THE STRUGGLE FOR OPEN HOUSING
Levenson, Frances & Fisher, Margaret
THE STRUGGLE FOR OPEN HOUSING by FRANCES LEVENSON and MARGARET FISHER A ny objective analysis of racial housing patterns in the United States leads to the inescapable conclusion that residential...
...It is a potent educational weapon in the battle for social progress...
...In addition, an endless array of communities which were formerly restricted to whites, including mammoth Stuyves-ant Town in New York City and the three Levittowns, have been racially integrated for some years...
...Members of the real estate industry, in their efforts to keep their "free" enterprise in an iron grip, employ tactics that tax the imagination...
...Lending institutions, as a general rule, will grant loans to non-whites or to whites only for homes located in neighborhoods they consider "approved" for the particular occupant...
...Seventeen states and fifty-five cities have barred discrimination in some area of the housing market, either by law or policy resolutions...
...Until recent years, the official "Code of Ethics" of the National Association of Real Estate Boards included the following specific regulation: "A realtor should never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood a character of property or occupancy, members of any race or nationality, or any individual whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values in the neighborhood...
...But those homogeneous neighborhoods were formed by free choice...
...and Jews, eighty-five...
...1930's...
...It is true that in the late 1800's there were the Little Italys, the Chinatowns, the Jewish communities, Irish sections, and concentrations of other newcomers to our land...
...In the last five years alone, three cities, eleven states, and the Virgin Islands have adopted fair housing laws applying to privately-financed as well as government-aided housing...
...Lakewood, near Los Angeles...
...The waiting list of applicants remains jammed at Stuyvesant Town, and a Levittown house purchased for $9,000 several years ago will bring up to $18,000 today...
...men of distinction and unknown laborers...
...We can achieve this goal only when our efforts insure: ¶ Effective and meaningful enforcement of the Presidential order on Federally-aided housing...
...At stake is the integrity of our democratic system, both for ourselves and before the peoples of the world...
...Yet their benefits have been largely denied to more than twenty million Negro Americans and to members of certain other minority groups...
...They continued to expand through the 1920's, but began to dwindle in the FRANCES LEVENSON is the director of the National Committee Against Discrimination in Housing and MARGARET FISHER is the editor of Trends in Housing, the Committee's bi-monthly publication...
...Housing with FHA- and VA-guar-anteed mortgages has accounted for the major portion of all non-farm housing constructed in the United States since World War II...
...intellectual and uneducated...
...These low-rent projects have represented substantially all the new housing available to non-white families, and numerically a considerable proportion has gone to them...
...many members of the real estate and banking industries have revised their former practices and are voluntarily complying with the laws...
...To be approved, Poles had to score fifty-five points...
...Yet, in spite of the formidable barriers, some solid progress has been made in the housing-civil rights field during the last ten years...
...The villains are many...
...Some of these citizens groups have impressive records of accomplishment...
...Probably the most important advance is the stirring of conscience and common sense among the American people...
...Since the depression of the early 1930's, when the Federal government first entered the housing field on a large scale, and remained as the most important single influence in the nation's housing market, it has played the roles of both architect and promoter of residential segregation...
...Concord Park in Philadelphia...
...The racial concentrations which form the vast American ghettos of today can hardly be described as voluntary...
...These enormous undertakings have been supported, of course, by taxes imposed on all alike...
...non-whites in "black" or fringe areas, or in an established integrated community which has been scheduled for all-Negro occupancy...
...Discrimination and segregation have been the norm in the exercise of that power...
...When President Kennedy sat at his desk in late November and made that long-awaited "stroke of the pen" on the Executive Order barring discrimination in Federally-aided housing, he actually laid down no new national mandate...
...A closing of the economic gap between Negro and white incomes...
...Urban renewal, which provides for the revitalization of the nation's cities, has become the keystone of Federal housing programs...
...Indeed, many observers lament that gradual dispersion has robbed the culture of our cities of diversity...
...If the market is glutted with homes for sale, for whatever reason, values will fall...
...Whites are shown housing only in "white" areas...
...Less than two per cent of the new homes insured by FHA have been available to non-whites, and the vast majority of them are in all-Negro developments in the South...
...However, more than eighty per cent of all federally-sponsored public housing is racially segregated...
...The real estate fraternity—the builders, brokers, and mortgage lenders— control access to the major part of the housing supply...
...These indigenous groups of "citizens for integrated living" are working to make the goal a reality in their own communities...
...America is moving toward a new way in housing-civil rights, but much too timidly and much too slowly...
...THE STRUGGLE FOR OPEN HOUSING by FRANCES LEVENSON and MARGARET FISHER A ny objective analysis of racial housing patterns in the United States leads to the inescapable conclusion that residential segregation— with its concomitant of segregated schools, churches, employment, and public and recreational facilities—is more widespread and more embedded as a national institution today than it was a century or a half-century ago...
...They have set a new ethical standard for the entire community...
...Greeks, sixty-five...
...What about the other programs...
...The popular magazines, the press, radio and television, conferences, sermons, and political speeches spotlight the problem almost daily...
...Many stable, integrated communities have been "renewed" on a segregated basis...
...They are rich and poor...
...Literally thousands of communities were developed across the nation which were restricted against occupancy by "undesirables"—American Indians, Syrians, Jews, Mexican-Americans, Puerto Ri-cans, Negroes, and other minorities...
...Many forces in our society are responsible for the formidable barriers faced by minority group families in their quest for housing...
...It would not, it declared, insure mortgages on any more properties subject to such covenants...
...It is possible today to identify more than 100 developments—both single home and apartment communities—which have followed an open occupancy policy from their inception...
...VA's record is no better...
...Cap ital Park Apartments in Washington, D. C; the Sinaiko Homes in Madison, Wisconsin...
...the angels, feiy...
...With FHA's benediction, the use of restrictive covenants spread through the general housing market...
...Measurable progress has also been made within the real estate industry...
...It is not unfair, however, to lay major responsibility at the door of the United States government...
...As late as 1934, only five per cent of the Negroes in Charleston, South Carolina, lived in blocks which were 100 per cent non-white, and more than forty per cent lived in blocks which were more than fifty per cent white...
...Civil Rights Commission has reported to the President, shelter for his family is the only major commodity on the American market which a non-white citizen cannot purchase freely according to his needs, his means, and his desires...
...Their residents are generally American to the core...
...Whole new all-white cities—the Levittowns of Long Island, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey...
...A Detroit physician, descendant of a signer of the Declaration of Independence, inventor of the electrical heart, and recipient of four national awards, did not make the grade because his father is a Jew...
...A striking example is the approach of the Federal Housing Administration, which was created in 1934 to provide insurance on mortgage loans and represents the largest of the government housing programs...
...Territory, as is enjoyed by white citizens thereof to inherit, purchase, lease, sell, hold, and convey real and personal property...
...Rigid separation of Negro citizens into circumscribed neighborhoods is a relatively recent phenomenon in the United States—either in the North or the South...
...Anti-bias housing legislation has set new records in the history of civil rights enactments...
...the highly profitable Glen-clift community in San Diego, California...
...While the anti-bias housing laws have been in operation too short a period to have caused substantial changes in residential patterns, they are unquestionably helping to lower housing barriers...
...The contention that property values must decline with the entry of a minority family into a "majority" neighborhood has been thoroughly discredited by numerous scientific studies...
...They became increasingly apparent in the 1930's, and continued to grow until burgeoning Black Belts were a characteristic of every major city after World War II...
...Today, one must search to find a settlement with the authentic flavor of the "old country...
...Residential integration was customary in New England, with Negro citizens participating normally in the religious, social, civic, and political life of the community...
...Perhaps the most dramatic indication of progress in recent years has been the spontaneous formation of literally hundreds of voluntary fair housing groups in many sections of the country...
...No matter how they rise in status, if they want to better their living environment their only choice is likely to be between one restricted tract and another...
...Ninety-five per cent of these citizens who are relegated to living apart are Negro Americans...
...Since 1933, the housing market and the face of America have been transformed by Federal housing operations...
...Despite the growth of segregation as a national pattern, the number of successful interracial communities scattered over the country has increased sharply during the last five years...
...A housing supply which is within the means of the people...
...These two agencies have underwritten more than $117 billion in loans...
...What he did do was to direct the government of the United States, in the operation of its far-reaching housing activities, to start obeying the mandate of the Constitution and Federal law, both of which it had been violating in its housing programs for a number of years...
...The 1960 census reports clearly reveal that this picture has worsened during the last decade...
...For fifteen years, the local brokers association, in conjunction with a property-owners organization, operated an elaborate point-rating system to protect the Pointes from "undesirables...
...It cuts across all economic lines: the wealthy Scars-dales have their fair housing committees, as do the middle-class Levittowns, and the upper-class avenues and working-men's sections of the inner-city...
...Its Underwriting Manual, which included a model restrictive covenant for inclusion in deeds, declared, "If a neighborhood is to retain stability, it is necessary that properties shall continue to be occupied by the same social and racial groups...
...If white residents use common sense and resist the scare tactics of real estate speculators who trade in creating panic for profit, the chances are about four to one that the value of their property will increase...
...These include the giant Prairie Shores luxury apartment development on the lake shores of Chicago...
...Park Forest, near Chicago—and the myriads of all-white suburban developments bear eloquent witness to government support of residential segregation...
...Yet the industry and many individual citizens cling to the myth...
...Shortly after its formation more than a decade ago, the National Committee Against Discrimination in Housing (a federation of thirty-seven major religious, civil rights, labor, and civic organizations) protested this scandalous misuse of Federal power and funds, and launched the long, hard battle for a Presidential order prohibiting discrimination in all housing affected in any manner by government action...
...A private detective screened prospective home-buyers and graded them on grammar, friends, dress, and complexion, as well as religion, race, and ancestry...
...Her books include "Strange Fruit," "Killers of the Dream," "The Journey," "Now Is the Time," "One Hour," and, just published, "Memory of a Large Christmas...
...Seven out of every ten Americans now live in urban areas...
...These programs have made possible the emergence of the large-scale builder, the vast new suburban subdivisions, the amortized mortgage marketable on a national basis, long-term credit and low down-payment, and extensive slum clearance and renewal of our cities...
...To a large extent, it is within the industry's power to decide who will live where...
...Furthermore, it has been the overwhelming judgment of the courts to uphold the constitutionality of the fair housing statutes...
...They and their parents and their grandparents were born on these shores...
...LILLIAN SMITH, one of the South's most celebrated writers, was co-editor of South Today for a decade...
...It is expected that by 1975, no less than eighty-five per cent of our total population will be city-dwellers...
...Color islands were scarcely discernible in most of our cities at the turn of the century and during the early 1900's...
...An increased drive among both Negroes and whites toward true residential integration...
...Housing discrimination and segregation are now widely recognized as crucial domestic issues...
...A Chicago official recently commented: "Always before in America, when things got too expensive, we've figured out a new way...
...From 1933 to 1938, the Federal government actively promoted discrimination and segregation in much of the housing affected by its operations...
...These include New York City (the pioneer), Pittsburgh, Toledo, Colorado, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Oregon, California, Pennsylvania, New York State, New Jersey, Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Alaska...
...An editor of Fortune recently wrote that "positive discrimination" in favor of the Negro must be exercised to overcome past actions against him...
...As the newcomers or their children rose on the economic and social ladder, they were free to move wherever they chose—whether "uptown" in the city or "to the country," suburbia...
...A classic example was exposed recently involving the five communities which form fashionable Grosse Pointe, Michigan...
...However, FHA continued extending its largess to builders and developers who flagrantly denied housing to non-white families...
...This "premise" more often than not is accepted as fact, but there is actually no unanimity on the subject within the financial community itself...
...It is significant that this exceeds the number of civil rights enactments in a comparable period in either the employment or public accommodations field...
...The "due process" and "equal protection" clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution prohibit Federal or state action which discriminates against any person because of race, color, or creed...
...and the prestige-laden Eichler developments in California—to name only a few...
...The housing and lending industries, local "improvement" associations, individual prejudice, customs, and codes have all been part and parcel of the abridgment of one of man's most basic rights...
...In no other aspect of national life has the Federal government given more aid, exercised more controls, and brought about more changes than in the field of housing...
...The number of builders, brokers, and mortgage lenders who are now operating on an open market basis is highly significant—and is growing steadily...
...But they are trying to knock down the walls of exclusion whether they have the assistance of a fair housing law or not...
...While the results of these gains are not yet statistically significant, they are an important bellwether of prospects for the future...
...At the close of World War 1, Negro residents were scattered throughout such cities as Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Columbus, Ohio...
...If they live in an interracial area, they want to keep it that way...
...Schwulst, now chairman of the Bowery's board, has stated that the bank considers the "color or ethnic origin of the borrower irrelevant," and that its experience has confirmed that position...
...America, the "land of the free," must come to grips with the hard truth that no man is free unless he can freely choose where he will live...
...Almost $2 billion in Federal funds have been expended to aid 870 slum clearance and redevelopment projects in 475 different communities...
...Even the most cursory examination of developments in the housing field shows that the requirements of the Constitution and Federal law have been largely ignored, and have had little—if any—impact on the course of events...
...You can't have fair housing without full housing...
...Testifying at the same hearing, a representative of the District of Columbia's largest building and loan association reported that his institution makes loans to Negroes who seek to buy in predominantly- or all-white neighborhoods, and that this practice has never resulted in a loss of business...
...An ironic sidelight: According to an NBC-TV program aired in October, 1961, a small colony of gangsters and criminals are residents and share the joys of "exclusive living" in Grosse Pointe...
...This proliferating movement appears to be contagious, spreading from town to town and state to state...
...The enactment of fair housing legislation by states and cities throughout the country, coupled with effective enforcement procedures...
...a sizable number of minority families—predominantly middleclass—have been helped by the laws in their efforts to move out of areas of racial concentration and into the mainstream of American life...
...The Federal Civil Rights Act of 1866, which survives to this day, provides that "All citizens of the United States shall have the same right, in every State and...
...More than seventy per cent of the families displaced by urban renewal projects have been non-whites...
...Orientals and Negroes automatically scored zero...
...Italians, seventy-five...
...Charles Abrams, housing and planning expert and president of the National Committee Against Discrimination in Housing, has said that FHA's official occupancy policy from 1934 to the end of 1949 might well have been culled from the Nuremberg laws...
...In Providence, Rhode Island, to cite one instance, the bulldozer has displaced some Negro households as many as eight times...
...Generally poor and understandably insecure in a strange new country, the immigrants reached out for community through the common ties of language, customs, or religion...
...The Public Housing Administration left the question of open occupancy or segregation up to local housing authorities, and most cities—North and South —chose segregation...
...Law is much more than an instrument of coercion...
...A recent five-year, $400,000 Ford Foundation-financed study, conducted under the aegis of the distinguished Commission on Race and Housing (chaired by Earl B. Schwulst, president of the Bowery Savings Bank of New York, and composed of business and professional leaders of comparable eminence from every section of the country), concluded that "Segregation barriers in most cities were tighter in 1950 than ten years earlier," and that we are experiencing "an increasing separation of racial groups as non-whites accumulate in the central city areas abandoned by whites, and the latter continually move to new suburban subdivisions from which non-whites are barred...
...the huge Morningside Gardens cooperative in New York City...
...Testimony submitted on behalf of the Mortgage Bankers Association of Metropolitan Washington before the U. S. Civil Rights Commission's recent hearing on housing in the capital city area stated: "Applications from minority groups are not generally considered in areas that are not recognized as being racially mixed, on the premise that such an investment would not be stable and attractive to institutional lenders...
...Closing its eyes to the moral and legal demands of the Bill of Rights and Federal law, the government not only practiced open and overt discrimination, but it developed and presented to the private entrepreneurs a grand design for a nation composed of "homogeneous neighborhoods...
...The people of the United States are beginning to learn the moral, social, political, and economic costs of residential segregation: increased juvenile delinquency, human demoralization produced by slum living, disease, crime, loss of potential skills, loss of tax revenue...
...As the U.S...
...Government sponsorship of segregation must be transformed into government sponsorship of democratic living patterns...
...Almost precisely the reverse occurred when the color factor entered the picture...
...Similar discrimination was practiced by the Veterans Administration...
...They believe the strong arm of the law is needed to insure the right of every American to compete for housing on an open market...
...One thing is certain: It will take aggressive, unrelenting, and multi-pronged efforts to make the right to equal opportunity in housing a reality...
...In December, 1949, after the 1948 U. S. Supreme Court decision that racially restrictive covenants were judicially unenforceable, FHA—reluctantly—bowed to the high Court's ruling...
...In 1910, Negroes not only lived in practically every section of Chicago, but almost thirty-five per cent of them resided in areas which were less than ten per cent nonwhite...
...Like cancer, housing discrimination is now constantly discussed in public forums...
...Greater understanding and active cooperation from the real estate industry...
...The Bowery Savings Bank of New York—the world's largest savings bank—operates on a firm policy of nondiscrimination...
...But the Federal government is not the only villain in the housing drama...
...If they live in an "all-white" section, they want it to become integrated...
Vol. 26 • December 1962 • No. 12
