Booman’s latest post is titled This is Interesting. In it he bemoans the undeniable failure of the Fair Housing Act of 1968.
He writes:
Honestly, the Fair Housing Act of 1968’s mandate to forcibly reduce segregation in housing feels like it came from an entirely different country.
True dat.
But then he says…partisan politics forever on this site, I guess…
It never had a chance in the face of Nixon’s Southern Strategy, the busing controversy and, especially, after the Reagan Revolution in 1980.
Now this is “interesting.”
Booman…have you read Ta-Nehisi Coates’s article Letter To My Son in The Atlantic?
You should.
Read the whole thing.
We all should.
It is a cri de coeur from an immensely gifted black writer, one who grew up on the hard ghetto streets of Baltimore and made it out…the same streets that recently erupted in violence over yet another police murder. It is about the segregationist societal forces that shaped him as a child and his continuing fears for the safety of his young son. What he says is terrible. It is also moving, from the heart and completely true.
Read on for a decidedly non-partisan understanding of the real problem. The DemocRatic Clinton and Obama administrations couldn’t/wouldn’t/didn’t get anything much done either, and it was not simply because of RatPublican opposition although that’s the way it has been spun. Legislating attitude or belief on this level is impossible, especially when many on all sides of the racial divides have their own negative takes on the idea.
Read on for a personal view from someone who has lived smack in the middle of the racial/cultural divides since the middle `60s.
Read on.
Regulars here know that I am a whitish-colored musician (beige I guess, to be more precise) of mostly Celtic ascent who has had a long and quite successful career playing mostly Afro-American and Afro-Cuban/Puerto Rican/Pan-American idioms in NYC. (Long name short for the latter idiom? Sure. Nuyorican. Deal wid it. The Nuyoricans do.) I have confronted that combination of rage, fear, hope and distrust from people of color of which Mr. Coates writes all of my adult life. I’m talking up close and personal here, folks. For real.
For example…a black musician with whom I roomed for several years in my late teens/early twenties (We played together, traveled, ate, got high and even occasionally fucked in the same room. Like I said…up close and personal. It was a small apartment.) once turned to me completely unexpectedly and said that on some level he would never, ever be able to fully trust a white man. He meant it, and I understood his point. I don’t trust most of them either. On the historical evidence.
I never forget that moment when dealing with people of color. Never. Especially those who grew up in the U.S. Sometimes I get past that distrust to an appreciable degree, sometimes not so much and sometimes not a bit of it. So it goes. I understand and accept it as part of the ongoing heritage of slavery, America’s original sin. So that goes as well.
Given that understanding, I can appreciate it when someone like Mr. Coates says the things he says.
The opening paragraphs:
Son,
Last Sunday the host of a popular news show asked me what it meant to lose my body. The host was broadcasting from Washington, D.C., and I was seated in a remote studio on the Far West Side of Manhattan. A satellite closed the miles between us, but no machinery could close the gap between her world and the world for which I had been summoned to speak. When the host asked me about my body, her face faded from the screen, and was replaced by a scroll of words, written by me earlier that week.
The host read these words for the audience, and when she finished she turned to the subject of my body, although she did not mention it specifically. But by now I am accustomed to intelligent people asking about the condition of my body without realizing the nature of their request. Specifically, the host wished to know why I felt that white America’s progress, or rather the progress of those Americans who believe that they are white, was built on looting and violence. Hearing this, I felt an old and indistinct sadness well up in me. The answer to this question is the record of the believers themselves. The answer is American history.There is nothing extreme in this statement. Americans deify democracy in a way that allows for a dim awareness that they have, from time to time, stood in defiance of their God. This defiance is not to be much dwelled upon. Democracy is a forgiving God and America’s heresies–torture, theft, enslavement–are specimens of sin, so common among individuals and nations that none can declare themselves immune. In fact, Americans, in a real sense, have never betrayed their God. When Abraham Lincoln declared, in 1863, that the battle of Gettysburg must ensure “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth,” he was not merely being aspirational. At the onset of the Civil War, the United States of America had one of the highest rates of suffrage in the world. The question is not whether Lincoln truly meant “government of the people” but what our country has, throughout its history, taken the political term “people” to actually mean. In 1863 it did not mean your [his son’s] mother or your grandmother, and it did not mean you and me. As for now, it must be said that the elevation of the belief in being white was not achieved through wine tastings and ice cream socials, but rather through the pillaging of life, liberty, labor, and land.
That Sunday, on that news show, I tried to explain this as best I could within the time allotted. But at the end of the segment, the host flashed a widely shared picture of an 11-year-old black boy tearfully hugging a white police officer. Then she asked me about “hope.” And I knew then that I had failed. And I remembered that I had expected to fail. And I wondered again at the indistinct sadness welling up in me. Why exactly was I sad? I came out of the studio and walked for a while. It was a calm December day. Families, believing themselves white, were out on the streets. Infants, raised to be white, were bundled in strollers. And I was sad for these people, much as I was sad for the host and sad for all the people out there watching and reveling in a specious hope. I realized then why I was sad. When the journalist asked me about my body, it was like she was asking me to awaken her from the most gorgeous dream. I have seen that dream all my life. It is perfect houses with nice lawns. It is Memorial Day cookouts, block associations, and driveways. The Dream is tree houses and the Cub Scouts. And for so long I have wanted to escape into the Dream, to fold my country over my head like a blanket. But this has never been an option, because the Dream rests on our backs, the bedding made from our bodies. And knowing this, knowing that the Dream persists by warring with the known world, I was sad for the host, I was sad for all those families, I was sad for my country, but above all, in that moment, I was sad for you.
—long snip to the final paragraph—
I am speaking to you as I always have–treating you as the sober and serious man I have always wanted you to be, who does not apologize for his human feelings, who does not make excuses for his height, his long arms, his beautiful smile. You are growing into consciousness, and my wish for you is that you feel no need to constrict yourself to make other people comfortable. None of that can change the math anyway. I never wanted you to be twice as good as them, so much as I have always wanted you to attack every day of your brief bright life determined to struggle. The people who must believe they are white can never be your measuring stick. I would not have you descend into your own dream. I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world.
So here we are…the Booman crew. Mostly white, mostly middle class, mostly “liberal,” mostly in only peripheral contact with people of color who grew up in the ghettos of America that are essentially economically-enforced slave pens. And we are talking about…
Talking about what, really?
“Desegregation?”
What kind of desegregation?
Willing desegregation? Deeper desegregation than in the workplace, the media entertainments or walking down commercial streets during daylight hours? A total end to racial or cultural segregation in the United States of America in terms of housing and educational institutions up and down the line?
It takes two to tango, y’know. Maybe even three or four in this case because most members of the various Hispanic + Asian cultures kinda sorta seem to feel like living in their own neighborhoods as well. Like I said…on the evidence. It’s a good feeling stepping out of your dwelling and not immediately being perceived as an outsider. Bet on it. A little safety at home is a desirable state for most people.
The depth of distrust that led my friend (still a friend, by the way) to say what he said to me after years of laughter and mutual trust on any number of levels…that level of distrust still exists, and it is not a distrust that is lacking for plentiful historical and contemporary evidence. Not a bit of that, either.
And the people who still “think that they are white?” (We are really all of us “Black, Brown and Beige.” Duke Ellington knew the truth of that matter way back in 1943.) Until those people awaken from their own dream, the dream of whiteness (an awakening that the corporate takeover of America is unwittingly promoting by attempting to make slaves of us all in America’s first real attempt at economically-enforced “equality enforcement”), until that awakening happens, why would any people of color wish to live with their enemies…whether those enemies are conscious of that fact or simply living in a media-enforced dream world…on a cheek-to-cheek basis? I have quite consciously lived in NYC during most of my time here in “border” neighborhoods…areas where the white dream and the non-white reality abut and confront each other. When so-called “gentrification”…as if the people who have been segregated by economic means for well over 150 years are not as much (or even more) “gentlepeople” than are the white dreamers who fall for the real estate hype and force them out…when that happens, I simply move to another border neighborhood. I’m inna Bronx, now…the last surviving NYC bastion of resistance to the Giuliani/Bloomberg gentrification/real estate hype machine, because the hyped remain afraid that the entire borough is still Fort Apache…and i am proud of it. I am happy here. My neighborhood…Kingsbridge…is entirely multicultural and almost entirely unhyped. (Why would the hype machine point out that kind of successful, working class multiculturism? There’s no money to be made off of it. Money to be lost, actually.)
I get off the 1 train at W. 231st St. when I come back from working in midtown Manahatta and encounter a thriving neighborhood where people of all races intermingle on the streets with almost no friction. Ain’t no “majority” down in here, just various Hispanic cultures, what survives of the once thriving black middle and working class culture and about 10 different so-called white cultures, almost all of them “minorities” in their own rights. Mostly Central European immigrants, working class Irish, various Muslims fleeing the madness, old-school Jews, the upper middle class who live in Riverdale (Riverdale. Read “upper middle class/wealthy,” mostly.) using mass transit and shopping in one particularly good market, the occasional artist and so on.
I got yer “desegregation”…right here!!!
>
>
Not legislated…chosen!!!
Despite the DemRat/RatPub hype.
The only way it’s gonna happen.
For real.
Bet on it.
Later…
AG
Horrified cries of “LIBERTARIAN!!!???”
Issat all you got?
OK.
No surprise.
I repeat:
Morality cannot be effectively legislated…on the evidence of the last 50+ years if for no other reason.
And longer:
Much longer.
Like dat, too.
Later…
AG
I’m not taking the opposing point of view (in no small part because I don’t agree with it) but it’s also true that the law can be a moral teacher. And when the law, for example, mandates segregation—as it did all across the North in the post-WW II era—it disallows the creation of more neighborhoods and municipalities like Kingsbridge.
Or to take an older example that Coates has on occasion referred to: when the KKK first formed after the Civil War, President Grant sent the Army in to crush it. Period. That mattered. It saved lives.
It wasn’t enough and it didn’t last. But creating a society where the legal structures allow, if not encourage, the kind of desegregation you (and others) find attractive is and would be a good thing. Not a perfect thing. Not the only thing. Not the solution. But a good thing. A small step in the right direction.
I’m not sure what you think this rule does or the earlier Fair Housing Act, but it is REAL desegregation by choice — just so long as minorities have the choice of seeing all of the housing units available instead of being steered to certain neighborhoods by real estate agents or being impacted by discriminatory landlords. The fair housing part allows for lawsuits against redlining banks, discriminatory real estate agents, and discriminatory landlords.
The rule today has to do with the allocation of funds for subsidized housing; it cannot all be clustered in poor neighborhoods and amount to subsidizing existing slumlords or politically connected realtors. Moreover the planning and zoning activities of cities can no longer exclude subsidized housing from gentrified zones on the basis of zoning and subdivision regulations. And further, the cities receiving federal grant money have the affirmative responsibility to show results in desegregation and distribution of low and moderate income housing that breaks down the notion of “exclusivity” of neighborhoods. What that means is moving to a single real estate market instead of artificially separate real estate markets marked by inflation or deflation as a result of price discrimination effects on the market.
One of the perversities of the real estate market is that price is considered a value in establishing the price. This is primarily an attempt to economically discriminate through inflation of prices to ensure that someone’s precious does not start hanging out with someone of a different class or ethnic background that is “beneath them”. That has the effect of making housing more expensive for everyone because it is serving a value that goes beyond shelter. It is also self-reinforcing causing prices to be bid up more rapidly that they would otherwise while allowing other housing stock to deteriorate because it is in a “poorer” neighborhood.
This rule promotes local governments addressing those market imperfections and those curtailment of choices.
The issue of choice boils down to whose choices you are talking about. Homebuyers’ choices, realtors’ choices, neighbors’ choices to exert control over the neighborhood, developers’ choices? Whose?
A related issue is that cities and counties make little to no effort to insure that the housing availability and affordability is compatible with the local workforce and not too inconsistent with city/county historical demographics. San Francisco City/County and surrounding cities/counties are the worst. Since 1970, SF’s AA population has been reduced by more than 50%. The working class and families with children population has been decimated as well. Teachers, fire fighters, police can’t afford to live decently anywhere close to where they work. (Well, I guess if communities get rid of the children, they don’t need teachers.)
In my experience, workplaces (offices not factories) are located in a place convenient to CEO’s and upper management. Usually even middle management can’t afford to work near them. Of course the real estate is expensive. The whole enterprise would be more efficient in a cheaper location, but CEO convenience is paramount. Better that hundreds of drones commute long distances than one CEO be burdened.
Case in point: At one particular time, Allstate Insurance got a new CEO who lived in Northbrook IL, so the company headquarters was moved from Skokie IL to Northbrook. Northbrook is a higher rent district. The Skokie location was right off the Edens expressway, convenient to Chicago employees. Northbrook was undoubtedly a longer commute for most employes.
Yeah, but…Tarheel!!! You left out the most powerful segregationist tool of all.
Income.
Minorities have the “choice” of housing that they can afford. Given the educational system in place in the neighborhoods that they historically been able to afford under previous segregationist tactics over generations, only the really bright manage to make it out. When real estate prices rise, the “redlining banks, discriminatory real estate agents, and discriminatory landlords” have no need to disobey the various civil rights acts in order to create segregated neighborhoods out of previously minority areas. It’s just a new form of segregation.
The kicker is that in order to be able to afford to live “there”…wherever that may be…one needs to be middle-to-upper class economically, and that generally means having paid the money to get a degree or two or three. Given the state of minority neighborhood public education over the past 150+ years…fuggedaboudit!!! Only the tip-top cream of the crop tend to make it out of economic segregation. On the other hand, in many white middle class and upper class neighborhoods a college degree is an integral part of the dream of whiteness. They only have to be mediocre…or worse, witness George W. Butch…to pass as “well edumacated” people.
And so segregation goes, continued by entirely economic tactics. It’s like the various “economic punishments” that the U.S. and NATO countries hand out to recalcitrant states.
Who needs the Ku Klux Klan when you have economic and educational barriers in place? A kinder, gentler segregation …and thus much more efficient because it’s harder to identify and understand…develops. This is a perfect parallel to the PermaGov’s switch from bloody murder to assassination by media over the last 50+ years. Why assassinate someone and get everybody all riled up when you can “AAAARGH!!!” them right out of contention and almost nobody seems to notice what happened.
As above, so below.
Like dat.
Bet on it.
AG
P.S. “Subsidized housing!!!???” It never happens to any appreciable degree in established middle class and higher areas.
A little token stuff, maybe, but only so’s the maids and gardeners can get to work earlier.
And while we are at it…why should minorities need subsidized housing in a supposedly desegregated country? There are only two possible answers:
#1-They have had their chance and proven to be genetically inferior to the white majority. (A concept that beggars belief to anyone who has actually lived as an equal and interacted with minority people of any cultural or racial group, but is easily sold in what is in fact an almost totally segregated society.)
Or…
2-Minorities have not been given an equal chance to prosper on any level of the society for several hundred years.
This problem can really be considered as an ecological problem. Human ecology. Just like a forest. Allow the best of the best regardless of race in every field to excel and the entire country will prosper. Hold down a necessary portion of that human ecological system in the name of “cheap labor” and slowly but surely that society will die.
Just like a forest.
Bet on that as well.
Like I said…as above, so below.
Everywhere.
Income segregation (“exclusive communities”, property values anxiety, and differential social investments in infrastructure) are racial and ethnic segregation as well. That is what the mapping and city policy review requirements are about in the rule. And those condition the funding for subsidizing city infrastructure as well as housing.
It is not true that minorities have the choice of the housing they can afford. Realtor steering, discriminatory rental firms, and mortgage redlining still go on. The foreclosure crisis hit minorities harder not because they were poorer credit risks but because they were discriminatorily sold sub-prime mortgages and pitch adjustable rate mortgages instead of regular mortgages that would not explode on them in a interest rate surge. And because of job discrimination, they were among the first to be laid off when companies started scrambling to cut costs.
It is not just minorities who need subsidized housing. Substantial numbers of middle class whites not only need but have moved into “moderate-income-housing”, which is a subsidy for homebuilders that increases sprawl. The main subsidy for distributing low-income populations into more affluent neighborhoods are Section 8 rental subsidies, which subsidize small landlords with typically one or two properties — many of them properties that they or their parents once lived in. It works in some places and not in others. If you look at the maps of residential segregation of major cities that WaPo put up, rigidly segregated cities like Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York have more difficulty with dispersal of Section 8 rentals than do cities like Atlanta, which still has identifiable historic areas. In those cities, it is acceptable for blacks to move into white areas with or without subsidies. But whites will not move into historically black areas even when the property values are equivalent.
Maids an gardeners are increasingly an issue for college towns, like Chapel Hill NC, for example. And travel to work in clogged suburban sprawl is not insignificant.
The most significant reality about the housing “market” is that two things make the market a poor market in terms of clearing transactions. A market in economic theory does not have homeless people and empty houses; the price declines should allow homeless people to afford the empty houses, or thus spake Econ 101.
First, the market is partitioned into price-discriminatory segments that are imaginally administered with labels like Executive, Luxury, Prestige, Exclusive, Comfortable, Budget…at the top there is the no-label “if you have to ask you don’t qualify” and at the bottom are the “abandoned units owned by 16 heirs who are not talking to each other and generally fail to pay the taxes because what city goes after that many people for that little money”. Prices don’t competitively stabilize at some common value-price ratio over the entire housing market.
Second, like job negotiations housing transactions are not conducted with full information and with a constantly updated market benchmark. The only benchmark used to be asking prices, or if you are diligent, assessed valuation. There are huge information distortions in the market. And that is before the distortions used to discriminate are buried in the transaction.
Yes, the system is screwed. Yes, this executive action does little more that map the atrocity. As for subsidized housing, there is never enough appropriated to cause serious backlash against government, just stigma for residents known to be in a “Section 8” house.
On a piecemeal basis, they have allowed families and their kids to move into better social, educational, and employment situations and then move out of subsidized housing altogether. But those numbers are small.
Way back when I was a kid and school segregation still existed in the South, I heard that the difference was that in the South there was school segregation but not housing segregation whereas in the North, it was the exact opposite. This was explained as being that in the South slaves lived right next to their masters (obviously!) but were socially isolated by Jim Crow. Northerners in their righteous indignation that everyone should be able to attend the neighborhood school forgot that they practiced rigid isolation of the neighborhood. In the South you had the KKK and lynchings. In the North we had fire bombings and buy outs.
In the shadow of catastrophic failure of the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in the St. Louis mid-town urban renewal of Mill Creek Valley …
○ LaClede Town, a great housing experiment
Private development with federal funding – Millstone Bangert Inc. built Laclede Town in slum area – Jerome Berger as social engineer.
The complex was made up of two components. Laclede Park was privately funded and rented apartments at market rates. Diagonally across the intersection of Laclede and Compton was LaClede Town, a community of federally subsidized townhouses. Rent was determined by a formula based on family size and income. What grew out of this was a national model for integrated housing populated by a group of people who felt closer to one another than some blood relatives do.
It brought together a community of people – black, white, brown, Jews, Christians, Muslims, atheists, lawyers, architects, sanitation workers, actors, athletes, draft dodgers, hookers, social workers, welfare recipients, musicians, reporters, waiters, politicians, doctors.
Yes Oui, but…the idea of “the exception proves the rule” is applicable here. If LaClede Town was not an exception, then there is no rule.
But plainly, it was an exception. And there most certainly is “a rule.”
Here’s the traditional African-American expression of this particular rule:
Those exceptions too shall pass.
From Oui’s link above:
Divvied up by two members of one of the most powerful and richest corporate organizations in the U.S. today, Big Education.
Like the man said:
Yup.
Bet on it.
The corporate-owned PermaGov wins again.
AG
The post here invokes Ta-Nehisi Coates’ writing in an effort to support its premise. Unfortunately, the pull quotes from Coates’ writing doesn’t support the premise of the post title.
And making the supposition that Coates would support the writer’s points here requires us to dispose with the memory of Coates’ scholarly work in his tremendous essay, “The Case For Reparations.” A large part of Coates’ reporting documented the devastation wrought by a multiplicity of discriminatory housing policies which stole money from African-Americans. Coates did an amazing job explaining that the financial and social penalties placed on the African-American community extend past the Fair Housing Act to this day.
The author here wants us to understand that income is the great housing segregator, but he fails to heed Coates’ call to consider the plunder of the wealth of African-Americans as well. The current generation of African-Americans suffers from the collective inability for their parents, grandparents, great-grandparents and beyond to pass along housing equity. We can see that this housing discrimination also steals from many African-Americans equal chances for a good education. This disables their equal opportunity to make a decent income, and the cycle continues and deepens.
A peculiar choice is made here by the author when he says that desegregation should be done by choice. It is exactly this that the Fair Housing Act has done something to address: giving African-Americans and other minorities a more equal set of choices.
Consider the case of San Leandro, California, the city I have lived in for about 20 years. In 1967, Mayor Jack Maltester testified in front of a Congressional Committee considering the passage of a Fair Housing Act. Mayor Maltester testified that the population of San Leandro was over 73,000, while the number of African-American people who were residents of the City was 28.
It’s important to note here that San Leandro has a direct border with Oakland.
So, you see, African-Americans in the East Bay had no true choice to move into a middle-class neighborhood in San Leandro. Choice is the very thing that well-designed and enforced fair housing laws defend.
The San Leandro I live in today has a significant racial and cultural mix. It’s an inferior mix to neighboring cities because it started so far behind in 1968, but it’s greatly improved because laws were created which legislated behavior, not attitude or belief. We can have realtors, property owners and public officials who are stone cold racists in their beliefs. It is right for us to create laws which prevent them from putting their racism to practice in ways which are harmful to people.
One of the reactions to the Fair Housing Act in San Leandro was a cross burning which took place at a home in town in March 1972. A City Policy Statement was issued afterward, a portion of which responds to the post above neatly:
http://www.sanleandro.org/civicax/filebank/blobdload.aspx?blobid=3761
“The Committee holds that is is not logical to assume that Blacks or other
minority groups do not live in significant numbers in San Leandro for
purely economic reasons or because they prefer living among their own
ethnic group. The Committee likewise holds that it is not logical to assume
that such discrimination is a result of conspiracy or of group actions; it
exists as a personal and individual matter.”
Legislating behavior, not attitude or belief. This is possible. This has led to reduced inequality in the United States. The Great Society programs have improved the lives of a meaningful portion of the minority populations in the United States. Claiming otherwise is to deny the factual record.
Most prejudice is due to unfamiliarity, i.e. fear of “the other”. When people grow up in mixed neighborhoods the presence of others is normal. Prejudice still exists but is much more muted. People don’t learn, but their kids do.