The frequent existence of polluting industry and toxic waste plants in African American communities, along with subdivided homes and rooming houses, contributed to giving African Americans the image of slum dwellers in the eyes of whites who lived in neighborhoods where integration might be a possibility. President Richard Nixon announced that public housing should not be forced on white communities that didn’t want it, and he reported to Congress that many public housing projects were “monstrous, depressing places-rundown, overcrowded, crime-ridden.” By 1973 the changeover was mostly complete.

As a result, the condition and then the reputation of public housing collapsed. The loss of middle-class tenants also removed a constituency that had possessed the political strength to insist on adequate funds for their projects’ upkeep and amenities. The federal government had required public housing to be made available only to families who needed substantial subsidies, while the same government declined to provide sufficient subsidies to make public housing a decent place to live. The condition of public projects rapidly deteriorated, partly because housing authority maintenance workers and their families had to leave the buildings where they worked when their wages made them ineligible to live there, and partly because the loss of middle-class rents resulted in inadequate maintenance budgets. It transformed public housing into a warehousing system for the poor. This policy change, mostly complete by the late 1960s, ensured that integrated public housing would cease to be possible. Rather, it is what courts call de jure: segregation by law and public policy. Segregation by intentional government action is not de facto. Besides, black families prefer to live with one another.Īll this has some truth, but it remains a small part of the truth, submerged by a far more important one: until the last quarter of the twentieth century, racially explicit policies of federal, state, and local governments defined where whites and African Americans should live. African Americans haven’t generally gotten the educations that would enable them to earn sufficient incomes to live in white suburbs, and, as a result, many remain concentrated in urban neighborhoods. Banks discriminated with “redlining,” refusing to give mortgages to African Americans or extracting unusually severe terms from them with subprime loans. Real estate agents steered whites away from black neighborhoods, and blacks away from white ones. When African Americans moved into a neighborhood like Ferguson, a few racially prejudiced white families decided to leave, and then as the number of black families grew, the neighborhood deteriorated, and “white flight” followed. Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher Programĭe facto segregation, we tell ourselves, has various causes.

The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein