Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban America (review)

Scholars have long recognized that whites, especially suburbanites, resisted sharing residential neighborhoods with African Americans in the twentieth century. Before World War II, Freund argues in Colored Property, whites rejected black neighbors for reasons that they did not hesitate to articulate in explicitly racist terms. But after World War II made it unpalatable for whites to acknowledge the racism that undergirded their preference for segregation, they couched their prejudice in terms of a purportedly race-neutral, market-driven defense of their property values. Freund shows, however, that their claim to a nonracist, purely capitalist motivation was disingenuous. Both the actions of the federal government and the development of the real-estate industry served to embed racial assumptions into the performance of the housing market in a way that validated whites’ preferences for segregated neighborhoods without exposing their racism.

Freund’s book consists of two monographs hinged together by the common themes of race and property in the twentieth-century United States—a national overview of the development of land-use policies and a case study scrutinizing housing regulation and market practices. In short, it is both a top-down and a bottom-up study of the culture of property relations in the twentieth century. The national study is exhaustive in its secondary research, rooting its analysis in secondary scholarship from diverse fields, including history, sociology, geography, government, housing, real estate, law, planning, politics, and economics. Freund’s account reveals how planners, real-estate professionals, legislators, and judges wrote racist assumptions about the desirability of racially homogeneous neighborhoods into theoretically nonracial land-use regulations, such as zoning. Significantly, when the federal government intervened in the housing market during the Great Depression, it worked actively to disguise its influence, encouraging Americans to believe that the suburban boom was the work of the unfettered free market.

The second half of Freund’s book uses traditional archival research to survey the Detroit metropolitan area—towns like Dearborn where the housing stock was largely indistinguishable from that in the city. The choice of this homogenous environment underscores his contention that whites’ postwar sensibilities about race rested on their beliefs rather than in material differences between the places where they and African Americans inhabited. Drawing on recent scholarship about racial formation, Freund points out that many suburbanites who had lived in Detroit as immigrants reinvented themselves as “white” homeowners in the suburbs.

As the civil rights movement made it increasingly difficult for whites to express racist views, their public rhetoric about why they wished to live in all-white environments shifted. The arguments about property and land use developed by real-estate and planning professionals during the interwar years allowed whites to assert their desire for exclusively zoned communities without having to resort to the language of racism or acknowledge their preferences for racial segregation. Evidence for whites’ hostility to black neighbors has been well rehearsed elsewhere. What Freund brings to his study is crisp argumentation that connects the quotidian life of postwar suburbia to the prewar work of housing and government professionals.