A House Divided
A basis for black reparations
By Jonathan Kaplan, associate professor and chair of the Department of Philosophy, and Andrew Valls, assistant professor in the Department of Political Science
An excerpt from “Housing Discrimination as a Basis for Black Reparations”
Published in Public Affairs Quarterly, July 2007
(Illustration: Edel Rodriguez)
The renewed interest in the issue of black reparations, both in the public sphere and among scholars, is a welcome development because the racial injustices of the past continue to shape American society by disadvantaging African Americans in a variety of ways. Attention to the past and how it has shaped present-day inequality seems essential to both understanding our predicament and to justifying policies that would address and undermine racial inequality. Given this, any argument for policies designed to pursue racial justice must be, at least in part, backward-looking, justified partly as compensation for the wrongs of the past. . . .
An important part of the story about racial inequality today is the history of housing and lending discrimination in the second half of the 20th century. Home equity, for many Americans, is a very important source of wealth, and the decades after World War II were ones of rapid home equity growth. They were the decades that saw the creation of a large, mostly suburban, middle class. But the middle class that was created was mostly white, and this was due largely to government policies that (in many cases intentionally) excluded blacks from the opportunities to get into the home market and benefit from home equity growth. . . .
The largest cost borne by black Americans is the result of the racist policies of the FHA and other government organizations from the 1930s through most of the 1960s. These policies made it much easier for white Americans to acquire and profit from residential real estate property and simultaneously made it harder for black Americans to acquire and profit from such property. The inability of black Americans to purchase housing on the same terms as white Americans priced many black Americans out of the market entirely; part of the ongoing inequality in home ownership rates can be traced directly to such impacts. Further, in many places that blacks might wish to live, FHA policies made it impossible for them to purchase homes and created incentives for white property owners in the area to discourage racial integration - multiracial neighborhoods would not be rated as highly by the FHA and hence property values could very well drop as mortgage loans, based on FHA ratings, became more expensive and/or harder to secure. While no doubt many white property owners during this time were in fact racist in the traditional sense of the word, even if such property owners were not adverse to living in the same neighborhood as black Americans, the FHA policies pressured them to favor (and enforce) segregation.
Aside from the lower rates of home ownership by black Americans, these policies resulted in homes in predominantly black neighborhoods not increasing in value nearly as much as those in predominantly white neighborhoods. Again, even if white Americans had wished to buy homes in racially “mixed” neighborhoods, they were unable to acquire mortgage loans guaranteed by the FHA in order to do so. This created a demand for new (de facto segregated) housing developments and no doubt in-creased the market demand in existing predominantly white neighborhoods, while simultaneously lowering the market price (by lowering demand) for housing in predominantly black neighborhoods.
Perhaps the most lasting legacy of these FHA policies is the high degree of residential racial segregation and the attendant differences in the opportunities afforded to black and white Americans. Most obviously, these include access to high-quality educational opportunities, as well as access to local financial institutions, health-care resources and other tangible neighbor-hood assets.
Read the complete paper by Kaplan and Valls at oregonstate.edu/%7Ekaplanj/Reparations.pdf