Thread by @GeeDee215

Today marks the 50th anniversary of the passage of the Fair Housing Act.

In 2018, the homeownership gap between Af-Ams and whites is greater than it was when the Fair Housing Act was passed in 1968.

bit.ly/2t9eV2V

#FairHousingIs50 #housingsegregationineverything

At almost every stage of searching for a place to live and in every part of the country, black ppl face more constrained choices about housing. They are more likely to be told by real estate agents that homes or apartments aren't available.

n.pr/2GTBvPo

They are more likely to be denied loans to buy homes than white people, even when they have the same incomes and financial histories as white loan applicants.

nyti.ms/2ILNbnG

And when they *are* approved for loans, banks are more likely to give black people mortgages with less-forgiving terms and harsher penalties than white people w/ the same credit histories.

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And bc homeownership is how Americans build wealth, this discrimination is a big REASON white families have 10 times the household wealth of Black families. White families with only HS diplomas have more wealth than Black families with college degrees. wapo.st/2GT21IJ

and it's why bourgie enclaves like Prince George's County --- the wealthiest majority-black county in the United States --- was devastated by the financial crisis a decade ago. Even well-off black families don't have much of a cushion.
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There is no part of structural racism in American life that is not informed by discrimination and segregation in housing. Pick an issue: wealth; education; health; policing.

In the first half of the 20th century, millions of black people started moving to cities in the North for jobs and fleeing racial violence in the South. But when they got to those Northern cities, they were basically pushed into slums and ghettos.

So as this is going on, the Great Depression is also unfolding, and FDR is pushing New Deal policies meant to bolster homeownership. So we get stuff we take for granted now: low, fixed interest rates and 30-year mortgages.

But Black people were shut out of all of these.

Since the government was backing these new mortgages, they created color-coded maps for banks to indicate which places hey felt it was "too dangerous" to insure those new home loans banks were giving out. You probably know where this is going.

On those maps the "uninsurable neighborhoods," the ones that the government was saying shouldn't be invested in, were marked red. And the biggest determinant of whether a neighborhood was colored red was the presence of "foreign-born people," and importantly: "negroes."

so, for example, this is the way way that government map looked for Baltimore:

Now look at these maps from the Baltimore @city_paper from 2015. They illustrate life in the city across a bunch of metrics: life expectancy at birth, household income, presence of bike lanes, reports of potholes, vacant homes, homicides, food deserts.

bit.ly/2HrMGj9

You'll notice a pattern in those maps. The places on the maps with the lowest household incomes are pretty similar to the ones with the most vacants and the lowest life expectancies and lowest home values and most homicides...They're all the neighborhoods where Black people live.

In 2015, Raj Chetty + Nathaniel Hendren released a groundbreaking study on how where you grow up informs your upward mobility. They found there was no place in the US where a child was LESS LIKELY to escape poverty than one born in segregated Baltimore.

wapo.st/2Ht8niW

So let's take one of those redlined neighborhoods: West Baltimore. Today it has all of the telltales signs of profound segregation and disinvestment. Old, crumbling housing stock. Under-resourced schools w/ lots of poor kids. Lots of crime. Lots of police.

This is where Freddie Gray was from.

He grew up in a house where peeling paint fell on him and his mom in the bed they shared when he was a child. That paint was laced with lead.

wapo.st/2HsK053

He later went to a high school where 80 percent of the kids were poor, where there were no AP classes on offer, and only about half of the kids graduated. And it was hyper-segregated: 98-percent Black.

bit.ly/2Hx90bq

And according to a scathing report from the Justice Department, his 97-percent Black neighborhood was the city's most heavily, aggressively policed.

bit.ly/2Hx90bq

Freddie Gray had his fateful encounter with the police three years ago *tomorrow.* It happened in a neighborhood that he had little chance of escaping, whose borders were constantly patrolled...sometimes quietly, sometimes violently.

That neighborhood is not an accident.

#FairHousingIs50

#Housingsegregationineverything