Redlining and Neighborhood Displacement in U.S. History

 Week 8 Post 1- Notes Chapter title- Local Tactics San Lorenzo was the largest wartime- specific government insured housing. It was whites only and in California. San Lorenzo was sold as a “safe investment”, and assured buyers that it had protective restrictions  The AFSC (quacker) tried to petition the ford plant to create an interracial community, since there was nowhere for black people to live in Milpitas  Milpitas became slightly overbuilt because of rapid population growth and then had several empty units in some subdivisions, but none of the developers would sell them to AAs The AFSC, after finding a developer to build their integrated subdivision, had to go to NYC to get a quacker loan since they could find no bank in the SF area that would fund it When the Santa Clara board found out they wanted to make an integrated community they rezoned the area for industrial  After four tries being interfered with, the builder gave up on the integrated suburb  A ne...

Week 7 Post 3- Informal Reflection     This weeks chapter was about the Internal Revenue Service and their contribution to segregation. The chapter started out with reviewing the purpose of the IRS and how they are mandated to act against racism because of amendments added to the consitution after the civil war. The chapter then went on to explain how they haven't been doing that, and how by allowing certain institutions like churches and colleges that continue to segregate to have tax breaks they were not upholding the US constitution. Something interesting I found in this chapter was the amount of churches that were in charge of these neighborhood associations that were creating these racist covenants. The chapter also explained 'reverse-redlining' and subprime loans. There was a lot of banking and housing jargin around this part, so I didn't take notes on all of it, but I got a pretty good idea of how banks were scamming African Americans with loans with horrible int...

 Week 7 Post 2- Formal Synthesis     In research IRS support and compliant regulations, it can be found that the federal reserve's involvement in residential segregation continued to prevent African Americans from having stable housing. The government had a constitutional obligation to prevent segregation to uphold the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendment. It was stated that although institutions like churches and universities are technically not part of the federal government, they do receive tax exemptions from the federal reserve, and should not be given these exemptions if they are practicing segregation. However, the federal reserve was not practicing this behavior. The agency was still granting tax breaks to white-only schools sixteen years after Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka was passed. In previous chapters we learned extensively about neighborhood associations and their creations of racial covenants. Many of these neighborhood associations were ...

 Week 7 Post 1- Notes  Chapter Name- IRS Support and Compliant Regulators The thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments were written specifically to protect black people from constitutional rights being violated  De jure segregation is committed when state real estate commissions publish codes mandating discrimination  We cannot blame church’s and universities as part of the state, but we can acknowledge that we have the right to expect that if these private institutions promoted segregation they would not get tax exceptions  “The IRS has always had an obligation to withhold tax favoritism from discriminatory organizations, but it almost never acted to do so” IRS regulations allow for charity deductions for organizations that “eliminate prejudice and discrimination” and “defend human and civil rights” the irs still granted tax exceptions to private whites only school until 16 years after brown v board  The IRS denied a tax exception to bob Jones in 1...

 Week 6 Post 3- informal reflection This weeks chapter talked about how white flight was instigated by the government. It was a really fascinating read, and while I was very familiar with the term White Flight, I never knew how influenced it was by government interference. The fact that real estate agents hired black people to go into neighborhoods and do things to scare white people into moving out is somewhat terrifying, in a sense that I can't believe someone would think like that. The staging of burglaries is so completely ridiculous, but it was successful in what they wanted it to do. This chapter helped me get a better understanding of what blockbusting really is, and how calculated the FHA was in their work during this time. I found the end of the chapter that focused on Chicago very interesting. The FHA was an indirect cause of a rise of gang activity in the Chicago area because of the 'double-shifting' that happened in Chicago schools because of how overcrowded bla...

 Week 6 Post 2- Formal Synthesis  Blockbusting was an epidemic of real estate agents manipulating the market to make money while causing black people to be framed as the cause of housing values depreciating. The FHA claimed that black people moving into neighborhoods causes the value of homes in that neighborhood to go down. The FHA had no evidence to back up this claim, in fact, black families could sometimes raise property values since middle-class black families were charged more for homes in neighborhoods with middle-class white families than the white families were. The chapter explains blockbusting, a process in which realtors tried to scare white families into selling their houses by making it seem like their neighborhood was in danger of integrating. They did this by hiring black women to push baby carriages around, hiring black men to blast music from their cars and drive in the neighborhood, and hiring black families to go with real estate agents when they were showi...

 Week 6 Post 1- notes Chapter: White Flight The FHA claimed that AAs purchasing homes in white neighborhoods would drive the value of houses down, yet there was never actual evidence of integration driving down home values  Homer Hoyt explained in 1939 that he thought racial segregation must be necessary because it was a worldwide phenomenon His only basis for this was that in China White missionaries lived seperately from Chinese people FHA policies actually prevented property values from going down when African Americans moved in, since they would give them such ridiculously high prices to try to keep them out A DC court refused to uphold a covenant because they said it would depress property values since AAs were so much mroe willing to pay higher prices than whites African Americans moving in would appreciate property values and help neighborhood stability An Appraisal Journal study found that there was no evidence of depretiation when black people moved into white neighbo...

 Week 5 Post 3- Informal summary This week's chapter was all about private agreements in neighborhoods about race. I found a lot of this stuff really interesting, and it was a good way to remember information since it discussed more about the FHA, which I learned all about in the previous chapter. I find the neighborhood associations especially interesting, because I know people today who live in places with neighborhood associations, and the fact that this is what it came from is so strange, knowing so many still exist in suburbs in the U.S. This chapter went into a lot of details of supreme court proceedings, much of which I didn't write down, since it took me a while to understand and I will probably need to read some parts again to take more concise notes. Something else that really cought my attention in this chapter was the use of air raid wardens in Culver City it discusses. That intersection of WWII and the racism still happening throughout our country is so so interest...

 Week 5 Post 2- Formal summary Racial covenants were used in neighborhoods to be able to segregate through private agreement instead of through the law. In 1948, a supreme court decision that forbade government enforcement of racial clauses in deeds for housing. The chapter several times also made sure to highlight the fact that racial clauses usually excluded African American workers and servants living with white families. To get around lack of government racial regulation, communities began creating racial covenants that were signed by buyers of homes stating they would not sell or rent their home to an African American. Another strategy was to create a neighborhood association that every homeowner was required to join. The neighborhood could not prevent African Americans from buying homes, but because they could prevent them from the association, they had no way to live in the neighborhood. Private covenants and associations were held up by the Supreme Court of the United State...

 Week 5 Post 1- Notes Chapter name- Private Agreements, Government Enforcement In 1948 the Supreme Court ruled that racial clauses in deeds could not depend on fed gov power to enforce them Private deeds included forbidding African Americans or any non whites for many rentals, in the same way you agreed to paint windows a certain color Most created exceptions for servants or non white workers of the tenants  A house deed containing a racial convanant was limited to the seller and current buyer, so people started creating entire neighborhood covenants Developers would create neighborhood associations  56 percent of developments built between 35 and 47 in nyc contained racial covenants Largest subdivisions was 85 percent  Dr Buckingham was sold a house by a white friend in a Berkeley neighborhood , when the other neighbors found out the buyer, they sued because of the Claremont improvement club and he was ordered to vacant the residence  Judges endorsed these raci...

 Week 4 Post 3- informal summary      This chapter was entitled 'own your own home' and was about the government organizations that financed housing for white families and how black families suffered because of it. This chapter took me a little while because it was a lot of information about real estate and all the details of the financial part of buying a house, which I knew very little about and was confusing for me. I got through most of that, but I didn't choose to include it in my research since most of it is not super relevant to my main point. I was very interested in the story of the Berkley teacher who was blacklisted from the FHA for leasing his home to a black man in 1958. This book has really put into perspective how recent all of these policies were created. There are some many people alive who can recount their stories of living in the U.S. as a black person during this time, who were adults while this was all happening. This chapter really emphasized t...

 Week 4 Post 2- formal synthesis     The United States government started to encourage white families to own homes due to the effects of the red scare following the 1917 Russian Revolution. The government exclusively promoted this for white families, and the creation of organizations such as the FHA and the VA exclusively offered loans to mortgage homes to white families. The housing crisis created these organizations since the depression and after effects of world war II caused housing shortages nationwide, specifically veterans. These organizations were strict in their segregationist ideas, and only on extremely rare occasion would finance all black developments, and would only do them distanced from their all white neighborhoods. Residential segregation plagued the country because of the actions of both of these organizations under multiple administrations.      This financial segregation had an effect on black communities permanently. Because black fami...

 Week 3 Post 3- informal summary     This week's chapter was on racial zoning, and it went through the history of racial zoning in privatized housing. The chapter started with reconstruction post-civil war and went through the process of the beginning of the great migration and black people becoming a larger population margin in Northern cities. With this came sundown towns, and places like Montana became unsafe for black people even though they had no racial discrimination before. The chapter went through all of the places that had controversial racial zoning for housing from the 1910s to the 1960s, and all the decisions that were made in these places to enforce segregation as much as possible. The chapter concluded with an explanation of zoning ordinances that allowed black neighborhoods to have liquor stores, strip clubs, and toxic waste centers and landfills. This made it very difficult for black neighborhoods to stay at the same quality as all white ne...

 Week 3 Post 2- formal synthesis     This week I researched racial zoning in the private sector. While we spent last week researching the history of segregation in government funded housing, this week was spent with the history of private housing's segregated history. The chapter began with an overview of what as known as sundown towns, towns that were majority or usually completely white, who threatened black people not to spend the night there with the assumption they would be murdered. There were many cities outside of the south that were integrated and had no problem with it until the early twentieth century, when state legislatures began making Jim Crow laws, causing cities like Helena, Montana, to drive out a majority of its black population. The 1910s brought race-based segregation in cities in the Midwest and northeast, mainly consisting of banning black families from moving onto fully white blocks and vise-versa. Many government officials clai...

 Week 4 Post one- notes Chapter- 'own your own home' Baltimore racial zoning began because an upper middle class black lawyer moved onto a predominantly white block The 1917 Russian revolution scared American government into believing that the only way to prevent communism was to get as many Americans to become homeowners as possible, handing out 'We own our own home' pamphlets and discouraging renting All of these promotions showed pictures of only white families The better homes org, led by Herbert Hoover, encouraged racial homogeniety in buying single family homes 'every thrifty family has an inherent right to own a home' Hoover also said that it was in the nature of 'our race' to own homes Manuals the Better homes in America published said apartments were the worst kind of houses to get because of African Americans and European immigrants The largest planned community in the nation at the time, Parkchester inf NYC, barred AA families one committee ou...

 Week 3 Notes- Racial Zoning Rutherford b hayes becoming president in 1877 caused troops protecting aas in the south to be removed, starting Jim Crow  Slavery—> “share cropping” The red shirts were a group of white supremecists in South Carolina who went on killing sprees of aas in small towns, and rigged elections to create a government that would favor them  Clemson only dissociated themselves with Tillman in 2015, and his name is still on the building because their state legislator has not authorized taking it down Helena, capital of Montana had a flourishing black community at the turn of the century, but then in 1906 decided it was time for white people to reclaim their space. Interracial marriage was outlined in 1909. Sundown towns- “the sun is never allowed to set on any n**** in Glendive” Wilson’s presidency enforced much more White House segregation, much like he did at Princeton  Baltimore was the first major city to establish racial zoning in 1910, proh...

 Week 2 Post 3- Informal reflection     This weeks chapter was titles public housing, black ghettos. The chapter went through how segregation has affected public housing's history in the U.S. The chapter started with an overview of how public housing became a much bigger issue after WWII with lots of veterans needing homes in a difficult market. It explained that the first projects that were not created specifically for defense work were commissioned by the new deal during the great depression. When projects started getting built more frequently in the 1950s, cities like ATL began demolishing already integrated neighborhoods to create segregated projects. This happened in many different cities, but as black people began to be the majority of those needing public housing, cities found it much more difficult to keep projects segregated. When Japanese Americans were put in internment camps during WWII, many public housing spaces opened up to African Americans and helped thei...

 Week 2 post 2 Formal Synthesis      The development of public housing in the U.S. was a tool used by the federal government to uphold segregation post World War II. This was explored through a few different cities, but had a heavy focused on Detroit, Chicago, and again, San Fransisco. The first public housing that was not created for defense purposes was created during the Great Depression with the signing of the new deal. New public housing was originally only open to white tenants, while black people in need had to continue living in temporary housing that was only meant to exist during wartime. As the years continued in the 1950s and 60s, the government realized there was an increasingly larger demand for public housing for African Americans, and many cities began building segregated projects for black people, however majority were still reserved for whites only. Many cities, including Detroit, Chicago, and San Fransisco could not built black and white projects r...