Post 6: The Illusion of Meritocracy in Housing, Part 1 | Sangwon Yang and Mako Nagasawa

The Purpose of A Long Repentance Blog Series

People talk about issues of race and justice in the United States as issues of ‘justice and injustice.’  Sometimes we launch into debates about ‘the proper role of government.’  But is that the original framework from which these issues were asked and debated?

The purpose of the blog post series called A Long Repentance: Exploring Christian Mistakes About Race, Politics, and Justice in the United States is to remind our readers that these issues began as Christian heresies.  They were at variance from Christian beliefs prior to colonialism.  Since Christians enacted and institutionalized what we believe to be heretical ideas, they were very destructive and harmful, then as now.  And we bear a unique responsibility for them.  As a result, we believe we must engage in a long repentance.  We must continue to resist the very heresies that we put into motion.  Thus the title of this blog series, A Long Repentance.  The journey is long and challenging.  It may be impossible to see the end.  But along the way, it is also inspiring and sometimes breathtaking.

We also encourage you to explore this booklet, A Long Repentance: A Study Guide, for further reflections and discussion questions. Here’s a YouTube video called Colonization, Globalization, and Liberating Theologies where co-author Mako Nagasawa did an introduction and summary.

In Post 2 and Post 5, we explored how white American Protestants promoted the heretical view of Genesis 1 taught by John Locke, that the productive can take land/property from the unproductive.   Also setting themselves up for deep anxiety, they also tended maintained that the social system they set up was fair and ‘meritocratic’ – as opposed to blatantly racist.  They tended to believe that their ‘individual success’ was the result of their ‘personal hard work’ in the ‘private market.’  White Americans even hid from themselves the fact that they used massive government intervention to set up a deeply unequal and racialized social system that continues to this day.  In this post, we explore the housing market.

Beliefs About Discrimination and Fairness

“So you think the system is fair?”

Michaela felt her blood rising as she turned to face her questioner across the office aisle.  Michaela didn’t like those NFL players taking the knee during the national anthem.  It was the wrong time, wrong place.  Even if the mostly black players had a case, which she wasn’t sure about, she felt something on behalf of the US as a country – a country that rewards hard work.  And she had just finished saying so, since last night’s game was fresh on everyone’s mind.

“I’m saying the system should be fair, which it would be, except for certain affirmative action policies.  If you play by the rules, and keep your head down, you’ll be alright,” she said, keeping her fingers on the keyboard, but looking steadily at Brian.

Brian asked, “So people who complain about the police treating people differently based on race are just making stuff up?”

“It’s not just about police encounters,” Michaela clarified slowly.  But Brian seemed already prepared for that.  “It’s about schools, jobs…”

“You think the whole system is fair, or would be, except for affirmative action?” Brian said through a raised eyebrow.

Michaela agreed.  At one point in the conversation, she said, “I acknowledge black people in the past did suffer a lot of discrimination,” trying to build a connection with Brian, who was African American.  “But now, I think white people are being discriminated against, more than minorities.  And there’s a lot of white people like me who feel it.[1]  Like in affirmative action.  The system has to be fair.”

“And by fair,” Brian added, “You mean a meritocracy?”[2]

“Exactly,” replied Michaela, patiently waiting.  She expected Brian to recite a litany of sob-stories about slavery.

Government-Approved Neighborhood Segregation by Race

“Look, did your parents buy a home?” asked Brian.  “Did your grandparents?”

“Why is that relevant?” asked Michaela, genuinely perplexed but skeptical.

“Would you agree,” replied Brian, “that your zip code affects your experience of safety, schools, policing, and your ability to find good food at nice stores, books at nice libraries, and places to play at nice parks, all within easy distance?”[3]

“Sure.”

“Well, then,” Brian said, “it’s important to remember how many middle-class white families became homeowners, and where.  So do you know who was the first in your family to buy a house?”

“I’ve driven by a house in the Los Angeles area that used to belong to my great-grandpa and great-grandma,” said Michaela.

“One of my great grandparents lived in the LA area, too,” said Brian.  “From 1905, realtor-developers Duncan McDuffie and J.C. Nichols had started using whites-only ‘racial covenants’ to promote high-end housing subdivisions to white people.  White people were attracted to the idea that an entire subdivision of housing would be whites-only.  This model caught on very quickly, in middle-class and working-class developments, too, across the nation.  White developers wrote racial covenants into the deeds of new construction everywhere.[4]  In 1922, Palos Verdes Estates promoted their neighborhood by saying on marketing literature,

“There are the usual restrictions prohibiting Negroes, Asiatics and people other than the white or Caucasian race, except in the capacity of domestic servants.”[5]

“Did you catch the word ‘usual’?” Brian asked pointedly.

“But that’s the private market,” Michaela objected.  “That’s not the government.”

“The government backed up the private market, Michaela,” said Brian.  “In 1919, the California Supreme Court said that racial covenants were legal.  They decided that Alfred Gary could not actually own or occupy the house he had bought because there was a racial covenant in place which blocked ‘any persons other than of the Caucasian race’ from doing so.[6]  This decision – Los Angeles Investment Company v. Gary – became the key legal precedent across the U.S, and it was not easily undone.”[7] 

“You’re saying that the California Supreme Court should have decided differently?  On what basis?” asked Michaela.

“On the basis of the Fourteenth Amendment’s ‘equal protection of the law’ clause,” Brian replied.  “There were two direct court precedents.  First, in 1890, a federal court blocked the city of San Francisco from forcing twenty thousand Chinese residents to move, because it violated the ‘equal protection of the law’ clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.[8]  Second, in 1892, in Gandolfo v. Hartman, a federal court blocked a private racial covenant that tried to stop renting “to a Chinaman.”[9]  My great-grandfather was African American and also lived in Los Angeles, which was the fastest growing real estate market at the time.  He remembers that:

“[By 1924], the time when [African Americans] could live where they could afford to buy in Los Angeles had . . . come to an end.  They were forced to live in despicable hovels with fire hazards, unsanitary conditions, and corroded plumbing.  More important . . . although living in such low income areas, they were faced with . . . paying higher rents . . . What would purchase a cozy nook in Hollywood, would only buy a tumble-down shack on the East Side.”[10]

“For the same quality of housing,” Brian continued, “people of color had to pay more because they had fewer options to choose from: 

“Those excluded typically had to pay 20 to 30 percent more for the same quality housing.  Limiting supply, limiting where one can live, pushes up what one has to pay.  This was an inevitable consequence of divided markets.”[11]

“My great-grandpa rented space in a garage,” Brian said.  “Other minority folks were evicted from homes they had bought, because of the racial covenants that had been written into the deeds.[12]  And the realtor-developers were lying when they said people of color made property values sink.[13]

“How widespread did segregated housing become?” Michaela asked.

“Let me compare Los Angeles in 1905 and 1920,” Brian replied.  “In 1905, people of color could live anywhere.[14]  By 1920, “95 percent of Los Angeles’ housing stock was effectively put off limits to Blacks and Asians.”[15]  This practice was written into the licensing of white realtors, by the National Association of Real Estate Brokers.[16]  In 1939, Fortune magazine did a national poll.  They asked whether African Americans should be allowed “to live wherever they wanted to live.”[17]  Only 15 percent of white Americans said yes.  And that’s outside the South.  Whereas in 1904,

“there had not been limits on where African Americans were allowed to live; by 1939, the vast majority of white Americans believed such limits were necessary.  Such views, once established, tended to be enduring.”[18]

Government Funded Housing and Wealth Accumulation Under the Guise of “Merit”

“What about your grandparents?” Brian asked.  “Did they own their own home?”

“My grandfather was drafted for World War II,” said Michaela.  “When he got back, he applied for a mortgage loan and bought a home.”

“Before World War II,” said Brian, “most people couldn’t buy a home.  You were too much of a risk.  Most banks wouldn’t give you a home mortgage.  In fact, at the time of World War I, you had to pay for almost 70% of the price of a home up front.”[19]

“Okay,” said Michaela.  “What’s your point?”

“My point is:  We don’t live in a meritocracy.  My grandfather, who served in the Navy and fought for our country as a black man, was denied that very same loan your white grandfather got.  FDR’s New Deal legislation called on McDuffie, Nichols and the National Association of Real Estate Boards (NAREB) to influence the Federal Housing Administration.  FDR was only able to pass this legislation by winning the support of Southern Democrat white supremacists.  And the FHA had a whites-only requirement.”[20]  

“So the government did something that the private market and ‘meritocracy’ by itself could not,” Michaela observed. 

“In fact,” Brian continued, “the FHA was explicitly committed to racially segregated schools.  The FHA manual warned that if children

“are compelled to attend school where the majority or a considerable number of the pupils represents a far lower level of society or an incompatible racial element, the neighborhood under consideration will prove far less stable and desirable than if this condition did not exist.”[21]

Therefore, “mortgage lending in such neighborhoods would be risky.”[22]  The FHA then influenced how much houses in these neighborhoods appreciated, how much financing was available to people who lived in certain neighborhoods, etc.  They did this by rating these neighborhoods from A (green) to D (red).  Journalist Alexis C. Madrigal examined his own neighborhood of Oakland, CA, which got a C (yellow) rating.  The FHA described C (yellow) rating neighborhoods in the following way:

“Yellow areas are characterized by age, obsolescence, and change of style; expiring restrictions [meaning: clauses written into the title not to sell to non-whites] or lack of them; infiltration of a lower grade population; the presence of influences which increase sales resistance such as inadequate transportation, insufficient utilities, perhaps heavy tax burdens, poor maintenance of homes, etc. “Jerry” built areas are included, as well as neighborhoods lacking homogeneity.”[23]

This is where the term “redlining” comes from.  White flight to the suburbs was a social welfare system hidden from plain view.  That’s what allowed white Americans to believe that the system was a fair meritocracy.  They thought they were just getting rewarded for their hard work.”

Later, Michaela was disturbed to read that the Nazis were inspired by American white supremacy.  Nazi lawyers, she discovered, studied American laws very carefully.  In 1935, a group of forty-five leading Nazi lawyers, who had just drafted and passed the Third Reich’s restrictive race-based laws against Jews, arrived in New York City.  They came to learn more about America’s racially discriminatory policies.  They were hosted by the New York City Bar Association, and were ‘warmly welcomed.’[24]  They examined the racial effects of immigration, anti-miscegenation, and citizenship laws in addition to housing and schooling segregation.  Yet the Nazis rejected American practices because they thought that America was too severely racist.[25]  Michaela was shocked.  She could see how this would continue to affect people for generations, up to the present.

America was too racist for the Nazis?

Michaela pondered the reverse question, too. In 1939, in diverse New York City, 20,000 Americans held a pro-Nazi rally in Madison Square Garden. When did the Nazis become too racist for America?

[1] In March 2018, Pew Research released a study about political beliefs among Americans by various factors.  According to this study, more than half of white millennials (born 1981 – 1996) “believe that discrimination against whites is as significant as discrimination against other groups.”  Fewer than half of young white men say black people face a lot of discrimination.  See Pew Research Center, “Wide Gender Gap, Growing Educational Divide in Voters’ Party Identification”, Pew Research Center, March 20, 2018; http://www.people-press.org/2018/03/20/wide-gender-gap-growing-educational-divide-in-voters-party-identification/; discussed by Philip Bump, “A Bright Spot for Republicans Among Millennials: Young White Men,” Washington Post, March 21, 2018; https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/03/21/a-bright-spot-for-republicans-among-millennials-young-white-men/; cf. Scott Clement, “Discrimination Against Whites Was a Core Concern of Trump’s Base,” The Washington Post, August 2, 2017; https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/08/02/discrimination-against-whites-was-a-core-concern-of-trumps-base/ notes that in a Washington Post-ABC News poll, 54% of Republican Trump-supporters believe discrimination against whites is a bigger problem than against blacks and Hispanics.

[2] Many Americans believe that America is a “meritocracy,” where people pull themselves up by their own bootstraps in a free market economy.  This is connected to a pseudo-Christian idea from John Locke that individuals should work hard and earn their property through rationality and hard work.  As a consequence, Americans tend to believe that when ethnic/racial minority groups ask for government intervention, or assert that the system is biased, that they are discriminating against the white majority, or detracting from the rewards of “hard work.”  While people have certainly worked hard and sometimes gotten what they “deserve,” we argue that “pure meritocracy” is an illusion.

[3] Conservative columnist David Brooks, “A Sensible Version of Donald Trump,” New York Times, October 27, 2015; https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/27/opinion/a-sensible-version-of-donald-trump.html cites Raj Chetty’s study on the impact of neighborhoods and peer groups; cf. Justin Wolfers, “Why the New Research on Mobility Matters: An Economist’s View,” New York Times, May 4, 2015; https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/05/upshot/why-the-new-research-on-mobility-matters-an-economists-view.html

[4] Gene Slater, Freedom to Discriminate:  How Realtors Conspired to Segregate Housing and Divide America (Berkeley, CA: Heydey Books, 2021), chs.3 – 4 gives detail on particular cities in California, and a few elsewhere, where this practice originated:  Claremont Park in Berkeley and St. Francis Wood in San Francisco (p.59); Country Club Estates in Kansas City (p.59); Elmwood District (p.61); Beverly Crest, Beverly Hills, Bel-Air, and Hillhurst Park (p.62); Culver City (p.63); Torrance (p.63); Palos Verdes (p.63); Eagle Rock (p.64); Glendale (p.64); Pasadena (p.65); San Marino and Arcadia (p.65); San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, San Diego, Sacramento, and San Jose (p.76); Chicago (p.77).  Realtors’ associations and conferences celebrated McDuffie and Nichols and their model of housing development. 

[5] Laura Redford, “The Promise and Principles of Real Estate Development in an American Metropolis: Los Angeles 1903 – 1923.”  PhD dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 2014, p.111.  Quoted in, and discussed by, Slater, p.63 – 64. 

[6] Quoted in Slater, p.73.  Slater points out:

“The Gary decision, the first upholding racial covenants by any state supreme court outside the South, created a precedent in state and then federal courts around the country.  Given its impact, the Gary ruling was remarkably brief, only two pages long.  In a paragraph, the court dismissed any constitutional concerns about equal protection, saying that the Fourteenth Amendment limits discrimination by states, not individuals.  No one had raised the question of whether court enforcement of covenants was itself state action; indeed the justices had “not been favored by either brief or argument” for Gary.  This hardly mattered, the majority decided.  “The correct conclusion in the case seems fairly certain nevertheless.”

“The impact of these decisions was sweeping.  In California, realtors, developers, and owners’ associations relied on Gary to record and enforce occupancy restrictions for the next thirty years.  Los Angeles courts would be filled by minorities being evicted from homes they had purchased, either knowing or not knowing there were covenants.”

[7] In 1948, in the Shelley vs. Kraemer case, the Supreme Court effectively overturned the 1919 Gary decision.  But it had narrow applicability.  Slater, p.158 writes: 

“The court did not say that covenants were illegal or invalid, only that courts could not enforce them against minorities.  Further, Shelley did not limit discrimination by developers.  Although it made clear that government could not discriminate, the decision did not deal directly with FHA.  Moreover, Shelley did not prevent the most widespread discrimination of all – namely, sellers and realtors selling homes only to whites.” 

Slater, p.161 – 162 points out how white people deployed cunning workarounds: 

“Moreover, because Shelley only outlawed lawsuits against minorities themselves, it did not prevent lawsuits by neighbors or a homeowners’ association against the white sellers of restricted homes.  Thus covenants could require that the white owner pay a fine – an enormous cash penalty – to surrounding neighbors if the home was rented or sold to a non-Caucasian.  The covenant would not be enforced against a minority; rather it would be used to prevent any white person from selling them a home in the first place.  This idea was quickly instituted by Henry Doelger in the Westlake development of Daly City, covering 6,100 homes, with the largest homeowners’ association in California.  If a white owner sold her home to a non-Caucasian, she was required to pay a fine to each of the nearest eight neighbors – a total penalty worth more than the sale price of the home.  Realtors and homeowners associations throughout California and nationally fought vigorously for court enforcement of such covenant penalties.  In Los Angeles, thirteen associations pursued such actions; an owner who had simply shown a house to a Filipino family was threatened with a $10,000 lawsuit.  Just as important, realtors and associations widely publicized such suits to discourage any other owners from even considering selling to minorities.  For five years after Shelley, this new type of lawsuit took the place of those the Supreme Court had ended.”

Slater, p.163, adds: 

“[Also,] When it came to new homes, the easiest way to continue discrimination was for the developer to limit whom he sold to.  Shelley did not limit discrimination by developers or other private owners.  Developers took every advantage of this.  An African American veteran visiting a new subdivision in Van Nuys was handed a sheet: “No person whose blood is not entirely that of the Caucasian race . . . shall at any time live upon any of the lots in said tract.”  Of the new homes built in Los Angeles from 1950 to 1960, less than 1 percent were occupied by non-Caucasians, and most of those were in segregated subdivisions built exclusively for African Americans.”

“[Moreover,] Shelley did not deal directly with FHA.  Although the ruling implied that the federal government itself could not longer require restrictive covenants, it did not prevent developers from using FHA insurance from discriminating.  Such discrimination would continue until the early 1960s.  In Lakewood, built from 1949 to 1953 with FHA financing, out of sixty-seven thousand residents in 1960, there were seven African Americans.  Lakewood illustrated, too, many of the features of these post-Shelley large-scale, racially segregated, FHA-financed starter-home developments around the country.”

[8] The case was called In Re Lee Sing.  See Charles J. McClain, “In Re Lee Sing: The First Residential-Segregation Case,” Western Legal History, Vol.3, No.2, Summer/Fall 1990; https://lawcat.berkeley.edu/record/1113811.

[9] The case, Gandolfo v. Hartman, addressed the barring of people of Chinese descent from renting a home.  Slater, p.72, says that the “federal district court held that a private racial covenant . . . was unconstitutional on equal protection grounds.  Taking an expansive view of the Fourteenth Amendment, the court concluded that “it would be a very narrow construction . . . to hold that, while state and municipal legislatures are forbidden to discriminate against the Chinese in their legislation, a citizen of the state may lawfully do so by contract, which the courts may enforce.  Such a view is, I think, entirely inadmissible.”  See 49 Fed. 181, 182 (C.C.S.D. Cal. 1892).  Cited by Cindy I-Fen Cheng, Citizens of Asian America: Democracy and Race during the Cold War (New York, NY: NYU Press, 2013), p.26 – 27 and also discussed by Slater, p.72 – 73. 

[10] Charlotta A. Bass, Forty Years: Memoirs from the Pages of a Newspaper (Los Angeles, CA: Charlotta A. Bass, 1960), p.96.  Charlotta Bass managed the newspaper, California Eagle, and came to Los Angeles in 1910.  Quoted in, and discussed by, Gene Slater, Freedom to Discriminate:  How Realtors Conspired to Segregate Housing and Divide America (Berkeley, CA: Heydey Books, 2021), p.76. 

[11] Quoted in Slater, p.77.

[12] Slater, p.73.

[13] Slater, p.83, points out:

“By the late 1940s, when empirical studies showed that property values rarely declined and often increased when minorities moved in, realtor organizations, appraisal journals, and FHA began to acknowledge that the axiom had no basis in fact.  But learning they had been wrong made no difference to realtors’ and FHA’s commitment to segregation.  Their property-value argument had not been the reason realtors insisted on segregation; it was how they justified that insistence in terms that seemed objective and high minded.” 

See the entire history of this debate on pages 81 – 102.

[14] Slater, p.52 – 53 writes,

“Widespread and systematic racial segregation did not exist in Northern cities when realty boards were first organized in the early 1900s.  It was the actions of board members that made residential segregation possible.  Indeed, the system of segregation that organized brokers created shortly after boards were founded became so ubiquitous that racially divided neighborhoods became taken for granted as if they had always existed.

The reality at the start of the twentieth century in cities like Los Angeles was quite different.  A Black real estate agent proudly stated in 1904 that “the Negroes of this city” were not segregated “into any locality but have scattered and purchased homes in sections occupied by wealthy, cultured White people, thus not only securing the best fire, water and police protection but also the benefits that accrue from refined and cultured surroundings.”  If most African Americans, Japanese, and Mexican Americans lived in the poorer areas of the city, these were racially mixed and dispersed as well.  Where one could live depended on where one could afford, not on one’s ancestry.

What was true of Los Angeles was true more broadly throughout the country.  African Americans lived in many if not most neighborhoods of Northern and Western cities and were rarely more than a third of the population of their immediate area.  In border cities, too, with larger African American populations – such as Baltimore, Washington DC, Louisville, and St. Louis – many blocks were racially mixed.  Looking farther south, studies show that, at the beginning of the twentieth century, cities in the South as well as the West were the least geographically segregated in the country.  Although, or perhaps because, social barriers in the South were so high, African Americans often lived in the same neighborhoods as whites, in many cases on the same blocks or on side streets or in scattered neighborhoods throughout a city.  Nationally, the spatial proximity of the races “most distinguishes” cities in that era from what they became a century later.”

[15] Slater, p.53, says,

“Within a decade and a half of the establishment of realty boards, however, residential racial segregation had become the norm in Los Angeles and cities throughout the country.”  This is important because the “Great Migration” of African Americans fleeing the South’s lynching and Jim Crow did not, of itself, create residential segregation in the North and West.  Slater, p.55, argues, “Nor was residential segregation first created in response to waves of African Americans moving to Northern cities for the jobs created during World War I.  To understand how and why residential segregation began, one needs to look not to grand schemes or sudden upsurges of racial hostility but to a land development dilemma facing innovative early realtors.”

Slater, p.75, says,

“Prior to the advent of covenants, racial minorities in Los Angeles had been part of a single, common housing market.  That is, they generally paid the same prices and rents as white residents and lived in mixed neighborhoods.  In 1900, Los Angeles’s small African American population, about 2 percent of the total, could “be found in most neighborhoods,” “not rigidly confined to one geographic area.”  In 1907, Japanese Americans, too, were “scattered all over the city,” as were Mexican Americans.  Although many minorities were priced out of the most expensive areas, what distinguished the Los Angeles of the early 1900s from twenty years later was that families of all races could generally choose where to live, rent, or buy according to their means, not according to who they were.”

[16] Slater, p.79 – 80, explains how realtors’ activism was disseminated through white realtor associations like NAREB, the National Association of Real Estate Boards, along with professions that were de facto white:  urban planners, architects, developers, construction companies, etc.  White realtors viewed themselves as political progressives who were utilizing local government, economic and organizational power, and ultimately state and federal policies, to benefit white Americans in ways that the “free market” was not doing:

“Realtors viewed what they were doing in spreading racial covenants as helping their customers and protecting the stability of residential neighborhoods. As with the rest of their progressive philosophy, they saw restrictions on owner freedom – zoning, subdivision regulations, and covenants – as essential to the common good. Covenants subordinated the unlimited freedom of any individual owner to that of the neighborhood as a whole period any owner or broker who allowed a minority family to move into a white neighborhood, and any minority family who did so, could thus be seen as self-serving, as sacrificing the good of the whole for their own personal interest. In creating their racial system, Realtors thus did not see themselves as violating their progressive principles, but as carrying them out. Creating racially separate housing markets reflected not realtors’ lack of commitment to the public interest but a narrow view of who the public was. If the ultimate result of their actions was widespread racial segregation, it was because realtors had never considered racial minorities as members or customers to begin with.

“No one better exemplified the link between these progressive values and the Realtors racial system than Nathan MacChesney, NAREB’s general counsel from 1908 to 1947.  A nationally known progressive Republican, MacChesney was long-standing counsel for the National Child Labor Committee and a leader of efforts to reform labor, welfare, criminal justice, and court systems.  Applying what he saw as these same progressive principles to real estate, MacChesney drafted NAREB’s model broker licensing act, adopted by 32 states; the standard text on brokerage law; the realtors’ arguments for zoning and planning laws -- and the model racial covenant used by realtors throughout the United states.  This covenant, which realtors welcomed as “constitution proof,” classified as Negro, every person having 1/8 or more of Negro blood . . . And every person known as a colored person.”  For MacChesney and the realtors he represented, racial covenants, like realtor licensing, zoning, and city planning, were ways of reforming a disorganized society, of limiting individualism for the common good.”

[17] Stephan Thernstrom and Abigail Thernstrom, America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1999), p.60.  Quoted in Gene Slater, p.133.

[18] Slater, p.133.

[19] William J. Collins and Robert A. Margo, “Race and Home Ownership, 1900-1990”, Vanderbilt University and NBER; http://cliometrics.org/conferences/ASSA/Jan_00/margo.shtml note in 1911 – 1914, the average down payment for (new and existing) single-family houses in 22 cities was almost 68 percent of the purchase price, and 46 percent of homes were acquired debt free.

[20] Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2017), p.64 – 65 notes that in 1934, the FHA

“insured bank mortgages that covered 80 percent of purchase prices, had terms of twenty years, and were fully amortized.  To be eligible for such insurance, the FHA insisted on doing its own appraisal of the property to make certain that the loan had a low risk of default.  Because the FHA’s appraisal standards included a whites-only requirement, racial segregation now became an official requirement of the federal mortgage insurance program.”

[21] Rothstein, p.65 – 66.

[22] Rothstein, p.66.

[23] Alexis C. Madrigal, “The Racist Housing Policy That Made Your Neighborhood,” The Atlantic, May 22, 2014; https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/05/the-racist-housing-policy-that-made-your-neighborhood/371439/.  For more information on American segregationist real estate practices prior to the New Deal, see Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).

[24] James Q. Whitman, Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017); Ira Katznelson, “What America Taught the Nazis,” The Atlantic, November 2017; https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/11/what-america-taught-the-nazis/540630/; Rafael Medoff, “Book Review Was Hitler Inspired by Racist American Laws?”, Haaretz, March 29, 2017; https://www.haaretz.com/life/books/was-hitler-inspired-by-america-s-race-laws-1.5452180 adds:

“Whitman should have mentioned that such views were held not only by crude southern demagogues, but by the president of the United States himself. In a document from 1939 (first published by this author more than 10 years ago), President Franklin D. Roosevelt was reliably quoted by a friendly senator as boasting, “We know that we do not have any Jewish blood in our veins.””

[25] Ibid.