL FAIR HOUSING POLICY‐MAKING

The influence of black officials and organizations on public policy varies among political settings. Factors responsible for this variation include the relatively limited political resources still available to blacks, the size of the black population in a location, the representation of blacks in elective office, the control of political gate keepers, and prevailing ideology. The ability of blacks to influence fair housing policy is further predicated upon the level of government addressed. Black individuals and organizations were in‐ strumental in gaining agenda status for the passage of federal fair housing legislation in the 1960s. Experiences in Cleveland and Ohio reveal a less prominent role for blacks in state and local fair housing policy. Two major factors peculiar to this topic, inattention of traditional civil rights groups and diminished public support for civil rights policies, combine with repre‐ sentational issues to require a broader coalition for support of these policies. The lead in advocacy has been assumed by black/liberal white coalitions that promote managed residential integration contrary to the preferences of black‐dominated interests that prefer equality of housing opportunity regardless of racial impact. The latter group, lacking the politi‐ cal resources of the former, usually reacts to policy rather than initiating policy. Black elected officials, who play a pivotal role in responding to the demand‐protests of their constituents, may be hampered or helped by the political resources available in state and local settings. The theory of politi‐ cal incorporation helps to explain the incremental gains of blacks as com‐ pared to long‐term policy responsiveness in state and local policy‐making.

Barriers to fair housing for black women

This article examines barriers to fair housing (or equality of access to housing opportunities) for black women in both the private and public sectors. First the coverages of federal fair housing legislation are described. Then evidence of discrimination (behavior that denies to one group the rights or opportunities given to others) against black women seeking housing is explored in several contexts—on the basis of race, of sex, and of membership in a family with children. Available data suggest that the major form of housing market discrimination confronting black women is based on race. Despite legislation prohibiting them, subtle forms of discrimination on the basis of both race and sex appear to continue. In addition, several instances were reported in which discrimination against families with children was used to camouflage racially motivated discrimination.

Black Youths in Predominantly White Suburbs: An Exploratory Study of Their Attitudes and Self-Concepts

As the income gap between Blacks and Whites narrowed during the 1960s and 70s,1 and with the enactment of fair housing legislation, the number of Black Americans living in suburban communities increased significantly. By 1977 the increase reached 71.8 percent2 and by 1980 one in every five Blacks was a suburban resident.3 This Black suburbanization is not a monolithic movement. Although many Black suburbanites live in predominantly Black spillover communities, a significant number of Black suburban residents live in predominantly White communities where they are a small but increasingly significant minority. There is a dearth of research that describes and interprets the social, psychological, and educational experiences of Black suburbanites. The present study is part of a larger study of Black families who live in selected, predominantly White suburban communities