How Racist Policies Destroyed Public Housing and Created the American Suburbs

The history of housing policy is often told from the perspective of its winners, as the democratization of homeownership. In our book, Abolish Rent, we retell the story from below, as 100 years of a war on tenants. This excerpt focuses on the post-war era and how racist, anti-communist policies built private wealth for white people in the suburbs, and, in the cities, subjected poor people of color to mass displacement.

–Tracy Rosenthal

World War II reorganized the economy and geography of the United States. By the 1940s, pushed by Jim Crow and pulled by employment in war industries, more than six million Black people relocated to urban centers. US government guest-worker programs also spurred immigration from Central and South America—a fair-weather reversal of the deportation project that had ejected two million Mexicans just a decade before. LA’s population of Black residents nearly doubled. But interlocking real estate exclusions restricted the places Black and Brown people could live to just five percent of the area of the city.

When new residents met segregation there and across the country, the consequence was overcrowding, excessive rents, and landlords with little incentive to improve dank apartments, dark garages, leaky basements, and informal shacks. As one New York City judge described the plight of new Black residents, “We have extended to them the privilege of paying the highest rents for the rottenest roosts out of the poorest wages for the dirtiest jobs.”

But the need to stabilize working populations for the war effort inspired national regulation in the form of rent control. In 1942, the Office of Price Administration, empowered by the war to hold down prices on food, gasoline, and other necessary goods, instituted patchwork controls for rent as well. This included protections from eviction and rent gouging as well as funding for local rent offices, where tenants often enforced controls through enthusiastic complaints, one contract at a time.

Relief was short-lived, as landlords demanded that rent control be rolled back, then altogether scrapped. Conservative agitation continued to stymie public housing and ensure that a shortage of cheap apartments would outlast caps on rent. Racism and anticommunism proved a potent amalgam. One member of the South Los Angeles Homeowners Association synthesized anti-Black racism and prejudice against the alleged communist proclivities of Jews plainly in 1943 by complaining, “All these goddamn New York Jews are coming here to put the n——s in our neighborhood.”

The real estate industry seized on local bigotry and local levers of power to veto federal public housing plans. In Los Angeles, by 1952, they had won forty out of sixty local referenda to block projects and managed to slash the city’s federal contract by nearly 60 percent. The resulting landscape was, in historian Don Parson’s words, “the spatial expression of the Red Scare.”

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Postwar economic recovery centered around public investment in homeownership and the mass consumption it inspired. The 1944 GI Bill’s zero-down home loans, which privileged new construction, lured homeowners into freshly speculated suburbs. Developers flipped rural land into single-family houses, which families filled with a record number of fridges and washing machines, and traveled to and from in a record number of cars.

As historian Dolores Hayden insists, the built environment of the suburbs kicked off an unending cycle of private consumption and cemented a patriarchal division of labor: women were isolated to cooking, cleaning, and care and made dependent on a husband’s wage. Subject to local vetoes and requiring the support of private mortgages, the GI Bill actively subsidized white flight.

Real estate professionals capitalized on racist fears that linked the presence of people of color to declining property values through a tactic called “blockbusting.” As one agent boastfully described it, “I specialize in locating blocks which I consider ripe for racial change… I make my money—and quite a lot of it incidentally—in three ways: 1) by beating down the prices I pay the white owners…2) by selling to the eager Negroes at inflated prices; and 3) by financing these purchases at what amounts to a very high rate of interest.” Of course, this process drove further real estate gains: panicked demand for suburban homes.

Suburbanization flipped the nation from a tenant to a homeowner majority. In less than two decades, more than twenty-seven million white people relocated to the suburbs, fleeing integration and chasing government subsidies. There, they used their outsized political influence to shore up segregation with an expansive toolkit of deed restrictions and local zoning regulations. As one real estate lobbyist bragged, “We helped think up the idea of city zoning ordinances.” (To this day, on three-quarters of developable land in the United States, only single-family homes can be built.)

Suburban homeowners traded public transit, parks, and social support for private cars, yards, and property values. They evacuated cities of resources by withdrawing from urban tax bases, even as they continued to depend on the same cities for jobs and infrastructure. They were recruited into alignment with the real estate regime: private asset inflation over public good.

In the cities, landlords let dwellings crumble. Many were overcrowded, black with soot from shoddy furnaces, and lacking running water, toilets, or showers. Truman’s 1949 Housing Act had promised more: “a decent home and a suitable living environment for every American family” through 810,000 new public apartments and the eradication of urban slums. But with public housing choked at the local level, cities followed through on only the second of these mandates.

The act’s slum clearance provisions expanded local powers of eminent domain, subsidized the acquisition and demolition of land no matter its current use, and introduced a new beneficiary of this process: private enterprise. Residential and commercial developers could claim the land that governments cleared; real estate had won the power not only to contain and gouge urban populations, but to remove them.

The displacement of more than a thousand Latinx families from LA’s La Loma, Bishop, and Palo Verde, now often called Chavez Ravine, dramatizes this process acutely. Those predominantly Mexican American neighborhoods of self-built housing had thrived for decades until the city sought the land. From 1951 to 1959, officials duped residents with undervalued buyouts, condemned their homes as blight, and finally expelled them by force.

The dispossessions were carried out to clear the site for a public housing project, but those homes were never built, killed by a mayor elected to block “un-American” public housing. The evicted residents would not return. In 1957, the constitutional mandate that the land be used for a “public purpose” was finally fulfilled through a $1 deal with a private investor. He’d build a baseball stadium to lure Brooklyn’s Dodgers to LA.

From 1949 to 1974, the United States redeveloped over 550 square miles of urban land and displaced 300,000 households, up to 1.2 million people. A twenty-seven-lane confluence of six different freeways tore through LA’s Boyle Heights. A single interchange, which residents still call the “spaghetti bowl,” pushed out at least 10,000 mostly Latinx people. Across the country, two-thirds of those displaced by blight-and-switch schemes were renters, and 55 percent were Black. Housing outcomes subjected Black and Brown people to different forms of exploitation that compounded across time and marked populations as deserving of discrimination; they made race have meaning.

Real estate racism fueled the uprisings of the late sixties: Watts, Harlem, Newark, and Detroit, most famously, but also Rochester, Philadelphia, Dayton, Atlanta, Buffalo, Kansas City, Pittsburgh, Louisville, Waterloo. Nationwide, 960 cities and towns erupted in open rebellion. When President Johnson tasked the Kerner Commission with identifying the root cause of the riots, their final report noted three central themes: poverty, police brutality, and housing.

Confirming what many called the “race tax,” housing cost Black people more, but was three times as likely to be both overcrowded and substandard. “White society is deeply implicated in the ghetto,” the authors wrote. “White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.” The fact had been observed a decade earlier by writer and revolutionary autoworker James Boggs, who compared the ring of absentee ownership that surrounded Black neighborhoods—rent gouging residents and neglecting maintenance—to a white noose. And even when the Supreme Court struck down explicit discrimination, the proxies of home size, income, and property value itself preserved the effect.

Of course, conditions of overcrowding, dilapidation, and over-policing were also endemic to newly expanding immigrant communities. US-sponsored civil wars and US trade-induced poverty had drawn Latinx migrants to US urban centers, just in time to make up the gaps left by white flight. In New York, the Puerto Rican militants of the Young Lords responded to urban abandonment with a day-long occupation of a disinvested city hospital and a “garbage offensive,” in which they collected trash in their neighborhood and lit it ablaze in the streets, winning resources for their community. In LA, where the Latinx population would soon surpass the white one, high school students leading the Chicanx Blowouts drew concessions for the city’s failing public school system.

Tenants tried to claw back resources by controlling their rents. Mobilizations of the sixties and seventies drew a wave of rent-stabilization ordinances across 170 municipalities, mostly in California and the Northeast. More moderate than controls, stabilization allowed steady rent increases, permanent exemptions for new construction, and loopholes to kick down the cost of repairs, but it was still a victory. These were collective bargaining agreements between landlords and tenants at the city scale. “Today we control rent. Tomorrow police, schools, the community!” one Berkeley Black Panther Party pamphlet celebrated. Yet organizing at the scale of the city could not constrain increasingly national and international capital.

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Excerpted from Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis by Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis. Copyright © 2024. Published by Haymarket Books.