Our Segregated Century

There is no more damning reminder of our racial divide than the sustained inequality in homeownership and, as a consequence, household wealth. As of the March 2020 quarterly estimate, the African American homeownership rate (47.0 percent) is 29 points less than the white rate (76.0 percent), a disparity that has grown substantially since 1980 and is now wider than it was in 1900.¹ Median African American family wealth ($24,100), a metric almost entirely shaped by home equity, is less than one-eighth that of white households ($188,200). For families with children, that disparity yawns even wider: the median for white families in 2016 was $89,106; the median for Black families was $0.² The wealth gap, in turn, is not just one more measure of inequality but, as Melvin Oliver and Thomas Shapiro underscore, is a foundational or “sedimentary” inequality that cements other distributional and relational disparities in place. Home ownership and household wealth bolster economic mobility and security, offering both a buffer against income shocks and a “starting gate” advantage to the next generation. Especially in the United States, investments in real estate are also investments in neighborhoods offering a starkly uneven distribution of public goods and economic opportunities. Recent research on economic mobility finds African Americans (and especially African American boys) both “stuck in place” when they grow up in poor neighborhoods and deeply disadvantaged when they grow up in middle- and high-income neighborhoods.. “Race and property” as Dalton Conley underscores, “are intimately linked and form the nexus of black-white inequality.” ³

The historical background here—the trajectory of policies and practices that denied African Americans access to neighborhoods, to home credit or insurance, and to the public subsidies that transformed housing markets in the middle years of the last century—is unfortunately now quite familiar. As early as 1899, W.E.B. Du Bois observed that “public opinion in the city [Philadelphia] is such that the presence of even a respectable colored family in a block will affect its value for renting or sale.” A half-century later, Robert Weaver (then of the NACCP, later to serve as the first Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (“HUD”)) offered a comprehensive checklist of causes and culprits: “community, neighborhood, and individual opposition to colored neighbors; race restrictive deed covenants; agreements, practices, and codes of ethics among real estate boards and operators; FHA acceptance and perpetuation of real estate practice; local government’s fear that adequate or more housing will encourage Negro migration; local political action to restrict Negroes to particular areas; development of exclusive one-class neighborhoods.”⁴ But rounding up the usual suspects only gets us so far. The important historical questions revolve around the timing and the causal mechanisms at work; the relationships between, and the relative culpability of, public and private actors; and the long cascade of costs and consequences for those disadvantaged by decades of unvarnished discrimination, segregation, and predation.⁵

These questions rest at the center of the two books reviewed here. Paige Glotzer’s How the Suburbs Were Segregated opens with the calculated invention of a particularly exclusive brand of residential segregation in late-19th-century Baltimore by the Roland Park Company. Glotzer traces the ways in which this segregation, which defined African American occupancy as a “nuisance” destructive to property values, was realized on the ground—by subdivision and building design, by hard and soft boundaries, and by the uneven provision of basic infrastructure. She charts the emulation, adaptation, and institutionalization of that invention—and all of the assumptions about race and property that it carried with it—in the real estate profession, in the local politics of housing, and in national housing policy. Glotzer bookends her...