Broadening the Narrative: Systemic Racism Series: Housing

Estimated Reading Time: 16 minutes

I am continuing in the systemic racism series here on the Broadening the Narrative blog. To learn more about this series, you can read the first post [“Systemic Racism Series Introduction”], the second post [“Systemic Racism Series: Whiteness”], the third post [“Systemic Racism Series: Wealth”], the fourth post [“Systemic Racism Series: Employment”], and the fifth post [“Systemic Racism Series: Education”]. Today’s post addresses systemic racism in housing. I will include the data and history behind the current disparities in the housing market, provide action steps, and link recommended resources for further exploration and education.

Data

Let’s look at segregation, homeownership, and loans in housing.

Segregation

In the Vox article “The Data Proves that School Segregation is Getting Worse,” Alvin Chang wrote, “Black children are now more likely to grow up in poor neighborhoods than they were 50 years ago. This is important because a large body of research shows that growing up in heavily segregated, poor neighborhoods affects everything from your education level, your future earnings, and your happiness to your health and, ultimately, your life span.”

In The Washington Post analysis “America is More Diverse Than Ever - But Still Segregated,” Aaron Williams and Armand Emamdjomeh reported, “The United States is on track to be a majority-minority nation by 2044. But census data show most of our neighborhoods are the same race. Since 1990, more than 90 percent of U.S. metro areas have seen a decline in racial stratification, signaling a trend toward a more integrated America...To explore these national changes, The Post analyzed census data from 1990, 2000, 2010, and the latest estimates from the 2016 five-year American Community Survey. Using that data, we generated detailed maps of the United States using six race categories: black, white, Hispanic, Asian/Pacific Islander, Native American and multi-race/other for the available years...Persistent and deep segregation is somewhat unique to African Americans, [Michael] Bader said, for several reasons: the legacy of segregated neighborhoods created during the era of Reconstruction and Jim Crow; enduring racial preferences among whites who choose to live near other white people; and significant Latino and Asian immigration after fair housing laws were in place. This deep segregation is noticeable in cities with large African American populations...Since 1990, a majority of U.S. metro areas have seen increases in racial diversity. While this means that more Americans are living in diverse neighborhoods, the numbers are still lower than researchers anticipated.”

Homeownership

In the Chicago Tribune article, “Why Black Homeownership Rates Lag Even as the Housing Market Recovers,” Gail Marksjarvis communicated that, “A decade after the housing crash destroyed the American Dream for millions of homeowners, black homeownership rates have dropped to levels not seen since the 1960s, hobbling African-Americans' efforts to build their wealth. Nationally, only 42.2 percent of blacks owned homes in 2016, compared with 71.9 percent of whites, according to a new report by Harvard University's Joint Center for Housing Studies. And in Chicago, the gap between black and white homeownership rates is even more extreme. Only 38.9 percent of African-Americans owned homes in the Chicago area in 2015, compared with 74 percent of whites. Before the housing crash, almost half of African-Americans in the Chicago area owned homes, according to Harvard's research. Latinos in the Chicago area also lag when it comes to homeownership. Only 50.5 percent of Latinos owned homes in the area in 2015. ‘Homeownership is a way for people to generate stability and wealth and not just go to work every day,’ said Deborah Moore, neighborhood planning director for Neighborhood Housing Services of Chicago, a nonprofit that helps Chicago residents buy and keep homes. In addition, homeownership can ‘change the trajectory of neighborhoods,’ she said. Without homes, blacks lack a powerful source of wealth creation, said Jonathan Spader, senior research associate with the Harvard center. Homeowners generally build equity that allows them to eventually buy other homes or businesses and send children to college. Homes also are passed to younger generations upon death, allowing future generations to build wealth. ‘Because whites are far more able to give inheritances or family assistance for down payments due to historical wealth accumulation, white families buy homes and start acquiring equity an average eight years earlier than black families,’ researchers Thomas Shapiro, Tatjana Meschede and Sam Osoro of the Institute on Assets and Social Policy at Brandeis University wrote in a report. The Brandeis researchers found that homeownership is the single largest predictor of wealth differences among races...Historically, homeownership has been 28.4 percent higher among whites than blacks, but the racial gap in homeownership is now the largest since data became available in 1940, Spader said. ‘Prospects for black homeownership have gone from hopeful to pessimistic in only 15 years,’ analyst Laurie Goodman said in a recent Urban Institute paper. Harvard researchers attribute much of the plunge in African-American homeownership to predatory lending practices that saddled buyers in poor minority neighborhoods with more debt than they could afford."

Julian Brave NoiseCat delineated in The Guardian article “America's Forgotten Crisis: Over 50% of One Native American Tribe Are Homeless,” “The globalization of the Brooklyn narrative from London to San Francisco has emerged as a central trope in politics, housing and urbanization. It’s the kind of phenomenon that shapes elections, inspires books and calls citizens to action. Meanwhile, out of frame and ignored, a Brooklyn-sized housing crisis has languished in the 617 American Indian and Alaska Native tribal areas and 526 surrounding counties where 2.5 million of this land’s first peoples live. There, Native men, women and children occupy the most severely overcrowded and rundown homes in the United States...Indian Country, unlike the rest of the United States, is largely bereft of a real estate market. Centuries of treaties and federal policies established reservations as lands held in trust for Indians by the federal government. In contrast to most legislation governing indigenous affairs, this structure is somewhat sensible. It protects reservations, which comprise roughly 2% of the United States, from expropriation by speculators like members of Trump’s cabinet who are eyeing vast oil and coal reserves on Indian land. But it also means that market-based tools, like mortgages, are ineffective. Until the 1990s, homeowners on Indian reservations could not use their homes as loan collateral. Many still can’t get a mortgage due to bad credit or no down payment – in short, because they are poor. The market sees too much risk for too little reward in lending to them. In that regard, the housing market is like most other markets in Indian Country. Like the markets for jobs and food, it barely exists...At the end of the day, Native households have made up for the massive shortage by piling friends and relatives into small homes so loved ones aren’t left out in the cold. HUD found that between 42,000 and 85,000 Native people in tribal areas would be homeless if they didn’t make these arrangements. If they don’t want to couch surf, young Native men and women looking for independence or privacy are left to seek housing in apartment complexes and trailer parks in reservation border towns, where one in four face overt discrimination.”

Loans

Nikole Hannah-Jones said in the Adam Ruins Everything video “The Disturbing History of the Suburbs,” “Banks still regularly charge black home buyers higher rates on loans than they do white home buyers, even when they have the same credit. Worst of all, black and Latino homeseekers still experience four million incidents of illegal housing discrimination every year.”

In the ProPublica article, “Housing Enforcement Group Sues M&T Bank for Discrimination,” Nikole Hannah-Jones reported, “One of the nation's largest banks discriminates against black, Latino and Asian homebuyers by offering lesser qualified white borrowers higher loan amounts and using hidden racial criteria in one of its loan programs, according to a lawsuit filed this week in federal court in Manhattan. The suit also accuses the bank of steering homebuyers to certain neighborhoods based on their race or ethnicity. The lawsuit claims that M&T Bank violated the landmark Fair Housing Act, a 1968 law that sought to end discriminatory lending practices and limit the historic segregation of many of the country's cities...Between 2012 and 2014, the Fair Housing Justice Center conducted a series of tests in which it sent out trained actors to explore whether white and non-white homebuyers would be treated differently when trying to prequalify for a mortgage. All followed a similar script, telling bank officers they were married with no children and were first-time homebuyers. The black, Latino and Asian testers presented slightly better qualifications when it came to income, credit and additional financial assets. In nine separate interactions recorded either with a camera or an audio devices, employees at M&T Bank's New York City loan office can be seen or heard treating the white applicants differently than the others, according to the suit...The lawsuit asserts that, in addition to white testers being favored, the bank ran a first-time homebuyers loan program that used the racial makeup of the area where the home would be purchased as criteria, and that loan officers used the program to steer nonwhite homebuyers to largely nonwhite neighborhoods...Further, he argued, when minority homebuyers get lower loan amounts than they are qualified for, it means they are not able to buy as nice a home or live in as nice a neighborhood as equally, or even lesser qualified whiter homebuyers...In recent years, the U.S. Housing and Urban Development has consistently found that racial steering - the leading of black and Latino home seekers away from whiter areas and white home seekers away from more diverse areas - is among the most common forms of housing discrimination. In fact, steering has been increasing even as other forms of housing discrimination have been waning, studies show.”

The NBC News article “Racism, Not a Lack of Assimilation, is the Real Problem Facing Latinos in America,” Suzanne Gamboa highlighted how housing discrimination has been experienced by those who are Latinx.

“Yet a recent report found that in Iowa City, Iowa, Latinos were denied home loans four times more often than whites, the biggest disparity in the country. This adds to the wealth gap between whites and Latinos because most families’ net worth comes from their homes and their equity...While now illegal, redlining (the denial of mortgages in particular racial or ethnic communities) and discriminatory lending has had long-lasting effects, creating racially segregated Latino neighborhoods in cities such as Hartford, Connecticut, and restricting Hispanic mobility across the nation, according to research reported in The Washington Post.”

Rakeen Mabud, author of the Forbes article “History and Housing Discrimination: Why Neighborhoods in The United States are Still so Segregated,” concentrated on a specific area when citing an investigation conducted on Long Island, NY.

“Last month, Newsday released the shocking results of a three year undercover investigation that found rampant housing discrimination on Long Island, NY. Real estate agents frequently funneled white applicants to neighborhoods that were majority white and more affluent, while they sent applicants of color to more racially diverse and less affluent areas. The investigation found that Black applicants faced unequal treatment in nearly half of the tested interactions while Hispanic and Asian applicants also faced bias, though to a lesser degree.”

History

On the Ben & Jerry’s website, the “7 Ways We Know Systemic Racism is Real” article provides a brief overview of the past that has shaped the present.

“When the government sought to make mortgages more affordable back in the 1930s, thereby jumpstarting the epoch of suburban living, the Home Owner’s Loan Corporation (and thereafter private banks) ranked neighborhoods all around the country, giving high marks to all-white neighborhoods and marking those with minorities in red as risky investments. Redlining, which essentially barred blacks and other minorities from sharing in the American Dream and building wealth like their white counterparts, was officially outlawed in the ’60s, but the practice really never went away. In fact, during the Great Recession, banks routinely and purposely guided black home buyers toward subprime loans. A recent study demonstrated that people of color are told about and shown fewer homes and apartments than whites. Black ownership is now at an all-time low (42%, compared to 72% for whites).”

In the Forbes article "History and Housing Discrimination: Why Neighborhoods in the United States are Still so Segregated" referenced above, Rakeen Mabud further unpacked the history of racism in housing as she explained, "Housing discrimination is not new. Racialized housing, especially for Black Americans, goes back to the institution of chattel slavery, and remained a part of the post-emancipation legal reality. Federal housing policies in the New Deal enabled discriminatory mortgage lending practices called 'redlining' that facilitated segregated neighborhoods, all while also subsidizing builders to build communities that expressly excluded Black homebuyers. The practice of redlining continues to this day - as the result of the Newsday audits make clear - even though it's no longer legal. The United States' historical policy choices have created a society that accepts - and at some level expects - discriminatory behavior in the housing market. If federal policies had not sanctioned this kind of behavior with policies like redlining, American society may be less complacent with the same kinds of outcomes today. Although the Fair Housing Act and other legislation have tried to fix the mistakes of the past, norms and expectations of inequality continue to exist, perpetuating a system of racialized injustice. After all, explicit housing discrimination created the segregated neighborhoods that we see around the country and has had snowballing effects on racial inequalities. Segregated neighborhoods are not only divided by the skin color of its residents, but also by access to crucial investments such as broadband internet, grocery stores with fresh, healthy foods, and safe communities. The racialized history of homeownership thus helps explain the devastating racial wealth gap that locks people of color out of a good life. Keeping homebuyers of color out of certain neighborhoods therefore has the broader effect of perpetuating generational divides, denying communities across the country access to the 'American Dream.'"

In the Vox article “The Data Proves that School Segregation is Getting Worse” by Alvin Chang referenced above, Alvin Chang wrote, “Let’s just state this for the record: Racial segregation in schools was caused by white America’s policies that kept schools and neighborhoods white-only. For black families, this meant their country engineered for them a second-class experience — one that put them in poor, segregated ghettos and poor, segregated schools.” Or as Nikole Hannah-Jones said in the Adam Ruins Everything video referenced above, “[Segregation] is a direct result of decades of redlining policies enacted by our own government to build the suburbs. Highways that were built to make access to the suburbs easier for white Americans were often run right through black middle class neighborhoods, destroying them.”

In the 2009 Center for American Progress report “Unequal Opportunity Lenders? Analyzing Racial Disparities in Big Banks’ Higher-Priced Lending” by Andrew Jakabovics and Jeff Chapman, they found that, “There’s a common perception that subprime loans originated solely from now-shuttered mortgage firms, but many of the nation’s largest banks and their current subsidiaries were quite active in doling out these higher-priced mortgages. The 14 systemically significant banks and current subsidiaries we analyze in this paper - using data from the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, which requires extensive loan level disclosures from most mortgage originators - were responsible for originating more than one of every three higher-priced mortgages in the nation at the height of the housing bubble in 2006.1 These banks and current subsidiaries together originated more than 876,000 higher-priced first mortgages - defined by the Federal Reserve as having an annual percentage rate at least three percentage points higher than a Treasury security of the same maturity - in 2006 alone. Overall, 17.8 percent of white borrowers were given higher-priced mortgages when borrowing from large banks in 2006, yet 30.9 percent of Hispanics and a staggering 41.5 percent of African Americans got higher-priced mortgages. Only 11.5 percent of Asians got higher-priced mortgages.”

All of this brings us to where we are now. For additional information about how the United States was shaped racially in regards to housing, read the 2012 ProPublica article “Living Apart: How the Government Betrayed a Landmark Civil Rights Law” by Nikole Hannah-Jones, which examines the Great Migration as well as policies and practices under Republican and Democrat presidents beginning with Lyndon B. Johnson.

Housing affects numerous additional facets of life, such as wealth and education as covered in previous posts on the Broadening the Narrative blog. To summarize this post about racism in housing, I want to turn to the words of Ta-Nehisi Coates in The Atlantic article “This Town Needs a Better Class of Racist.”

“If you sought to advantage one group of Americans and disadvantage another, you could scarcely choose a more graceful method than housing discrimination. Housing determines access to transportation, green spaces, decent schools, decent food, decent jobs, and decent services. Housing affects your chances of being robbed and shot as well as your chances of being stopped and frisked. And housing discrimination is as quiet as it is deadly. It can be pursued through violence and terrorism, but it doesn't need it.”

Action Steps

Complete additional research on the topic of systemic racism in housing. Obviously there is more to explore than I could possibly cover in a single blog post. I will link additional resources at the end of the post.

Have action that follows the research and reflection.

-Since housing influences opportunities for education and employment, support policies at every level of government that will achieve comprehensive integration. Write, email, call, and tag representatives and others in local, state, and federal political positions. Lauren Camera wrote in the U.S. News & World Report article “U.S. Commission on Civil Rights to Congress: Make School Funding More Equitable,” “‘Essentially, housing policy is education policy,’ the report concludes, ‘and with greater collaboration at the federal, state and local levels, policies can be developed that can successfully integrate communities, integrate schools, raise achievement for all students, and ultimately realize the goals of Brown.’”

-Support reparations in your personal life and by the government. Support initiatives that seek to acknowledge wrongs done, repent of those wrongdoings, and intentionally repair the damage. I wrote a post about reparations in August titled “Reparations before Reconciliation.”

Vote, show up, and engage in meaningful ways to dismantle systems of oppression. Do all of this under the leadership of people of color.

What to Expect in Future Posts

At this time, I plan to address systemic racism as seen in the justice system, surveillance, foster care, healthcare, the environment, media, military, politics, and the Christian church in future posts. I will give action steps for myself and readers and provide additional resources.

As I look at the Equal Justice Initiative calendar and read it to my kids, I see that every single day conveys at least one injustice, usually based on race. These are past and present injustices, spanning hundreds of years, demonstrating that racism in this country is not simply an individual problem. Rather, racism is a systemic problem, infecting institutions and structures. Further, this problem centers around justice, therefore it's a problem Godde is concerned about, which means I must be concerned. In my opinion, systemic racism is not solely a political issue but also a spiritual issue. I am called to love my neighbor, and one way I can do this is by joining the fight to dismantle systems of oppression so that all people can flourish.

(Resources are linked below.)

The Work of Nikole Hannah-Jones

ProPublica Work of Nikole Hannah-Jones

“The Ultimate White Privilege Statistics & Data Post”

Race Forward “What is Systemic Racism” Videos

The Witness: A Black Christian Collective

Where Change Started

Black Lives Matter

Brownicity

White Allies in Training

Videos to View

“What is Systemic Racism? - Housing Discrimination” with Jay Smooth