Segregation's Legacy

It was designed as both an antidote to rampant housing discrimination under Jim Crow and a path for African-Americans from the ghetto to the middle class.

It swept through Congress and landed on President Lyndon B. Johnson's desk just days after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King – and as urban neighborhoods, where days of rioting erupted on news of King's murder, still smoldered.

Before signing the Fair Housing Act of 1968 into law, Johnson called it "among the proudest [moments] of my presidency." Because of it, he predicted, "Negro families [will] no longer suffer the humiliation of being turned away because of their race."

Then, reality set in: Uneven enforcement, deep-seated, cultural bias and the bill's own flaws allowed bigoted mortgage bankers and unscrupulous landlords to preserve – and profit from – the status quo.

Now, a half century after the Fair Housing Act became a civil-rights landmark, multiple studies show housing in America is nearly as segregated as it was when LBJ enacted a law designed to eliminate it. Study after study shows African-Americans still lag far behind whites in home ownership, a key asset in building middle-class wealth.

At the same time, the institutional problems the Fair Housing Act was designed to solve – inequality in mortgage lending and homeownership, as well as real-estate agents steering black home buyers to certain neighborhoods and landlords who avoid renting to minorities – haven't gone away. Limited access to housing in stable, middle-class neighborhoods, analysts say, has had a negative impact on everything from the quality of education black children receive to the health and longevity of their parents.

In 2016, for example, "there were 28,181 reported complaints of housing discrimination" nationwide, according to the National Fair Housing Alliance 2017 annual report. "But we know housing discrimination often goes unreported or undetected. It is estimated that there are over 4 million instances of housing discrimination annually in the rental market alone."

"We still have a very, very segregated society, in terms of housing and [by extension] schools," says John R. Logan, a Brown University sociology professor who specializes in housing discrimination. While there's been "pockets" of improvement, mostly in progressive urban areas, "there's also been some backsliding" in enforcement at the federal and local level.

Meanwhile, widening economic inequality has emerged as a new, troubling factor in housing discrimination. As the gap widens between rich and poor, African-Americans, who typically earn far less than whites and already face discrimination in the housing market, are in danger of being left further behind.

"The mixture of class and race is hard to disentangle," says Nela Richardson, chief economist at Redfin, a national real estate brokerage and housing analysis firm. On top of de facto segregation, she says, "There are very few neighborhoods where there's economic integration – they're either all rich or all poor. We don't often see a plumber living next to a lawyer living next to a janitor."

Despite troubling data and experts sounding the alarm, Richardson, who studies housing patterns, and others say, don't look to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson or a Republican-majority Congress to use the Fair Housing Act as a tool to reverse inequality.

Late last month, The New York Times reported that the GOP-controlled federal government is actively rolling back its mandate to enforce fair-housing laws, not long after reports that Carson, ordered the words "inclusive" and "free from discrimination" erased from HUD's mission statement. Carson told the Times that the notion he's backing away from enforcement of the Fair Housing Act is "absurd," but others aren't convinced.

"Carson has moved at lightning speed to gut these important regulations," says Kristen Clarke, executive director of Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. At the same time, she adds, there's been a marked decline in the number of Justice Department cases brought against realtors or landlords under the Fair Housing Act.

"In both agencies, we've seen significant shifts" away from enforcing the law, Clarke says.

Even former Vice President Walter Mondale, who co-sponsored the bill when it was drafted in 1968, says the progress towards fair and equitable housing has been halting at best.

"There's been a struggle to get the Fair Housing Act recognized as real law, and enforce it at the state and local level," Mondale, who was a senator representing Minnesota when he co-sponsored the bill, told TIME magazine recently. "I would say we haven't done very well at it. I think it has made significant progress possible in America, but we're not there yet."

That's likely because, besides being a legacy of slavery and Jim Crow laws, discrimination and segregation in housing was at one time sponsored by the federal government itself.

Grappling with the Great Depression in the early 1930s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt implemented a New Deal program to address a housing shortage by building new homes in the suburbs. But the housing programs were "whites only," and the strategy was an official mandate, according to author Richard Rothstein, whose book, "The Color of Law," examines the government's role in housing discrimination.

In a 2017 interview on NPR, Rothstein said the government believed that "if African-Americans bought homes in these suburbs, or even if they bought homes near these suburbs, the property values of the homes they were insuring, the white homes they were insuring, would decline." No evidence supported that assumption, he added.

In fact, when African-Americans tried to buy homes in predominantly white neighborhoods, "property values rose because African-Americans were more willing to pay more [than whites]… simply because their housing supply was so restricted and they had so many fewer choices," Rothstein said.

That meant African-Americans were consigned to live in decaying urban neighborhoods, their children forced to attend underfunded, crumbling schools and get locked out of well-paying jobs. Richardson, the Redfin analyst, says "there are actual physical barriers" between suburban whites, urban neighborhoods "and where the job centers are."

"You'll see a railroad track, a highway, a river – something that literally cuts the [black] community off," she says. "In Cincinnati, the city put a highway that literally cut off this neighborhood in the center of town. And now they're talking about putting a [transit] stop to create another barrier."

Mondale co-sponsored fair-housing legislation with Sen. Edward Brooke, a Massachusetts Republican and the first African-American lawmaker sent to Washington after winning a statewide election. But there was trouble with the bill from the start – particularly enforcement, Mondale said.

"In its first years, organizations that were building housing that discriminated— where all whites [lived] and no blacks — would say to the judge, 'Well, this law requires finding a realtor intended to discriminate,'" the former vice president told TIME. "So there was the difficult, almost impossible task of trying to prove what was in a developer's mind."

Then there was lockstep opposition from Southern Dixiecrats, says Logan, the Brown University sociologist. Even though Johnson himself put his weight behind the law, "racial discrimination and racial segregation wasn't a small thing to them. It was a way of life."

Yet providing equal housing opportunity to black homebuyers and renters is more important than fairness or doing the right thing, Logan says: It's about access to good-paying jobs, government resources, hospitals, parks and even the quality of political representation.

"Segregation and integration was not just about people – it wasn't just housing. It's not about blacks and whites living next to each other," he says. "It was voting, schools, every aspect of life. It was, in a sense, about integrating opportunity. It's also always about resources."

Logan and others say that, overall, things have changed for the better – it's commonplace to see blacks and whites living next to one another, mostly in urban neighborhoods – but some old problems still linger. African-Americans are far more likely than whites to receive high-interest mortgages from banks, real estate agents still "steer" minority buyers away from white communities, and some neighborhood associations still include race-based restrictions on who can move in.

"As a result, in today's America, approximately half of all Black persons and 40 percent of all Latinos live in neighborhoods without a White presence," according to the National Fair Housing Alliance report. "The average White person lives in a neighborhood that is nearly 80 percent White."

It doesn't have to be that way, says Clarke of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights.

"In a perfect world, we have leadership at the federal level" that encourages banks, landlords and investors "to do the right thing," she says. However, "We're not seeing that now, and as a result, we're seeing the resurgence of discrimination in housing markets across the country."