How Real Estate Divided America - Dissent Magazine

How real estate divided America Real estate has long had a significant impact on national housing policy in the U.S., which harms African Americans. Richard Nixon, Housing Secretary Romney, and the mayor of Washington are touring a neighborhood devastated by the riots following the death of Martin Luther King Jr.

In the years of many anniversaries, two of them stand out in light of the housing crisis facing the United States today. The first is the passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which is more commonly known as the Fair Housing Act. In a sense, the law sharply recognized the role of discrimination in housing policy that kept African Americans in a subordinate social position. The exclusion of Black individuals from white neighborhoods, coupled with the refusal to invest in Black communities, deprived them of access to the best schools and the highest-paying jobs. Housing discrimination was a key factor in Black inequality in American society, and the Fair Housing Act promised to eliminate it by prohibiting racial discrimination in the rental, financing, and sale of housing.

The second anniversary is the 2008 crisis - perhaps the most striking indication that the Fair Housing Act failed to fulfill its obligations. The crisis not only wiped out decades of hard-earned financial success for African Americans but also took away their homes. In 2010, nearly half a million African Americans were at risk of foreclosure, and by 2014, more than 240,000 had lost their homes.

In 2007, just before the crash, the median income of white families was eight times higher than that of black families. By 2013, this number had risen to eleven times, and it has since decreased slightly. The crisis of bad mortgage loans and the widespread housing and economic crisis it caused were the result of a long period of predatory targeting of African Americans in the housing market, which can be traced back to the housing and credit reform period in the late 1960s and 1970s. After decades of exclusion, African Americans were finally promised access to the developed housing market that had supported the white middle class in the second half of the twentieth century. Instead, they were subjected to predatory lending and real estate practices that perpetuated familiar forms of discrimination. At the peak of the housing bubble in the early 2000s, black individuals were 50 percent more likely to receive a bad loan than their white counterparts. These loans, as is widely understood today, were more expensive and carried higher interest rates. The terms of these loans increased the likelihood of default, and their concentration in black neighborhoods threatened not only to ruin individual credit but also to undermine the stability of entire communities.