Racial Segregation In Housing Research Articles

Beyond Isabel Archer's Door: The Underground Railroad and the Condemned Plot for Freedom

Abstract This article radically reframes Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady in relation to the Underground Railroad, the transatlantic slave trade, US slavery, and racial housing segregation. Focusing on the house in Albany, New York, where Isabel Archer stays in the 1850s, it asserts that Isabel's pursuit of freedom is grounded in her 1850s childhood when the Underground Railroad was particularly active in Albany. It examines the Albany home within the historical context of the 1870s and 1880s, when, respectively, Isabel returns to Albany and The Portrait of a Lady was first published. Taking into account the Supreme Court's 1883 Civil Rights Cases, which facilitated housing discrimination against Black Americans, this article argues that the Albany home, whose door remains bolted to the “vulgar street,” protects James's American lady from a vulgarity associated then with African Americans. By examining a critically overlooked function of the Albany house—its spatial representation of the novel's plot—this article shows how narratives of Black people escaping slavery along with late nineteenth-century definitions of vulgarity centrally define Isabel's pursuit of freedom. Analyzing the plot's architecture, the article reveals how James strategically alludes to two novels about racism—overtly to George Eliot's Daniel Deronda and covertly to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin—to construct his highly influential narrative about a white woman's transatlantic journey toward freedom.

Rebellious Lawyers for Fair Housing: The Lost Scientific Model of the Early NAACP

Historically-rooted patterns of racial segregation in housing remain a significant contributor to racial inequities in health, intergenerational wealth, and life chances more generally. This article uncovers a powerful but long-forgotten model for rebellious lawyers in the struggle for fair housing. I draw this model from archival research into the innovative early NAACP lawyers who litigated racially restrictive covenants from the 1910s to the 1940s. Facing a hostile judiciary, and with little legal precedent on their side, these lawyers turned their attention to a fundamental conceptual obstacle to their cause: what they termed “property in a sociological vacuum.” In this view, property ownership as an entirely private manner unrelated to the public interest and social context more generally. Under the vacuum logic, segregationist lawyers had convinced the courts that supporting racial covenants was a racially innocent defense of white homeowners’ property rights. The early NAACP lawyers countered this vacuum understanding of property by radically departing from the conventional norms of legal advocacy. In their briefs and oral arguments, they refuted the vacuum view on theoretical grounds and backed up their position with social-scientific findings that mapped out the pervasive use and devastating impacts of racial covenants in communities of color. Courts had never before been presented with such an enormous trove of social scientific research in civil rights litigation. This strategy reached full expression in Shelley v. Kraemer (1948), the land US Supreme Court decision that rendered racially restrictive covenants unenforceable. Shelley is a well-studied staple of the 1L curriculum, but legal history has largely ignored the decades of legal efforts that made it possible. This article traces that history in detail. I show how NAACP affiliated lawyers identified the vacuum view of property as a central target in their litigation strategy and then worked with academics and other social movement allies to develop a vast body of empirical research. This strategy enabled these lawyers to fill the sociological vacuum around property. In this way, they forced the judiciary to see that racial covenants were more than purely private instruments of individual landowners but rather had formed a pervasive land policy of racial apartheid, slum conditions, and excluding people of color from homeownership. I conclude by arguing that this “lost scientific model” should be emulated by today’s fair housing lawyers, who continue to encounter the vacuum view of property as a core theoretical obstacle to racial integration and inclusion.

Racial Rent Differences in U.S. Housing Markets

This paper exploits an unusually rich data set to estimate racial differences in the rents paid for identical housing in the same neighborhood in U.S. housing markets and how they vary with neighborhood racial composition. It overcomes the shortcomings of the data used in previous studies. It is large (over 400,000 observations), covers all parts of the country, and contains detailed information about the housing units and their immediate neighborhoods and the census block group of each unit. Importantly, due to the sample size, there are many blacks living in predominantly white neighborhoods and many whites in predominantly black neighborhoods. Results suggest that households led by blacks pay more for identical housing in identical neighborhoods than their white counterparts and that this rent gap increases with the fraction of the neighborhood white. In neighborhoods with the smallest fraction white, the premium is about 0.6 percent. In neighborhoods with the largest fraction white, it is about 2.4 percent. This pattern holds across different types of areas, namely the 50 largest metro areas, all other metro areas, non-metro areas, and areas with the highest and lowest levels of racial segregation in housing.

Segregation by Design: Race, Architecture, and the Enclosure of the Atlanta Apartment

This article explores the ways in which architecture, landscape design, and site planning helped maintain racial segregation in housing in Atlanta, Georgia, between the 1960s and 1990s. Under Jim Crow, apartment complexes in Atlanta hewed to national design norms. By the late 1960s, however, racial tension, rioting, and passage of the Fair Housing Act led to proliferation of the architecture of enclosure: design that helped code communities as white through pastoral symbolism and heavy, obscuring landscaping. The concept, which appeared to a lesser degree in other U.S. housing markets, was introduced to Atlanta at Riverbend (1966-1972), a swinging-singles complex developed in part by Dallas’s Trammell Crow with a site plan by California’s Lawrence Halprin & Associates. The practice was generalized in the 1970s and 1980s by Post Properties, which became one of the region’s largest builders.

Confidence and Crisis: A History of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, 1959–1977 by Steven M. Avella

Reviewed by: Confidence and Crisis: A History of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, 1959–1977 by Steven M. Avella Leslie Woodcock Tentler Confidence and Crisis: A History of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, 1959–1977. By Steven M. Avella. [Urban Life Series, no. 7.] (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press. 2014. Pp. 344. $24.00. ISBN 978-0-87462-086-3.) When does “the past” become “history”? At what point, in other words, do we gain sufficient perspective on recent events to place them with reasonable confidence in an overarching political, social, or cultural narrative? There seems to be a growing consensus among historians of American Catholics that the decades immediately following the Second Vatican Council have become “history.” Nonetheless, it requires courage to navigate this particular piece of the past, given [End Page 434] the controversies that still surround it and the presence among us of many who lived through those turbulent times. Steven Avella is thus to be congratulated for his scholarly boldness in producing a history of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee during the episcopate of Archbishop William Cousins (1959–77). Cousins was an amiable if not terribly distinguished churchman, whom Avella treats with a nice mixture of sympathy and intelligent criticism. He was well-suited to the prosperous times that prevailed in the Archdiocese of Milwaukee until 1965. The early years of Cousins’s tenure were years of building, largely in Milwaukee’s burgeoning suburbs, along with ambitious planning for a major expansion of the local seminary. Presumably some at the chancery were concerned, at least in passing, about white flight from the center city and its growing impoverishment. But until the mid-1960s, the Cousins chancery appears to have assumed that the future of the archdiocese would be much like its recent past. Vocations would continue to increase, as would the numbers of Catholic schools, and racial segregation in housing—and hence, for the most part, in education—would continue to be the order of the day. Cousins was cautiously sympathetic to the civil rights movement, particularly in its Southern manifestations, and no laggard when it came to implementing the various liturgical reforms associated with the Second Vatican Council. But his instinct was always to conciliate, indeed to temporize, rather than take a principled stand. Circumstances changed abruptly in 1965. As in other dioceses of the United States, Milwaukee saw a sudden diminution in seminary enrollments, even as growing numbers of priests left the active ministry. The numbers of women religious fell sharply, too, which endangered the future of local Catholic schools. A hitherto quiescent black population erupted into militancy, especially around the issues of housing and schools. And much to the astonishment of local Catholics, the city’s best-known civil rights activist by 1965 was James Groppi, a priest ordained for Milwaukee in 1959. Passionate in his espousal of open housing, school integration, and economic justice, Groppi made the national news with his leadership of local protests that sometimes ended in arrests. (He was the first priest in the history of the archdiocese to spend time in jail.) Groppi was a divisive figure among the local clergy and even more so among the laity. But Archbishop Cousins remained on the fence, neither disciplining his famous priest nor condemning the racism displayed by many of his critics. In the end, Groppi drifted out of the priesthood, marrying a local activist in 1976 and fathering three children. Avella’s two chapters on Groppi are his best—the most alive and charged with personality. Other chapters examine the implementation of the Council reforms in the archdiocese, the eventual crisis of the parochial school system, changes in seminary education and related developments among the local clergy, the altered contours of vowed religious life, postconciliar parish life, and ministry to Hispanics. The breadth of its subject matter is among the book’s many strengths. The author has little to say, however, about the changing religious mentality that marked the [End Page 435] turbulent years he chronicles; perhaps he concluded that, in this respect, these years are not yet ripe for historical analysis. Leslie Woodcock Tentler The Catholic University of America (Emerita) Copyright © 2016 The Catholic University of America Press

Are people willing to pay for less segregation? Evidence from U.S. internal migration

It is difficult to determine whether racial housing segregation is socially desirable, because segregation has some effects that are hard to measure. To overcome this challenge, we estimate a migration choice model to measure the willingness to pay for reduced segregation. The key idea underlying our empirical approach is that if segregation is undesirable, migrants should be willing to give up some earnings to avoid living in segregated cities. Using decennial census data from 1980 to 2000, we provide evidence that segregation is an urban disamenity. It is shown that both black and white migrants prefer to live in less segregated cities. For example, for a one percentage point reduction in the dissimilarity index, the estimated marginal willingness to pay of blacks is $436 (in 1999 dollars) in 2000. Among whites, this marginal willingness to pay is $301.

Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun and the “Illegible” Politics of (Inter)personal Justice

Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun has long been misunderstood as a celebration of racial integration and the possibility that Black families can attain the American Dream by accessing the fruits and benefits of homeownership. This misinterpretation has long deflected attention away from the play’s grounding in the Black radical tradition and its searing critiques of upward mobility, normative domesticity, the white nuclear family, and homeownership. Hansberry’s play reveals that Black exclusion was a necessary component of the American Dream itself. In a move that may be even more important today than when the play was first written and performed, Hansberry used her play as an opportunity to examine the freedom dreams of everyday people and explore the dangers of the constant crushing deferral and systematic denial of them. By creating a drama based in a Black domestic sphere that exposes the interior, intimate impact of structural racism via housing segregation, oppression, economic exploitation, and inaccessible educational opportunity, Hansberry is able to reveal the importance of this nexus in a deft and complex fashion. The home and the central roles all the women play serve as a powerful rejection of the twin legacies of sociological discourses about Black family/cultural dysfunctionality. These discourses, essential for garnering support for policies that created racial housing segregation to cordon off Black life, also regulate interracial intimacy and contact and represent a defining nexus for Black social relations. A Raisin in the Sun champions the resistive and restorative power of Black love and redefines it as a political act.

Explaining Racial/Ethnic Gaps in Spatial Mismatch in the US: The Primacy of Racial Segregation

Despite declines in racial segregation across most US metropolitan areas in recent years, racial and ethnic minorities still display uneven geographical access to jobs but consistently inferior to that of Whites. This article provides a detailed analysis of the factors driving racial and ethnic gaps in spatial mismatch conditions across US metropolitan areas. Using data primarily from the 1990 and 2000 US censuses, and the 1994 and 1999 US Department of Commerce's zip code business pattern files, descriptive, multivariate and decompositional evidence is generated to address why Blacks and to a lesser extent Latinos display greater degrees of spatial mismatch than Whites. The results indicate that, among many other factors including job sprawl, racial segregation in housing markets is the most important. The models indicate that racial differences in spatial mismatch conditions, particularly between Blacks and Whites, should be eliminated in 45–50 years if racial segregation levels continue to decline in the future at rates similar to those observed over the 1990s.

De Jure Housing Segregation in the United States and South Africa: The Difficult Pursuit for Racial Justice

The thesis of this article is limited but quite relevant. The United States Constitution empowered the Supreme Court to ensure equal treatment under the law for all Americans. In some instances, the Court has interpreted the due process and equal protection clauses of the fourteenth amendment in a manner that afforded some protection against certain aspects of de jure racial segregation. On the other hand, the South African Constitution severely limited the judiciary's ability to protect the civil rights of black South Africans. The exercise of the judiciary's power was interpreted by the South African Supreme Court in a manner, similar to that displayed by many American state courts, that has permitted de jure racial housing segregation.Implicit in this article's thesis is that a new South African Constitution, authorizing the power of judicial review and containing a prohibition against housing discrimination similar to the provision embodied in the fourteenth amendment, will help to ensure the equality of opportunity in housing of all South Africans. But more importantly, it is essential that such a constitution be enforced by a racially pluralist judiciary that will be careful to avoid the rationale of prior jurisprudence that assumed that blacks could be treated differently from and unequally to whites. A meaningful constitutional revision without an enlightened racially pluralistic judiciary committed to equality of opportunity for all South Africans will not assure black South Africans of even the limited protection against housing segregation that some black Americans have received.This article examines the legal challenges to de jure racial housing segregation in the United States and South Africa. In so examining, this article discusses the relevant housing statutes and cases and compares both the similarities and differences in approach, response, and result. This article first discusses the relevance of a comparative analysis of American race relations law and the South African system of apartheid. Section III discusses residential segregation in South Africa while section IV examines such segregation in the United States. Section V analyzes the similarities and differences between the two legal communities. Finally, section VI concludes by suggesting a response to the continuing de jure racial housing segregation in South Africa.

Race, Not Class: Explaining Racial Housing Segregation in the St. Louis Metropolitan Area, 2000

Two techniques, computation of segregation indices within income categories, and indirect standardizations based on income and two measures of housing cost, are used to assess the extent to which residential segregation in the St. Louis metropolitan area in 2000 may be attributed to socioeconomic differences between whites and African Americans. Both techniques indicate that the overwhelming majority of segregation is attributable to race, not class. In all income categories, segregation of blacks from whites is as great or greater than in the overall population. Indirect standardizations show that housing cost measures using estimated value of the house explain away somewhat more segregation than those based on monthly owner cost. However, the former type of measure may itself reflect consequences of racial discrimination in housing and lending. Despite a modest decline in the proportion of segregation attributable to race, the large majority of segregation remains tied to race, not class.

The Role of Governmental Policies in Promoting Residential Segregation in the St. Louis Metropolitan Area

Dennis R. Judd, Department of Political Science, University of Missouri-St. Louis* This article explains how local, state, and federal governments have exacerbated or failed to take steps to reduce residential segregation in the St. Louis metropolitan area since the District Court's 1981 decision in Liddell v. Board of Education The court ruled then that both the policies of the city school board and governmental housing policies had contributed to racial segregation in the city's schools. The author presents a comprehensive review of socioeconomic and political issues related to housing segregation in the St. Louis region, and offers five corrective actions to facilitate fair housing practices, policies, and enforcement in the region. INTRODUCTION In the 1977 Craton Liddell et al. v. the Board of Education of the City of St. Louis, Missouri et al. trial, the board of education (BOE) of the city of St. Louis argued that racial imbalance in that city's schools existed because of resegregative factors associated with governmental housing policies, and not because of school policies administered by the school board. In rejecting this argument in 1981, the District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri ruled that the policies of the school board contributed to racial segregation in the schools. The court also recognized that governmental housing policies had played an important contributing role, basing its conclusions in this regard primarily on the report of its independent housing expert, Gary Orfield.1 Orfield's comprehensive 153-page report, submitted on April 21, 1981, provided strong that federally assisted housing has, over time, tended to resegregate African American populations. The court subsequently ordered the state of Missouri, the United States, the city of St. Louis, and the BOE to develop a plan to ensure that housing programs would facilitate school desegregation. Though such a plan was drawn up, the state of Missouri refused to participate, and the plan was never implemented. Nearly two decades later, federally assisted housing yields the same effect, despite changes in policies at the federal level. The long-term pattern of local resistance to racial integration in the St. Louis region has continued unchanged. Governments at all levels have continued to pursue policies that have promoted racial segregation in housing, in St. Louis and elsewhere, and they have failed to enact policies that would have the effect of reducing such segregation. The effect of this governmental complicity and inaction is that the St. Louis metropolitan area remains highly segregated. The conditions of residential segregation documented in 1981 persist to this day. As in the past, segregation in housing continues to amplify school not only in St. Louis but across the nation. Because racial segregation in the schools is directly related to patterns of residential schools in the St. Louis metropolitan area, in many urban areas in the United States, remain highly segregated. In this article, I demonstrate how, local, state, and federal governments have continued to exacerbate or have failed to take steps to reduce residential segregation in the St. Louis metropolitan area since the District Court's 1981 decision. I also present a comprehensive review of the socioeconomic and political issues related to housing in the St. Louis region, and offer five corrective actions to facilitate fair housing practices, policies, and enforcement across city and county lines. THE LIDDELL CASE In reaching its initial decision in Liddell, the District Court identified St. Louis as an example of 'severe' residential segregation, and noted that evidence of housing segregation in St. Louis is undisputed in the record (Liddell, 1981, p. 1324). The Court further expressed its view that government policies and action have been a major force in developing and maintaining housing discrimination against blacks (p. …

Race Still Matters

Two techniques are used to examine the extent to which racial housing segregation in the St. Louis metropolitan area in 1990 is attributable to income and housing cost differences between African-Americans and whites. Measurement of segregation within household-income categories revealed that, at all income levels, African-Americans and whites with similar incomes are about as segregated as African-Americans and whites overall. Indirect standardizations based on housing cost and tenure reveal that if those were the only causes of segregation, African-Americans and whites would be far less segregated than they are. The proportion of segregation attributable to such differences is even lower in 1990 than in past censuses.

Housing, Schools, and Incremental Segregative Effects

Racial segregation in housing contributes to racial segregation in schools, and racially identifiable schools contribute to the development and maintenance of segregated neighborhoods. Examination of the reciprocal interplay between housing and school segregation has been spurred by the Supreme Court's decision in the Dayton school case, which calls for determination of how much incremental segregative effect the discriminatory actions of a school board had on the racial distribution of pupils compared to what the distribution would have been if the board had never practised discrimination. In recent hearings in the Milwaukee school case, plaintiffs sought to address this specific question through the testimony of a social scientist. Discriminatory actions with respect to teacher assignment, "intact busing," student transfers, school plant utilization, and attendance zone boundary changes were identified as having pervasive and enduring effects on racial residential segregation in Milwaukee. This case study illustrates that the Supreme Court's effort to construe school cases narrowly should fail, and that policymakers, whether they are concerned with housing, schools, or other domains, should cultivate a broad perspective on the unity of the nation's racial problems.

The Effects of a Freeway Displacement on Racial Housing Segregation in a Northern City

The Effects of a Freeway Displacement on Racial Housing Segregation in a Northern City