We Gon' Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation (10 page)

By itself, gentrification can’t explain the new geography of race that has emerged since the turn of the millennium. It has almost nothing to say about either Hyphy or Ferguson. Gentrification is key to understanding what happened to our cities at the turn of the millennium. But it is only half of the story. It is only the visible side of the larger problem: resegregation.

II.

Cities are becoming wealthier and whiter. Aging suburbs are becoming poorer and darker. Those suburbs are being abandoned, policed, and contained the way that communities of color in inner cities were for the past century. And all of these problems are interconnected: the fate of Sanford, Florida, where Trayvon Martin was killed, tells us about the fate of San Francisco; the fate of Brooklyn tells us about the fate of Ferguson. Nationally, we are witnessing a process that is reproducing racial inequality on a vast level.

And all of this matters because place still matters. Segregation is still linked to racial disparities of every kind. Where you live plays a significant role in the quality of food and the quality of education available to you, your ability to get a job, buy a home, and build wealth, the kind of health care you receive and how long you live, and whether you will have anything to pass on to the next generation.

Ferguson, Missouri—the tiny north St. Louis County suburb of 21,000—is one of those invisible places to which many of the displaced went. Its story was not unlike many other colorized suburbs. It had once been a “sundown town” where Blacks were not allowed after dark. Then in the last quarter of the twentieth century, an African American exodus from the city transformed St. Louis County. Between 1970 and 2010, Ferguson went from 1 percent to 67 percent Black. The story of how that came to be, the story of Ferguson itself—as community organizers there often note—reveals much about the America that has been hidden, and is central to understanding the conditions we all face right now.

The American metropolitan area had been designed with the preservation of whiteness in mind. Robert Moses’s grand plans for New York City—for a Manhattan as a shining global center of wealth, literally purged of darkness and blight—were built on exclusion. But so was the rise of the modern American suburb, envisioned as a harbor from industry and “the dangerous classes,” and all the clamor, filth, and social ills that accompanied them.
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Beginning in the late nineteenth century, developers tried to pitch upscale city dwellers on the appeal of suburbs by emphasizing how they combined urban convenience and rural predictability.
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Stability and permanence, the urban historian Robert Fogelson argues, were key to this utopic in-between—no alarms and no surprises, no Blacks and no Chinese, either. It also neatly befit the forward-looking optimism of the American frontier mythology. If things got too crowded, too loud, too unsafe, or too unfamiliar, those who could afford to would simply set out again, as one journalist in the 1920s wrote, “toward that fringe of green that will always be the ideal setting for home.”
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St. Louis City and its suburbs proved especially innovative in designing resegregation. Black organizing against these practices was no less so. Historically, the St. Louis metro area was both the central hub of a pro-slavery state and a crucial node between Mississippi and Louisiana in the south and Chicago in the north. Perhaps this tension—between the place’s legacy of racial domination and its gateway location—fated it to play a central role in many a crucial national legal battle over segregation.

In 1916, as the Great Migration began, and just a year before the East St. Louis massacre left thousands of African Americans displaced and dozens more dead, St. Louis City’s white residents voted to approve one of the nation’s first housing segregation laws. The ordinance forbade anyone from living on a block occupied by more than 75 percent of the other race. The Supreme Court ruled such racial quotas unconstitutional in
Buchanan v. Warley
a year later.

But when African Americans sought judicial relief and the courts declared segregationist policies and practices illegal, new structures of inequality—what Paul Jargowsky called the “architecture of segregation”—were erected in their place. After
Buchanan v. Warley
, the powerful St. Louis Real Estate Exchange accelerated the use of restrictive covenants.

Historically, covenants had been used to restrict “undesirable activities,” such as using a home for commerce or heavy manufacturing, or building homes of materials other than brick or stone.
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But now they were used to restrict “undesirable people” from purchasing or renting homes in many neighborhoods—in this case, “people of the Negro and Mongolian race.”
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Most Black St. Louisans thus lived in a narrow rectangle of downtown, between Cass and Chouteau Avenues from Grand Boulevard to the Mississippi River. City officials then began to label Black neighborhoods as full of “blight,” a status that placed them in zones of redlining and disinvestment, and threatened their residents with abandonment or displacement.

After World War II, African Americans sought to move into covenanted St. Louis city neighborhoods. When white resident Louis Kraemer filed a suit to block the Shelleys, a Black couple, from moving into a house for which a racial covenant had been struck in 1911, the case went all the way to the Supreme Court. The Shelleys prevailed in 1948, when the court used the Fourteenth Amendment to declare that racial covenants could no longer be enforced. Soon, subsidized by post–World War II federal mortgage loans, whites began leaving the city for the county suburbs.
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White flight and the politics of abandonment had begun.

The rise of St. Louis City had been premised on the idea that racial segregation was key to rising property values. The rise of suburban St. Louis County rested on the same logic. Of 400,000 Federal Housing Administration mortgages guaranteed in greater St. Louis between 1962 and 1967, only 3 percent of city loans and less than 1 percent of county loans were given to African American families.
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(In this regard, St. Louis was merely at the national average.)

Government policies supported white mobility and suburban growth. They also enforced Black containment and accelerated urban decline. Federal public housing assistance incentivized the city to push Black poor into public housing downtown. Prospective Black homeowners continued to face steering practices that maintained a cordon around what real-estate agents explicitly called “the Negro community,” which had been pushed north to the other side of Grand and Delmar Boulevards. This new physical border—between Black and white, poverty and wealth—would persist into the twenty-first century, becoming known as the Delmar Divide.

By the middle of the century, the downtown area had deteriorated so much that a visiting French corporate executive looked out from the windows of Monsanto’s corporate headquarters and declared, “It looks like a European city bombed in the war.”
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City officials soon chose to clear the so-called blight. The razing of the Mill Creek Valley neighborhood in the 1950s displaced 20,000 African Americans.

At the same time, new industry, housing, and shopping popped up along the freshly paved interstate highways out of the city. Ferguson was a destination town back then, part of a ring of county suburbs that, historian Colin Gordon wrote, were helpfully rated for prospective white homeowners “according to average rents, population density, and ‘the presence of Negroes.’”
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One of Ferguson’s neighbors was Kinloch, known as “Missouri’s first Black city,” where Maxine Waters and Dick Gregory had been raised. In 1937, white residents in Kinloch failed in their political attempts to divide the school district to maintain school segregation, so they broke away to incorporate the new town of Berkeley. St. Louis County’s home-rule laws allowed towns to propagate in this way, to allow whites to easily establish and protect their “fringe of green” from the crowded, the loud, the unsafe, and the unfamiliar. Eventually, ninety municipalities in all would be incorporated in St. Louis County.

In the mid-century, there was an explosion of new county towns, driven by a survival-of-the-fittest mentality. New towns built wealth, tax rolls, and city budgets, while reinforcing segregation and avoiding responsibility for the downward spiral of St. Louis City and the poorer county towns.
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Gordon called this spate of town incorporations “a prolonged pattern of local piracy.”
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If the western vistas of Manifest Destiny were made possible by genocide, the picket fences of the Affluent Society were made possible by segregation.

“Fear—not forward-looking optimism—shaped the geography of metropolitan America,” the scholar Thomas Sugrue wrote. “Sprawl is the geography of inequality.”
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III.

In 1975, when Gerald Ford was running things in the West Wing and Obama was still a teen in Hawai’i, African Americans made up more than 70 percent of the population of Washington, D.C. “They still call it the White House,” George Clinton joked in
Chocolate City,
“but that’s a temporary condition, too.” For a time, Parliament’s tribute to “my piece of the rock” was not only funkily unavoidable, it was factually undeniable. And when Reagan took over the Oval Office, nearly 90 percent of the suburbs across the nation were white. It was no different in Washington, D.C. “Uh, Chocolate City is no dream,” Clinton concluded. “God bless Chocolate City and its vanilla suburbs.”

By the time the other Clintons—Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea—were moving into C.C. in 1993, suburbia had become more diverse, reflecting the removal of racial restrictions on housing, immigration, and jobs, and the subsequent growth of middle-class communities of color. Prince George’s County, which stretches eastward beyond the District’s borders, was majority nonwhite. In 2000, Montgomery County, north of the District, passed the same mark. By 2010, even Fairfax County, at its western and southern borders, was about a third nonwhite, the national average.

Many people of color moved to the suburbs for the same reasons that whites did—for more house, for comfort and convenience, for employment and educational opportunities. They also moved to specifically ethnic neighborhoods because a network of culturally welcoming neighbors and institutions had already been established. In some ways this trend reflected America at its best, the definition of the pursuit of happiness. But in other ways, it reflected resegregation’s stark reality.

During the 1990s, many Black families left Washington, D.C., for Prince George’s County. P.G.C. quickly became the highest-income majority-Black county in the country.
Washington Post
journalist Michael Fletcher described it as “a community that grew more upscale as it became more Black.”
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He and other
Post
reporters noted that in Fairwood, Prince George’s richest neighborhood, the median household income was $173,000. But in the aftermath of the housing crisis, the county had the highest foreclosure rate in Maryland. Half of the loans made in 2006 and 2007 went bad.

Most of the blame pointed to the banks. Lenders disproportionately offered predatory subprime loans to Black buyers, even when by all fair lending standards they qualified for the very best terms.
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Even if Prince George’s County suburbs were high income, they too had been redlined by race.

It was this way all across the country. Neighborhoods where mostly people of color lived were more than twice as likely to have received subprime loans as mostly white neighborhoods. The foreclosure crisis revealed that high-income Blacks were not protected from racist and predatory housing and lending practices. Nor were Latino and Asian American home purchasers. So when the crash came, Blacks and Latinos were 70 percent more likely than whites to lose their homes to foreclosure.
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A national study by demographers Matthew Hall, Kyle Crowder, and Amy Spring that examined nearly all foreclosures between 2005 and 2009 found unequivocally that “the highest rates of foreclosure were in racially integrated neighborhoods.”
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Since the single biggest asset for an overwhelming majority of households of color was their home, the national wealth gap between whites and all other racial groups grew larger than ever. Between 2005 and 2009, white household net worth dropped by 16 percent, but plunged 53 percent for Blacks, 54 percent for Asians, and 66 percent for Latinos.
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By 2013, the median white household held ten times the wealth of a Latino household and thirteen times the wealth of Black household.
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These impacts would have a long-term effect. One study found that before the Great Recession, white and Black households of comparable age, education, and median income were projected to reach parity in home equity by 2050. But in the wake of the crash, the study found white home equity would grow to over 1.6 times Black home equity in the same period.
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But there were other broad social impacts as well. Desegregated neighborhoods are the pathway to reducing precarity for households of color and increasing stability and sustainability for communities of color. But as demographers Hall, Crowder, and Spring wrote, “This pathway may have been significantly damaged during the foreclosure crisis, with housing distress piling up in these neighborhoods and white populations abandoning these areas at a quicker pace.”
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