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

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 minorities 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 minorities 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, as Freund notes in his effective overview of these debates, that whites “defended segregation in the postwar era by invoking the amorphous language of ‘rights,’ which enabled them to cast racial exclusion as a defense of hard-earned, and presumably nonracial, privileges, be it as homeowners, working people, consumers, citizens, or loyal supporters of the New Deal state” (p. 6).⁴ Less certain, given that many whites claimed to approve racial equality in principle, is whether this rights-based language was racist subterfuge or a genuine and race-neutral response to the regrettably real, if historically contingent, threat that integration posed to white property values. Historians sympathetic to the latter perspective tend to argue that racial ideology was less important to anti-integration whites than class and economic concerns. This conclusion is generally part and parcel of a broader minimization of the role that racial backlash played in the conservative Republican triumph.⁵ In contrast, ever since the “urban crisis” of the 1960s consolidated residential segregation in America and contributed to the final unraveling of the liberal New Deal coalition, the majority of historians who identify a strong causal current of racism have devoted considerable attention to the ways in which racial politics, demographic change, deindustrialization, and the activist state led to the overdevelopment of the (largely white) suburbs and the underdevelopment of the (increasingly nonwhite) urban core.⁶

Colored Property’s primary aim, however, is more ambitious than merely adding to the growing list of works that have demonstrated the importance of race—and racism—to the conservative ascendancy. As Freund sees it, whether they insist upon the persistence of racism in shaping urban change, or treat whites’ economic and status concerns sympathetically, scholars have handled white racism as a static and exogenous variable “conceptually separable from other variables that fuel conflict between groups (including racial groups)” (p. 7). “Largely missing from this important scholarship,” Freund insists, “is an investigation of how whites’ racial thinking itself changed during the years that the United States became a predominantly suburban and home-owning nation...