Eugenic Housing: Redlining, Reproductive Regulation, and Suburban Development in the United States

American eugenicists in the 1930s saw housing programs as a vehicle for a new form of reproductive regulation promoting large families for the so-called fit while limiting family size among the so-called unfit. Housing developers, federal agencies, and real-estate associations used a eugenically informed racial hierarchy to justify redlining and preferential home loans that discriminated against African Americans and immigrants. Reframing this history from a feminist perspective, I argue that these practices were intended as a form of eugenic regulation that enforced women's role as reproducers. This reproductive agenda contributed to a legacy of race-based discrimination in housing, and disparities in wealth that resulted from those differences.