"Public housing" did not exist prior to the Great Depression. So it wasn't until Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal that the government had the chance to impose segregation at the highest level. The effects of segregation policy in housing continue to this day in the United States. Akira Drake Rodriguez and Richard Rothstein are our guides to how and why the government did it.
Transcript
Hannah McCarthy: In the early 1990s, the city of Atlanta began a wide scale demolition project.
Archival: This is the day that many have dreamed of and others feared would eventually come. The first phase of.
Hannah McCarthy: Some of the first buildings to be razed were part of a federal housing development called Techwood Homes.
Archival: These apartments are very, very old and new, and they have to come in here constantly to keep them up. It's a danger to the tenants, some conditions.
Hannah McCarthy: And by the time these homes were demolished, they were considered blighted property. It's an official term. It's still used today to describe uninhabitable or dangerous places. And it wasn't just teakwood. Federal public housing, like it in Atlanta and across the country, had deteriorated. Broken elevators, broken lights, unreliable heat and hot water. Trash piling up in garbage chutes, boarded [00:01:00] up, apartment units, organized crime. This kind of public housing. Some said it had been a nice idea. It had offered hope.
Archival: Anyone that has pads in the high rise projects and looking in from the outside, it seemed like a beautiful home, a clean home and a lovely place to live in.
Hannah McCarthy: But it just hadn't worked out.
Archival: I live inside and I know there's some fear that I am living in.
Hannah McCarthy: So, Nick, I bring up Techwood in part because it wasn't just one of the first to come down. It was the first, as in the very first in the United States to go up.
Nick Capodice: This was the first ever public housing.
Akira Drake Rodriguez: So Atlanta has the first public housing in the country. Right. So Teakwood Homes in 1936, first public housing development that was federally financed. Locally administered.
Hannah McCarthy: This is Akira Rodriguez.
Akira Drake Rodriguez: An assistant professor of city and regional planning at the University of Pennsylvania's Weitzman [00:02:00] School of Design.
Hannah McCarthy: This is Civics 101. I'm Hannah McCarthy.
Nick Capodice: I'm Nick Capodice.
Hannah McCarthy: And this is part one of two on federal housing in the US. Later on, I'm going to talk about Teakwood and Atlanta because the story of what happened within that city's public housing can teach us a lot about people, space and power. But first, we need to understand what we talk about when we talk about federal public housing. That is part one housing policy.
Archival: The story of Homes How people live is the story of the foundation on which a nation is built.
Nick Capodice: Very quickly, Hannah, can we just define what public housing is?
Akira Drake Rodriguez: Yes, public housing to me is housing that is subsidized.
Akira Drake Rodriguez: By the government. And so that is a very broad definition and kind of includes all housing, which [00:03:00] is the point to me. It should be like all housing is actually public housing.
Nick Capodice: Hold on. All housing in the US.
Akira Drake Rodriguez: This is like a favorite housing policy stat that our largest housing expenditure from the government is the mortgage interest tax deduction. It is not Section eight, it is not, you know, constructed public housing units. That is actually our biggest giveaway. And so all of us receive benefit of varying degrees from the federal government in order to support our housing costs and needs. And it really is the stigma, particularly the racialized and gendered stigma of public housing, as we think of it, the tall buildings, the empty lots that it has this negative connotation. But we all live in public housing.
Hannah McCarthy: So when we say subsidized housing in America, the typical association is with very low income renters [00:04:00] who qualify for government subsidized housing units or housing assistance vouchers from the government. But what Akira is saying is that the biggest subsidy is in mortgages for private homes. Anyway, for this episode, when we talk about public housing, we're talking about that last category that Akira described constructed public housing units, apartments and homes that the US government financed, the construction and provided for the management of.
Richard Rothstein: The federal government first got involved in housing in the New Deal. It first got involved with the creation of the first public housing in this country.
Hannah McCarthy: This is Richard Rothstein, author of The Color of Law.
Richard Rothstein: The first public housing in this country was created by the Public Works Administration, the first New Deal agencies. It created projects around the country, the first civilian public housing ever created in this country.
Nick Capodice: The New Deal. This is that period during and after the Great Depression, [00:05:00] when Franklin Delano Roosevelt pushed a bunch of legislation through Congress to stop the U.S. essentially from going under. Yeah, and due to various financial and policy disasters, there were hundreds of thousands of people without jobs or homes. So FDR created a bunch of agencies and programs to help Americans survive and bring the economy back from the brink.
Archival: The legislation that has been passed is in the process of enactment, can properly be considered as part of a grounded, well rounded plan.
Hannah McCarthy: And infrastructure wise, we got the Public Works Administration. It spent billions of dollars to hire companies and administer projects across the country, and it built, among tons of other things, public housing, the very first being teakwood homes in Atlanta.
Nick Capodice: And the federal government had never been involved in housing like this before. This was the first time, right?
Hannah McCarthy: Public [00:06:00] housing was a brand new concept in the US, and when they came in, cranes blazing, the government made sure to include a crucial policy about the public homes that were being built. Here's Akira again.
Akira Drake Rodriguez: Public housing starts off as a segregated program. And so in the New Deal, which is when public housing begins in Atlanta, out of the sort of suite of programs and policies offered by Franklin Roosevelt, it is you know, we're going to build six public housing developments in Atlanta. Three of them will be for whites, three of them will be for African-Americans.
Nick Capodice: The federal government literally said that these homes are going to be segregated.
Richard Rothstein: This is public policy, administrative policy. And it began in the New Deal during the Roosevelt administration, during the Great Depression, because there was no federal involvement in housing prior to the New Deal.
Nick Capodice: Okay? This is policy, not law. Congress did not pass a law saying [00:07:00] heretofore housing shall be segregated in the United States. Nope.
Hannah McCarthy: Instead, this was the policy of the Public Works Administration or the PWA. Like an internal rule. Black neighborhoods and white neighborhoods. Black housing and white housing. But I do want to make it very clear this was a policy that was written down.
Nick Capodice: So this wasn't de facto segregation. This wasn't some sort of off the books way that people simply behaved due to bigotry and racism.
Hannah McCarthy: This was how the CWA operated. It was the federal government actively segregating people, bureaucrats deciding what housing of this kind should look like. It's just that housing of this kind hadn't existed before.
Richard Rothstein: So there was no opportunity for the federal government to impose segregation. There were many efforts at the local level and state levels to do it. And with the creation of the first [00:08:00] public housing in this country, everywhere it created it, it segregated it, creating separate projects for African-Americans, separate projects for whites, frequently segregating neighborhoods that hadn't previously been segregated.
Nick Capodice: As in the PWA wasn't just building segregated housing units. It was also segregating neighborhoods that had not been segregated before.
Hannah McCarthy: In some cases, the PWA would look at an integrated neighborhood and just designate it like this is now a black neighborhood, or this is now a white neighborhood. And then they would demolish the existing neighborhood and build in either all black or all white public housing development.
Nick Capodice: But how did the federal government justify this?
Richard Rothstein: In 1934, the Federal Housing Administration was established.
Hannah McCarthy: All right. We're going to do a quick zoom out here to figure out what happened. Are you with me?
Nick Capodice: Let's go.
Hannah McCarthy: Part of the New Deal was [00:09:00] to establish public housing. Another part of the New Deal was to help people buy homes. A big part of the financial system collapsed during the Great Depression is that people were defaulting on their mortgages left and right. The government passed the Federal Housing Act and created the Federal Housing Administration. Now, the FHA made a couple of things happen. For one thing, it changed the terms of mortgages. You could make smaller payments over a longer period of time.
Archival: And so they leave reluctantly, it seems, or they both would like to have this place for their very own. Too bad they can't afford it all. But maybe they can. Well, according to this sign, they can buy this house with monthly payments that are less than they now spend for rent.
Hannah McCarthy: For another, the FHA would insure mortgages.
Nick Capodice: Basically, even if someone did default, is it not pay their mortgage? The [00:10:00] federal government would have the mortgage lenders back, essentially protecting banks and other financial institutions. So we didn't end up in another financial mess all over again.
Hannah McCarthy: That's right. But they'd only insure mortgages in certain neighborhoods.
Richard Rothstein: It imposed a program of excluding African-Americans from neighborhoods where it was issuing mortgages or guaranteeing mortgages, rather, or insuring mortgages or where it was financing developers to build suburbs.
Hannah McCarthy: Nick, you asked for a justification for all of this, and there is one. It is on the books and everything that's coming up right after this break.
Nick Capodice: But before we go, I just want to remind everyone, it's tough to take something like public housing or an amendment or a foundational document and cram it into one digestible episode. We do our best, and it's the job of our very patient executive producer to just take out the stuff [00:11:00] that's a bit extraneous. But some people out there might like the extraneous stuff. If you are one of those people who likes ephemera and deep dives, you should definitely subscribe to our newsletter. It's called Extra Credit. It comes out every two weeks. It's fun, it's free, and you can sign up at our website, civics101podcast.org.
Hannah McCarthy: We're back. This is Civics 101. And this is part one of a two parter on federal public housing part one policy. How did the United States government approach housing once it finally got itself involved?
Nick Capodice: And before the break, Hannah, you were telling me that the government had a reason. It had a justification for excluding black Americans from the housing assistance it was providing to white Americans. And so I want to know what exactly was that justification?
Hannah McCarthy: Well, the justification here, the reasoning behind generally not granting black Americans these insured [00:12:00] mortgages and new affordable homes was that black owned homes were thought to bring down the value of homes around them and that black owned homes because of that, were not the kind of thing that the federal government was generally going to insure. This becomes glaringly clear when developers start building the suburbs.
Richard Rothstein: The Federal Housing Administration began to finance developers build subdivisions in suburban areas, which really ramped up after World War Two, when millions of returning war veterans were coming home needing housing. The only way they could do it was by going to the Federal Housing Administration and then the Veterans Administration and both of those agencies required as a condition of their issuing bank guarantees for the loans that these developers needed to build the subdivisions as a condition that they never sell a home to an African American. And they [00:13:00] went so far as to say you couldn't even guarantee the bank loan for a developer was going to build an all white project if it was going to be located near where African Americans were. The Federal Housing Administration had a manual that laid this out. This wasn't the action of rogue bureaucrats. It was a policy written policy of the federal government.
Hannah McCarthy: This manual was distributed all over the country. And how does a home being owned by a black individual or family bring down its value? According to this manual, alongside the various factors that would make a neighborhood a bad financial investment. Environmental factors like smoke, odors and fog. This was an indicator.
Richard Rothstein: Infiltration by harmonious racial groups.
Nick Capodice: That language was explicitly in the manual.
Hannah McCarthy: It was. And let me just give you an example of what this looked like. There is this infamous dividing line in Detroit, Michigan, called Eight Mile Road. [00:14:00] To the south of Eight Mile Road was an historically black community. But white families began to settle closer and closer to that area, and suddenly neither black nor white families could secure FHA insured mortgages.
Nick Capodice: Because the FHA saw the threat of in harmonious racial groups, which was on its no loans list.
Hannah McCarthy: So a white developer looks at this issue and comes up with a solution. He builds a wall between the white area and the black area.
Nick Capodice: A literal wall.
Hannah McCarthy: Yes, literally, it is still there. Anyway, the wall goes up. In 1941, the FHA reappraised the white homes and lo and behold, it approved their mortgages.
Nick Capodice: But not the homes of the black families.
Richard Rothstein: In the 1930s, although there was a federal agency called the Homeowners Loan Corporation, which created maps of almost every major [00:15:00] city in the country. And the maps were designed to guide the federal agencies like the Federal Housing Administration and the Veterans Administration to where it was safe, low risk to make loans, guaranteed loans, I should say. The federal government doesn't make the loans. It guarantees the bank loans or insures them The areas where it was too risky to insure mortgages or loans to developers were color grid. And one of the criteria that the map developers used to decide which neighborhoods would be colored red was whether there were African-Americans living in it. Now banks follow the similar policy. It wasn't because of the maps, but the term redlining comes from these maps that the Home Mortgage Loan Corporation originally drew. And the redlining refers to the fact that there are neighborhoods where [00:16:00] the government, where banks were insurance companies won't support housing, but because they are black neighborhoods.
Nick Capodice: Okay, I've certainly heard of redlining, but I don't know if I've realized that there are actual physical maps with red lines drawn around areas, drawn around the homes that this loan corporation says are undesirable. And of course, undesirable in this case means in a black community. Was all this just totally out in the open?
Richard Rothstein: It was well known at the time. This is not the secret policy that the government was following. Certainly people who were directed to separate housing projects based on their race knew what was happening. Certainly people who bought homes where their deeds said that they couldn't sell or rent to an African-American knew what was happening. So this was a well known public policy. It was not something in the South, it was a national policy, and it was the cause of much of [00:17:00] the segregation that we have today. Without these policies, we would have much more integrated society today. But this was, as I say, it was done by the officials of the Federal Housing Administration, the Veterans Administration. It wasn't the single person who was dictating this. This was a widespread federal policy across several federal agencies, all the agencies that were involved in housing.
Nick Capodice: All right, Hannah. Just pause here for a minute. It's just that all of this, at first blush, sounds massively unconstitutional. Am I wrong about that?
Richard Rothstein: Well, it is unconstitutional. You can take as many blushes as you want. It's unconstitutional. The Supreme Court annihilated the intent of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution in 1866 following the adoption of the 13th Amendment, which [00:18:00] prohibited not only slavery but the characteristics of slavery, and authorized the federal government to implement that provision. In 1866, Congress passed the law prohibiting discrimination in housing, private or public. Prohibiting discrimination in housing. That law was amended a couple of times, and the Supreme Court eventually evaluated the 1893 and said it was unconstitutional.
Nick Capodice: The court said it was unconstitutional to prohibit discrimination in housing.
Hannah McCarthy: It took a very, very narrow view of the 13th and 14th Amendments, essentially saying these amendments cannot control individuals and they also only apply to literal enslavement. And eventually segregation would be deemed unconstitutional in various cases. But there's this really important point that Richard made when it comes to that desegregation, federal segregation in housing, as [00:19:00] in where people live, has a much more lasting effect than segregation in other spheres of life. Even after the court acknowledges that it is not constitutional.
Richard Rothstein: Once we've created segregation, it's hard to undo. You know, if you we had segregated restaurants and busses prior to the 1960s. We pass a law saying you can't segregate restaurants anymore. The next day, anybody can go to any restaurant. They pass a law saying you can't segregate neighborhoods. The next day, things would look much different.
Nick Capodice: Because housing doesn't change overnight. You don't just wake up the next day and move.
Hannah McCarthy: And the reasons why are bigger than, well, it's hard to integrate. When we segregated housing and who was allowed to have certain kinds of housing, the United States profoundly affected housing access for generations. Richard talks about this place called Levittown. It was this large FHA insured, all white, affordable development built for veterans returning from World [00:20:00] War Two.
Archival: Five years ago. This was a vast checkerboard of the. Bombs on New York's Long Island today. A community of 60,000 persons living in 15,000 homes all built by one firm. This is Levittown. One of the most remarkable housing developments ever conceived.
Richard Rothstein: The white returning war veterans, as well as other whites who were living in urban areas and wanting to move to these suburban homes, bought them for eight $9,000, $100,000. I'll use current dollars from now on, $100,000 in today's money. And they gained wealth over the next couple of generations as those homes appreciated the value. So you can't buy a home. Levittown today for $100,000. You can't buy a home in any of these suburbs for $100,000. They now cost, depending on the area of the country, at 203 hundred and 400,000. In some places, $1,000,000 in the more. So the white families gain wealth [00:21:00] from the appreciation of the value of their homes. They use that wealth to send their children to college. They use it to perhaps take care of medical emergencies or temporary employment. They use that to subsidize their own retirements, and they use it to bequeath wealth to their children and grandchildren. Who thou? Who then had down payments for their own homes. African-americans are prohibited from participating in this wealth generating program.
Hannah McCarthy: Desegregation in housing specifically. Eventually came the Fair Housing Act of 1968 said, okay. Black individuals and families can live in formerly white only neighborhoods. But that doesn't take care of the generational wealth gap between white families and black families, which was created in large part by racist housing policy.
Richard Rothstein: Levittown today is, [00:22:00] oh, about 2% African-American. There are some African-American families going abroad who could afford to buy $500,000 homes. But Levittown is located in an area is probably about 13 to 14% African-American.
Nick Capodice: Because if you essentially prohibit homeownership assistance to black families, then a huge part of the population can only rent for decades. They can't buy a home.
Hannah McCarthy: And owning a home is pretty much the best way to accumulate wealth over generations. You can take out loans and you can use your house as collateral. You can sell a home for way more than you bought it for and give some of that wealth to your family. But that path to wealth was closed to a lot of Americans.
Richard Rothstein: What the Fair Housing Act itself cannot fix. So it's possible to redress this, but it requires enormous financial commitment, subsidies to African American families [00:23:00] to move to places that they were unconstitutionally prohibited from living it.
Hannah McCarthy: Okay. So, Nick, that is the big picture When we talk about federal housing policy in the United States, when we talk about who got help and what kind and how. We need to understand that the process was steeped in racist segregationist policy, and that policy made home ownership more difficult for black Americans as it made it easier for white Americans. Many of the affordable homes built for white Americans following the Great Depression still stand today. But if some of the homes specifically built for black Americans, homes like the rental apartment projects of Atlanta, Georgia, many of them have been deemed a failure and razed to the ground. So now we are going to take a very specific and close look at federal housing in one city, Atlanta, [00:24:00] Georgia. That's in part two of federal Housing One City's Story. This episode was produced by me, Hannah McCarthy, with help from Nick Capodice. Christina Phillips is our senior producer. Jacqui Fulton is our producer, and Rebecca Lavoie is our executive producer. Music In this episode by Anemoia, Xylo-Ziko, Arthur Benson and Rockett Jr. You can listen to part two on federal housing in the United States, as well as the entirety of the rest of our catalog at Civics101podcast.org, where you will also find a bunch of other resources. Civics 101 is a production of NHPR, New Hampshire Public Radio.