Racism and Sexism Questions

Racial Economic Segregation and Policing in the Present

AFAM & WMNST 103

Moms 4 Housing Video Link • https://www.democracynow.org/2020/1/14/oakland_california_moms_4_housing

Terms and Concepts

• Racial Redlining • Systematic denial of services or goods by federal agencies, local government, or

the private sector either directly or through the selective raising of prices; • In 1933, faced with a housing shortage, the federal government began a program

explicitly designed to increased—and segregate- America’s housing stock; • The government’s efforts were “primarily designed to provide housing to white,

middle-class, lower-middle-class families.” • African Americans and other people of color were left out of the new suburban

communities—and pushed instead into urban housing projects • https://www.npr.org/2017/05/03/526655831/a-forgotten-history-of-how-the-u-s-government-segregated-america

Redlining (continued) • state and federal housing policies that mandated segregation • Richard Rothstein, author of The Color of Law, explains how

segregation was perpetuated by refusing to insure mortgages in and near African-American neighborhoods

• At the same time, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) was subsidizing builders who were mass-producing entire subdivisions for whites– with the requirement that none of the homes be sold to African-Americans

Rothstein, The Color of Law "The segregation of our metropolitan areas today leads ... to stagnant inequality, because families are much less able to be upwardly mobile when they're living in segregated neighborhoods where opportunity is absent," he says. "If we want greater equality in this society, if we want a lowering of the hostility between police and young African-American men, we need to take steps to desegregate."

White Flight “The sudden or graduate large-scale migration of white people from areas becoming more racially ethnoculturally diverse. Starting in the 1950s and 1960s, the term became popular in the US… [referring] to the large-scale migration of people of various European ancestries from racially mixed urban regions to more racially homogenous suburban or exurban regions.”

• Property value of neighborhoods go down because they are considered “intimidating” or “crime-ridden” areas; • Cities such as Oakland, Detroit, parts of Los Angeles are known for having this yo-yo effect of gentrification and white

flight.

• White flight and gentrification have been thought of as micro-formations of colonization of racial enclaves in cities that experience occupation of ethnic neighborhoods and then a sudden exodus.

Racial Wealth Gap • “Despite legal gains in civil rights, however, asset inequality in America has actually been growing rapidly during the last 20 years.

The assets that current generations own are heavily dependent on the legacies of their families of origin. Today's blacks still suffer from the fact that their parents and grandparents grew up in a rigidly segregated America, where opportunities to accumulate human and financial capital were strictly limited. So housing wealth is a disproportionate share of total black wealth.”

• African American families were not afforded the opportunity of a inter-generational wealth because slavery and segregation (which excluded the ability to own property) was a recent past.

• In other words, owning property such as housing establishes inter-generational wealth and allows for more flexible social mobility. Even if it is “modest,” the wealth allows for socio-economic advantages such as education, security, shelter, overall stability.

Oliver: “Whatever the exact figures, the bottom line is clear -- after centuries of being denied any opportunity to accumulate wealth, after a few decades of having limited opportunities, and after a generation during which African American families accumulated significant wealth, the African American community now faces the greatest loss of financial wealth in its history. Institutional processes and racialized policy are trumping hard-earned educational, job, and income advances.”

Racial Targeting & Predatory Loans • New financial instruments, which relaxed (and sometimes ignored) rules and regulations, became the market's answer to broadening

homeownership.

• But the industry-promoted picture of sub-prime as an instrument of home-ownership opportunity for moderate income buyers is highly misleading. First, homeownership rates reached their historic highs before the zenith of sub-prime lending; and, second, increased access to credit brought homeownership opportunities within the reach of groups that had historically been denied access to credit. The issue became the terms of credit.

• In hindsight, many critics now describe the sub-prime crisis as the consequence of bad loans to unqualified borrowers. In fact, the issue needs to be reframed to focus on the onerous terms of these loans. Data from the longest natural experiment in the field -- the Community Advantage Program, a partnership of Self-Help, Fannie Mae, and the Ford Foundation, where tens of thousand of loans were made beginning over a decade ago -- show that home loans to apparently riskier populations, like lower-income, minority, and single-headed households, do not default at significantly higher rates than conventional loans to middle-class families do, as long as they are not the handiwork of predators.

• The difference is that loans such as ones made through the Community Advantage Program had terms that were closer to conventional mortgages as opposed to the risky terms that have characterized sub- prime mortgages. The latter had high hidden costs, exploding adjustable rates, and prepayment penalties to preclude refinancing.

• Minority communities received a disproportionate share of sub-prime mortgages. As a result, they are suffering a disproportionate burden of the harm and losses. According to a De¯mos report, Beyond the Mortgage Meltdown (June 2008), in addition to being the target of mortgage companies specializing in sub-prime lending, minorities were steered away from safer, conventional loans by brokers who received incentives for jacking up the interest rate. Worst of all, African Americans who qualified for conventional mortgages were steered to riskier, and more profitable, sub-prime loans.

• Households of color were more than three times as likely as white households to end up with riskier loans with features like exploding adjustable rates, deceptive teaser rates, and balloon payments. Good credit scores often made no difference, as profit incentives trumped sound policy. The line from redlining to sub-prime is direct, as is the culpability. Even many upper-income African Americans were steered into sub-prime mortgages.

• Forty years after the Fair Housing Act of 1968, housing markets are still segmented by class and race, what realtors politely call location, location, location. Homes appreciate most in value when they are situated in predominantly white communities, and they appreciate least in value when situated in low-income minority or integrated communities, except when those communities undergo gentrification (and often become predominantly white).

Black Women & Children Face More Possibility of Homelessness During the Pandemic

• Despite federal eviction moratoriums, Black women are most at risk of losing their housing during the pandemic.

• Women are already the most vulnerable to job loss, the most likely to be sole heads of households, the ones who are most often the sole providers for their children, are also most likely to be evicted;

• Black women still face evictions at twice the rate of white people in at least 17 states (ACLU) without broader policy in place to stop the looming mass evictions;

• This is because of the structural inequalities that black women face: racial wealth gap, systemic racial discrimination, balancing job, education, and family care

Eviction: Lasting Economic and Health Consequence • Eviction has lasting economic consequences, making it harder to find suitable housing in the future. • It also has reproductive health and child welfare consequences: Children of mothers who face evictions are far more likely

to live in substandard housing, leading to poor health outcomes.

• An eviction in a pandemic adds another layer of complication, putting thousands at risk of being homeless or in shelters that are already overcrowded, where the ability to socially distance or quarantine is nearly nonexistent, said law professor Emily Benfer, who chairs the American Bar Association’s COVID-19 Task Force Committee on Eviction, and is the principal investigator on a study of nationwide coronavirus eviction moratoriums and housing policies.

• Exposed to higher rates of infection.

Racism and Sexism: Housing and Health • Racial discrimination in the nation’s housing practices has long been an issue — and one that has long disproportionately impacted Black

women. The New Deal in the 1930s introduced redlining — the policy that marked Black and other minority neighborhoods as riskier for mortgages, blocking many people of color from access to stable housing — and also denied farm workers and domestic service workers, many of them Black women, from access to labor protections like minimum wage, overtime pay and collective bargaining rights.

• This began a legacy of financial setback that, despite significant strides, still finds Black women earning 62 cents on the White male dollar. • The pandemic has only exacerbated this lopsided inequality. This year, unemployment among Black women hit 16.5 percent — the highest it’s

been in almost 40 years — and the second-highest of any group behind only Latina women. The burden is compounded when you add children or dependents. Nearly 70 percent of Black women are the primary or only breadwinner in their family, according to a report from the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank.

• When people lose or are at risk of losing their homes, the consequences pile up: Public health. Mental health. Domestic abuse. Child welfare. All of those are on the line for the disproportionately high number of women and mothers who fail to make rent.

• “Shelter-in-place orders and these sort of situations where folks are increasingly at home really does kind of set up the perfect storm in terms of the power and control and coercion that abusers can exert over survivors of domestic violence,” -- Renee Williams, a senior staff attorney at the National Housing Law Project.

• Economic instability has led many survivors to stay with their abusers, Williams said, beginning a cycle that repeats itself. • Black women are disproportionately evicted following domestic violence calls to the police. • Properties generated such demerits following “excessive” police calls for anything from arson to noise complaints to littering.

Black neighborhoods experienced them most often, with domestic violence contributing to a third of all citations. In response, the research found that Black women felt the brunt of evictions following those citations. Police can threaten landlords with fines, forfeiture or incarceration for being a so-called nuisance, so landlords often opted to evict the tenant, even if they were the victim of abuse.