essay about residential segregation

How American racism is rooted in residential segregation

UC Berkeley research shows America’s cities continue to be segregated, causing negative outcomes and disparities for people of color.

By Ivan Natividad

June 21, 2021

A new UC Berkeley report shows America’s cities continue to be segregated, causing negative outcomes and disparities for people of color. Detroit, shown above, is statistically the most segregated city in the nation. ( Flickr photo by Mike Boening )

The disproportionate use of police brutality against people of color in America. Higher COVID-19 death rates of Black and Latinx people in the health care system. Lower percentages of homeownership and loans approved in Black communities. Society often labels these disparities as racism or prejudice against individuals with specific racial identities. 

But new research from UC Berkeley’s Othering and Belonging Institute shows that these inequities are symptoms of a much more racially systemic problem — residential segregation.

“It’s the racial identity of the neighborhood you live in, and whether it is segregated or not, that really correlates with these negative outcomes,” said Stephen Menendian , the institute’s director of research. “And these outcomes have gotten worse over time. If you measure what the average neighborhood looks like for a particular racial group, you actually see that we are as segregated today as we were in 1940.”

Stephen Menendian is the assistant director and director of research at UC Berkeley’s Othering and Belonging Institute. (Photo courtesy og Othering and Belonging Institute)

Released today, the report provides an annotated bibliography of local histories of segregation from 60 American cities and an interactive mapping tool that illustrates the level of segregation for every city, region and neighborhood.

The research found that 81% of metropolitan regions were more segregated in 2019 than in 1990. That lack of integration has led to a disproportionate distribution of resources in segregated communities of color compared to segregated white communities, said Menendian, and a neighborhood poverty rate three times higher in those communities of color.

According to the report, Black and Latinx children raised in integrated neighborhoods earn nearly $1,000 more annually as adults and $4,000 to $5,000 more when raised in white neighborhoods, compared to those raised in segregated communities of color. Moreover, household incomes and home values in white neighborhoods are twice as high as those in segregated communities of color.

On Tuesday, Menendian will delve deeper into the impact of residential segregation in America during a livestreamed forum with other leading race and housing scholars and advocates from across the country.

Menendian recently spoke with Berkeley News about the ways residential segregation has changed over time, and how a lack of integration has led to a “very sick” American society.

Berkeley News : Why are America’s neighborhoods more segregated now than 30 years ago?

Menendian: We’re more segregated today because we are more diverse, and our communities are highly balkanized across the spaces we occupy.

Even as we’ve desegregated workspaces, desegregated play areas, desegregated mainstream culture and, to some extent, we’ve desegregated schools, there are still racially identifiable neighborhoods in cities across the country. And it causes a lot of inequality.

But segregation actually looks a lot different today. While 20th century segregation was also residential — Black urban areas versus white suburban areas — in the 21st century we’re seeing segregation as more regional today. We’re also seeing white suburbs and Black suburbs.

A city like Ferguson, Missouri, in 1970 was 90% white. But by 2010, it’s 66% Black. Segregation now is more mobile and more regional than it was in the 20th century. It’s much more multiracial. It’s not binary. And it’s about the community you live in, not the neighborhood within the city you live in.

What hasn’t changed is that these segregated communities of color are still poorly resourced. White communities have these high pockets of private wealth and resources, while non-white areas have very anemic low levels of wealth where residents are extremely underpaid, under-resourced, and have disinvested public goods and infrastructure.

Research shows higher rates of police brutality in segregated communities of color. Here, protesters in Ferguson gathered following the 2014 killing of Michael Brown Jr., an 18-year-old Black man, who was fatally shot by a Ferguson police officer. (Photo by Jamelle Bouie via Wiki Commons)

What other racial disparities correlate with this lack of integration?

When you think about disproportional use of police brutality, or COVID-19 health outcomes and unemployment in communities of color, society often labels these disparities as racism in these individual institutions. But all these outcomes are really connected to residential segregation. This is what makes it systemic and not institutional racism.

For example, police are most brutal in either highly segregated Black communities, where they’re targeting Black people. Or they are hyper-policing in neighborhoods that are white, so Black people driving through those white neighborhoods are more likely to be pulled over. Segregation is the force behind it all.

It’s not the individual race of the person. It’s the race of the community that actually correlates these outcomes.”

If you live in a neighborhood that has good jobs, access to a healthy environment, access to green spaces and good schools, all of those things aren’t correlated with race, per se. It’s correlated with racial segregation that still exists today.

It’s not the individual race of the person. It’s the race of the community that actually correlates these outcomes, and that’s what our research shows.

White people living in highly segregated communities of color do just as bad, or almost as bad, as the people of color living in those neighborhoods. And people of color living in highly segregated white neighborhoods do much better than their counterparts in highly segregated communities of color.

It’s really what we mean by structural racism. That is to say, structural racism is not about an individual that’s being discriminated against. It’s about the environment we live in, and the forces that shape our lives.

What we really find is that it’s structural racism that is at the core, and the taproot of structural racism is racial residential segregation, because it is a mechanism that sorts people into different kinds of environments — high opportunity environments versus low opportunity environments.

I think there are some things that help. The American Rescue Plan is giving a lot of money to cities. But I don’t think our public’s ability to raise funds is even close to meeting the scale of need.

So, it doesn’t seem to be getting any better. We’re in a kind of dystopian future.

Are we at a moment of crisis at this point?

I think we’ve been in crisis since at least the late 1960s. The Kerner Commission warned us that we were creating two segregated societies that would continue to be unequal. What they predicted actually happened. And none of the recommendations the Kerner Commission provided came to be.

We did everything wrong.

We disinvested in our society. We pulled up the carpet, and we didn’t integrate. While we did actually integrate some of the schools, by the 1990s the federal courts were out of that business, and schools have been resegregating ever since.

Research also shows Latinx children are likely to enter elementary schools with fewer white peers than a generation ago. Here, a class studies at the Bruce-Guadalupe Community School in Milwaukee, a charter school that is 97% Latino. (AP photo by Ivan Moreno)

Everything seems to me to be on the wrong track, and we’ve been on the wrong track for a long time. So, what we have are these eruptions, these symptoms — police brutality, health outcomes and so forth — and it’s like if your body is sick, and you’re getting boils all over your body. That’s sort of what we’ve been through.

We’re just very sick, and we’ve been sick for a while.

What can we do to turn things around?

Integrate and invest. We need to resurface the reality that racial segregation is really the core cause of racial inequality. You can’t zero out racial inequality in a highly segregated society. You can’t have balkanization and then have equality. It’s totally antithetical.

What we seem to be doing  is we tear down statues or rename buildings instead of doing what we need to do, which is to massively invest — in public goods, childcare, public transit, community colleges and so forth — for a more integrated future. I just don’t see how we can break all these cycles when, if you’re born poor and Black or Hispanic in the United States, there’s a track for you that is very hard to break out of.

So, we shouldn’t be focusing, in my opinion, on these symptoms as much as we should be focusing on the root causes of structural racism.

And I just think we spend way too much time talking about symbols and performative gestures. If we’re really serious about getting rid of racial inequality, then we have to shift our focus. And so this report and discussion on Tuesday is a push in that direction.

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The Roots of Structural Racism Project

• Publication
• June 21, 2021
• By Stephen Menendian , Samir Gambhir & Arthur Gailes
• Updated June 30, 2021

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Project Summary 1

The Roots of Structural Racism Project was unveiled in June 2021 after several years of investigating the persistence of racial residential segregation across the United States. Among the many components included in this project are the national segregation report (below) which contains startling findings about the intensification of racial residential segregation in recent decades; an interactive mapping tool that illustrates the level of segregation in every city, region and neighborhood in the country; a collection of tables which list cities and metropolitan regions by various measures of segregation and political polarization; nine city profiles noteworthy for their levels of segregation or integration; and a literature review featuring dozens of local city histories . All of these components can be accessed using the navigation menu on the right-hand side of this page .

This project spawned out of a multi-part report series on segregation focused on the San Francisco Bay Area we published from 2018 to 2020, and which informed efforts by the Berkeley city council in February 2021 to reconsider exclusionary zoning. We hope this new national project will be useful to housing justice advocates, researchers, lawmakers, and journalists across the country working towards integration.

Key report findings

• Out of every metropolitan region in the United States with more than 200,000 residents, 81 percent (169 out of 209) were more segregated as of 2019 than they were in 1990
• Rustbelt cities of the industrial Midwest and mid-Atlantic disproportionately make up the top 10 most segregated cities list, which includes Detroit, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Trenton
• Out of the 113 largest cities examined, only Colorado Springs, CO and Port St. Lucie, FL qualify as “integrated” under our rubric
• Neighborhood poverty rates are highest in segregated communities of color (21 percent), which is three times higher than in segregated white neighborhoods (7 percent)
• Black children raised in integrated neighborhoods earn nearly $1,000 more as adults per year, and $4,000 more when raised in white neighborhoods, than those raised in highly segregated communities of color
• Latino children raised in integrated neighborhoods earn $844 more per year as adults, and $5,000 more when raised in white neighborhoods, than those raised in highly segregated communities of color
• Household incomes and home values in white neighborhoods are nearly twice as high as those in segregated communities of color
• Homeownership is 77 percent in highly segregated white neighborhoods, 59 percent in well-integrated neighborhoods, but just 46 percent in highly segregated communities of color
• 83 percent of neighborhoods that were given poor ratings (or "redlined") in the 1930s by a federal mortgage policy were as of 2010 highly segregated communities of color
• Regions with higher levels of racial residential segregation have higher levels of political polarization , an important implication in the context of gerrymandering and voter suppression
• The most segregated regions are the Midwest and mid-Atlantic , followed by the West Coast
• Southern states have lower overall levels of segregation , and the Mountain West and Plains states have the least

I. Introduction 

In 2020, disparate rates of infection and deaths from the Covid-19 pandemic and a series of shocking police encounters captured on video, culminating in the brutal murder of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police, prompted what media organizations labeled “a National Reckoning on race .” A greater portion of the American public awakened to the fact that too many people of color were disadvantaged in ways that seemed to shape life chances and overall well-being. Demonstrations supporting the Black Lives Matter movement occurred not only in large metropolitan regions, but spread to many predominantly white and rural counties across the country. Books on race and racism shot up best seller charts, polls indicated a groundswell of public support for race-conscious policy reforms, and the term “systemic racism” entered the mainstream lexicon. 2

Racial disparities in health and well-being, policing and the criminal justice system, schools and universities, corporations and labor markets, and in neighborhoods and housing are stark and difficult to ignore. Whereas such disparities may once have been attributed to differences in intelligence, motivation or effort, the surge in anti-racism activism and reading has helped engender greater awareness of the structural inequities that underpin these outcomes. Journalists have probed these phenomena more deeply than in the past, revealing the circumstances and conditions that contribute to these outcomes or the subtle differences in treatment or care that create stunning inequities. 3

Despite these efforts, however, there remains a surprising lack of appreciation for the centrality of racial residential segregation in forming and sustaining these disparities. It is residential segregation, by sorting people into particular neighborhoods or communities on the basis of race, that connects (or fails to connect) residents to good schools, nutritious foods, healthy environments, good paying jobs, and access to health care, clinics, critical amenities and services. Aggressive “ broken windows ” policing practices target racially and economically isolated Black and Brown neighborhoods, while jobs and the tax dollars flow to white communities, leaving crumbling infrastructure, poisonous water, predatory financial institutions, and food deserts behind. 4 For these reasons, and many more, racial residential segregation remains the “ lynchpin ”—the deep root cause—that sustains systemic racial inequality. 5

Given the centrality of racial residential segregation to the reproduction of racial inequality—not just as a fact of history, but in contemporary terms—there is a remarkable ambivalence about this fact, and what to do about it, and not just among those who oppose racial justice advocacy or stand on the sidelines in such policy debates. For many middle-aged African Americans, the short-lived experiment in educational desegregation was a mixed bag —an infusion of resources and expansion of educational opportunities at the expense of community, more micro-aggressions (or worse), and fewer caring and committed teachers and administrators invested in their future. 6 And desegregation proved fleeting. White hostility and unrelenting opposition to integration produced bursts of violence even in northern cities like Chicago and Boston , accelerating white flight, which further undermined the project of federally mandated desegregation, long before courts largely abandoned this effort in the early 1990s. 7

And unlike school desegregation, the nation never embarked upon a national project to integrate neighborhoods, let alone declared an unambiguous commitment to that goal. There has never been a Brown v. Board of Education -like decision for housing, mandating a deliberate, proactive effort to integrate neighborhoods. Even if there had been such efforts on a wide scale, integrating neighborhoods was always going to be more difficult than integrating schools. 8 No matter how unpopular, students could be assigned to different schools in a district or region by a central public authority under the mandate of federal courts, and bused accordingly. But there is no comparable institution or authority that has the power to compel the integration of neighborhoods and communities.

Instead, our fair housing laws are predicated on the assumption that simply prohibiting discrimination would gradually unwind decades of deliberate segregative policy and ultimately produce residential integration. This assumption proved fallacious. The Fair Housing Act of 1968, the final legislative achievement of the civil rights movement, prohibited discrimination in housing (sale, rental, lease, etc.) on the basis of race, and provided victims of discrimination with a tort remedy as well as empowered the federal government to bring suits on behalf of aggrieved parties. 9 Indeed, the Act helped break down barriers to integration and reduce the prevalence of housing discrmination, but it was comparatively weak in terms of proactively integrating existing segregated communities. 10

Nonetheless, following the passage of the federal Fair Housing Act in 1968, residential integration increased significantly between 1970 and 1980, 11 to such an extent that many reasonable observers felt that the residential patterns established in the early and middle decades of the twentieth century might actually fade away in time. Previously all-white neighborhoods changed complexion as non-white neighbors arrived, and vice versa. 12 Although progress incrementally slowed each subsequent decade, the in-migration of people of color into the suburbs—especially between 1990 and 2000—seemed to suggest a different and more hopeful racial trajectory, such that two economists declared the “ End of the Segregated Century .” 13 The downward trend of residential segregation, at least as popularly measured, seemed to portend eventual widespread residential integration. But as we'll explain later in this report, these encouraging observations turned out not to reflect the actual dynamics of what was occurring. In most regions, segregation was in fact increasing.

Aside from public health and epidemiology, one arena where policymakers, parents, and scholars speak frequently and unabashedly about the harms of segregation is in the context of education, where sharp disparities in educational outcomes and demographic profiles are stark and persistent. 14 Schools have gradually re-segregated in the 65 years since Brown v. Board of Education was decided. 15 The problem today is that our nation’s public schools replicate the demographic profiles of the communities and neighborhoods they serve. 16

Given the failures of integration, or, more accurately, the failure to integrate (and sustain it), many anti-racism advocates evince ambivalence about integration itself, or carefully elide the issue, focusing instead on the symptoms, such as abusive policing, inadequate health care, and underperforming schools. For example, in his popular treatise How to be an Antiracist , Ibram X. Kendi writes, “What really made the schools unequal were the dramatically unequal resources provided to them, not the mere fact of racial separation.” 17 He’s right on this point, of course, but his implied solution, to simply equalize resources, is woefully insufficient as a comprehensive remedy, for reasons we will show.

It is unlikely that we can ever close out racial disparities let alone significantly improve life outcomes for racially marginalized people in a racially segregated society. ... Racial residential segregation so effectively sorts people across space and bundles vitalizing resources that no redistribution plan can ever match the swift efficacy of the underlying mechanism.

This report refocuses attention on the roots of structural racism: racial residential segregation. First, we explain how segregation functions not only to perpetuate and sustain racial inequality, but as a widespread and surprisingly commonplace global driver of inter-group inequality. By illustrating its near universality as an inequity-causing mechanism, we can better appreciate the continuing function of racial segregation in American society today. To that end, we briefly canvass the social scientific literature on the harms of racial residential segregation in the realms of public health, education, and economics.

Second, we will show how racial residential segregation is much more pervasive and endemic than we generally acknowledge. Not only are most of our major metropolitan regions and cities highly segregated, but we find that nearly 81 percent American cities and metropolitan regions are more segregated today than they were in 1990, after several decades of federal policy applied to this problem.

Part of the failure to recognize this is a byproduct of overreliance on inadequate measures of segregation that are no longer capable of helping us gauge the extent of segregation in an increasingly diverse and multi-racial society. Racial residential segregation has evolved during the last century, but our prevailing ways of understanding and describing it are stuck within a twentieth century paradigm. 

To address these problems, we apply more recently developed measures and gauges of segregation and introduce a functionally new measure of racial residential integration. We describe regional differences in segregation and identify the most and least segregated cities in the nation, and flag places that have changed the most in recent years, either becoming less segregated or moreso.

Third, we present key findings and insights from an analysis of our observed measures of racial residential segregation. We find consistent and strong correlations between the degree of racial residential segregation and key life outcomes, such as poverty rates, home values and rents, educational achievement, life expectancy, economic mobility, and more. For example, we find that neighborhood poverty rates are highest in segregated communities of color (21 percent), which is three times higher than in segregated white neighborhoods (7 percent).

We compare highly segregated white neighborhoods to highly segregated Black and Latino neighborhoods and integrated neighborhoods, as well outcomes for different-race residents, to demonstrate the structural role of racial residential segregation in shaping access to vitalizing resources. For example, we find that Black children raised in integrated neighborhoods earn nearly $1,000 more per year as adults than those raised in highly segregated communities of color. Latino children raised in integrated neighborhoods earn $844 more per year as adults than Latino children raised in highly segregated communities of color. 

We also describe the relationship between historical redlining and contemporary patterns of segregation, suggesting the enduring effects of government policy nearly a century ago. We also illustrate the relationship of racial residential segregation and political polarization with implications for the process of political districting.

Finally, we introduce a sophisticated and powerful new mapping tool that is capable of more vividly illustrating the extent and degree of racial residential segregation in our nation and illuminating the extent of the problem. This interactive tool can be used to observe racial residential segregation in any community at any level of geography (neighborhood, city, region), and to see changes over time.

It is our hope that this tool and the granular data made available by this project will engender not only greater awareness of the problem of segregation at the local level, but will facilitate the creation of local histories and deeper knowledge that can support local advocacy and policy change. 18 For that reason, we supplement our mapping tool with a repository of city snapshots and local histories to serve as examples, educational tools and inspiration.

II. The Function and Effects of Segregation

Second only to outgroup violence, segregation is the oldest and most ubiquitous source of inter-group inequality. From the most ancient human civilizations to the present, segregation has been used to separate people on the basis of race, ethnicity, sex, class, profession, caste, and religion in public and private realms. In contemporary societies, where violence and discrimination are either outlawed or otherwise verboten, segregation is the primary mechanism for controlling access to resources, spaces and people. Segregation undergirds a vast array of resource disparities, tangible and intangible. 19

It is important to emphasize at the outset, however, that racial segregation, like racial violence or discrimination, is generally not established, justified, or propounded on the basis of hatred, animus or invidiousness. Rather, it is usually advanced on the basis of peace, security, social harmony, and order, and sometimes on the basis of purity, religious or otherwise. Thus, the US War Department placed Japanese Americans into internment camps on the ground that they were a security threat to the United States during World War II; 20 the California Department of Corrections segregated inmates on the basis of race ostensibly to tamp down inter-group violence within prisons as recently as 2005; 21 and, ancient European kingdoms isolated Jewish people into “ghettos” ostensibly to protect Christian religious purity. 22

To better appreciate the universality of segregation as a mechanism of inequality, briefly consider cases of segregation and their effects in contexts aside from race and outside of the United States: religious segregation in Northern Ireland, sex segregation in Saudi Arabia, and caste segregation in India. Through these cases, American readers will better appreciate the actual function of segregation, before we present a summary of findings on the harmful effects of American racial segregation.

India’s ancient caste system deems the lowest caste, Dalits, as “untouchables.” 23 This is not merely a rhetorical flourish, but a literal article of faith among many Hindus. In many villages, Dalits are forbidden to drink from upper-caste wells or to worship at their temples. 24 In 2020, a 17-year-old Dalit was shot and killed for entering a temple “belonging” to an upper caste. 25 In many ways, this kind of caste-based segregation is similar to that of Jim Crow, which restricted access to public accommodations for Black Americans. 

Saudi Arabia’s “Guardianship” system created an interlocking set of rules that segregates women from men. 26 Until very recently, these rules not only prohibited women from driving or traveling outside the country without a male family member’s explicit permission, 27 they also restricted access to public spaces, such as movie theaters or concerts, and provided separate seating areas and entrances for men and women in restaurants and other public venues. 28 Again, this kind of public accommodations segregation resembles elements of Jim Crow, which provided separate seating areas in restaurants, courts and theaters, and on public transit.

For many decades in the twentieth century, Northern Ireland was a site of intense violence between Irish Catholics and “Unionist” Protestants. The conflict was dubbed “The Troubles.” 29 In the course of this conflict, as a result of violence and enmity, neighborhoods in Northern Ireland became increasingly religiously segregated, with Catholics moving to predominantly Catholic neighborhoods and Protestants moving to more heavily Protestant neighborhoods. 30 These neighborhoods provided differential access to critical resources, such that today, Irish Catholic life expectancy there is 74.1 years compared to 81.7 for Protestant men. 31 Protestant women live 4.7 years longer than Catholic women.

Racial residential segregation in the United States is associated with similar disparities in life outcomes. In the San Francisco Bay Area, for example, we found that life expectancy is more than five years greater in white neighborhoods (84 years) than in highly segregated Black/Latino neighborhoods (79 years). 32 By virtually any measure of well-being, from employment, income, educational attainment, access to health care and a healthy environment, residential segregation based upon group identity is a driver of unequal outcomes.

One of the fundamental problems in our world is the divide between people who want a community built around a single, primary salient identity and those who want to live in diverse, pluralistic communities. The exclusionary enclave sentiment undergirds anti-immigrant and xenophobic sentiment worldwide, but it is also rampant within societies, including in the United States. This is the essence of segregation.

Perhaps the most extensive research on the harmful effects of racial residential segregation is in the field of public health. 33 Racial residential segregation has been linked to infant mortality, 34 asthma, 35 cardiovascular disease, 36 diabetes, 37 hypertension, 38 obesity, 39 and many other health conditions and illness, 40 including Covid-19 infections. 41 Segregated communities of color often have less access to grocery stores, child care facilities, and other important neighborhood resources, and are more likely to have hazardous waste facilities in close proximity. 42 Segregation disproportionately exposes Black communities to environmental pollutants and isolates Black populations from essential health resources such as improved recreational spaces, quality pharmacies, clinics and hospitals, and healthy food options. 43

The harms of segregation are well documented in the educational context as well. 44 Segregated schools are associated with teacher turnover and lower teacher quality, larger class sizes, fewer extracurricular offerings, lower test scores and graduation rates. 45 In contrast, integrated schools have more credentialed teachers, lower drop-out rates, and greater capital investments into school buildings and infrastructure. 46

A recent study of schools found that racial segregation is strongly associated with the magnitude of achievement gaps in third grade, and with the rate at which gaps grow from third to eighth grade. The study found that racial segregation appears to be harmful because it concentrates minority students in high-poverty schools, which are, on average, less effective than lower-poverty schools. 47

In a landmark longitudinal study of Black and white students in desegregated schools in the southern United States, Berkeley professor Rucker Johnson found that desegregated schools greatly improved educational outcomes for Black children with no corresponding decrease in outcomes for white children. 48 He found, for example, that at least five years spent in desegregated schools yielded an estimated 25 percent increase in annual earnings and increased annual work effort of 195 hours for Black boys. He found that each additional year of attendance in desegregated schools increased Black men’s adult annual earnings by roughly 5 percent, increased their wages by 2.9 percent, and led to an annual work effort that was 39 hours higher. This reduced their chances of poverty as adults as well. Furthermore, attending a desegregated school as a child reduced by 14.7 percent the probability of spending time in jail by age 30.

The economics literature on racial residential segregation also firmly establishes the harmful effects on economic and social mobility and other economic outcomes. Higher levels of racial segregation are associated with lower median and per capita incomes for Black and Latino Americans. 49 It is also associated with unemployment and idleness. 50 Racial residential segregation is also strongly associated with disparities in lending practices and access to credit. 51

It is an uncomfortable truth for anti-racism advocates, but one that we must confront and acknowledge: it is unlikely that we can ever close out racial disparities let alone significantly improve life outcomes for racially marginalized people in a racially segregated society. Compensatory schemes that redistribute resources can help to ameliorate these inequities, but racial residential segregation so effectively sorts people across space and bundles vitalizing resources that no redistribution plan can ever match the swift efficacy of the underlying mechanism. 52

Moreover, even if it could eliminate some disparities, such efforts would fail to remedy every element inside the bundle. For example, even if redistribution could match the inequity in school funding, it might fail to do so in terms of jobs. But even if it could do so in terms of jobs, it might fail to do so in terms of health care or providing a healthy environment. And even if it could do that, it might not in terms of social capital and communal fiscal stability. This is why racial residential segregation is the lynchpin of racial disparities in the United States.

III. A Fresh Look at Racial Residential Segregation

When we think of segregation, we may think of Jim Crow lunch counters or race-based pupil assignments. While the segregation of public accommodations was the primary form of segregation in the South, in the North and West, segregation was accomplished primarily through residential patterns—by law and violence that prohibited Black movers from entering any but a small number of tightly bound neighborhoods. The federal government reinforced racial residential segregation through policies such as redlining and other federal mortgage guarantees, which were promulgated locally and spread through the private market. 53 Although we dismantled much of Jim Crow by the late-1960s, northern-style residential segregation overtook the country, even as most neighborhoods diversified.

By prohibiting discrimination in housing on the basis of race, the 1968 Fair Housing Act began to open up previously all-white neighborhoods to people of color. Despite these prohibitions, our growing diversity and the decline in single-race communities, racial residential segregation remains a stubborn and persistent fact of life. Today, most white children live in segregated, white communities, and most Black children, similarly, live in segregated, Black neighborhoods. 54 Racially identifiable communities are everywhere, and students and families are more racially isolated than they would like to be, even controlling for income, wealth, and demographic preferences. 55

Schools have gradually re-segregated in the 65 years since Brown v. Board of Education was decided. The problem today is that our nation’s public schools replicate the demographic profiles of the communities and neighborhoods they serve. 

The prevailing narrative around gradual residential integration relies primarily on a measure of segregation that is misleading and flawed in many ways, but chiefly because it focuses on the binary of Black-white segregation. This widely used measure of Black-white segregation indicates a relatively significant decline in segregation between 1970 and 1980, with more modest declines between 1980 and 1990, 1990 and 2000, and 2000 and 2010, with the 2010 measures as either high, moderate-high, or moderate for virtually every major metropolitan area in the United States. 56 So, although this traditional measure of segregation reflects gradual declines in overall levels of segregation, for many, if not most, regions of the country, overall Black-white segregation remains high or moderately high.

One reason for the gradual decline in Black-white segregation (from extremely high to merely high or moderately-high) is the presence of anti-discrimination laws and their enforcement. As a consequence of the passage of the Fair Housing Act, there are far fewer homogeneous all-white (or all-Black) communities in the United States any more. At least some members of different races have been able to move into previously single-race communities. But a relatively small number of different-race residents should not obscure the fact that racially isolated neighborhoods are still commonplace. The fact that these neighborhoods are no longer entirely same-race does not mean that they are truly integrated, just that the ramparts of racial exclusion are no longer impermeable. 

A related problem with traditional perspectives and measures of racial residential segregation is that the form that racial residential segregation takes has evolved in critical respects. Whereas racial segregation once separated people of different races into different neighborhoods in the same cities (such as different neighborhoods in Oakland, Chicago, New York, or Detroit), racial residential segregation today is more “mobile” and regional. 57 People of color have greater freedom to move to different communities than they did several generations ago, but those neighborhoods and communities are more likely to be struggling, either declining urban areas or struggling inner-ring suburbs or far-flung exurbs. In this sense, people of color are no longer locked into a small number of neighborhoods, but are channeled into certain types of often disadvantaged communities, like Ferguson, Missouri, or Vallejo, California.

As a result, racial residential segregation today occurs between cities and places as much as it does between neighborhoods within the same cities. This is what is meant by “regional” segregation: racial residential segregation is more inter-municipal than intra-municipal. Thus, the simple patterns of segregation that defined metropolitan regions in the second half of the twentieth century, such as the “Chocolate city, Vanilla suburb,” no longer hold. 58 Segregation is more prominent between different-race suburbs today than the traditional urban-suburban divide would suggest. Measures that are more sensitive to these dynamics are needed.

Contrary to prevailing impressions of the United States, the most segregated regions are the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic, followed by the West Coast. Southern states have lower overall levels of racial residential segregation, and the Mountain West and Plains states have the least.

A more serious problem with traditional binary measures of segregation is that they fail to account for America’s growing diversity. A great paradox of racial segregation in America is that segregation persists despite the nation’s growing diversity, and also despite the fact that there are fewer and fewer places that are racially homogenous. In other words, there are far fewer all-white or all-Black neighborhoods today than there were 50 years ago. And so many of our regions and states are more diverse than they were a generation ago. 

A large and growing influx of Asian and Latino residents has dramatically shifted the complexion of our racial geography nationwide, but especially in states like California, Texas, and Washington. This diversity means that simple binary measures of racial residential segregation can no longer suffice to convey a fulsome portrait of underlying conditions or patterns. Holistic measures that can account for growing diversity are needed, and they tell a very different tale. 

For that reason, we employ a relatively new measure of segregation that overcomes these problems, and better accounts for America’s current diversity. This project measures segregation in a way that better accounts for Asian, Latino, and Native American populations, as described throughout. The appendix to this report contains a technical description of the various measures of segregation, and a more comprehensive explanation of our preferred measure over the alternatives. We find, for example, that many highly diverse regions in the United States are either as segregated or more segregated as of 2010 than they were in 1970 or even 1990. For example, Tucson, Arizona; San Jose, California; and Honolulu, Hawaii are cities that have overall much higher levels of racial residential segregation than would be suggested by Black-white segregation. 59

Overall, we found that racial residential segregation was much greater and more pervasive than is generally appreciated. We calculated the level of segregation for every city and metropolitan region in the United States. Out of every metropolitan region in the United States with more than 200,000 residents, 81 percent (169 out of 209) were more segregated as of 2019 than they were in 1990. In most cases the increase or reduction in segregation was modest, but in some cases the changes were dramatic as indicated in Tables 1 and 2 below, which provides a list of the metropolitan areas with the greatest overall increase or decrease in segregation in that time period, and indicates racial compositional changes that may have contributed to these changes in the level of segregation.

Table 1: Top 10 Metros with the Greatest Increase in Segregation (1990-2019, Minimum 200,000 people)

Table 2: Top 10 Metros with Greatest Decrease in Segregation (1990-2019, Minimum 200,000 people)

The complete results of this analysis, indicating the change in level of segregation and racial composition for every metropolitan area from 1990 to 2019, are available here .

We also calculated a complete list of the most-to-least segregated cities and metropolitan areas in the United States (again, available on the “Tables” menu on the right hand side of the project page). The top 10 most segregated metropolitan areas are presented below in Table 3, and are generally consistent with more traditional measures of segregation. 60

Table 3: Top 10 Most Segregated Metropolitan Statistical Areas (2019, Minimum 200,000 people)

Our nation’s largest cities and metropolitan areas remain highly segregated using any measure, but the rustbelt cities of the industrial Midwest and mid-Atlantic disproportionately make up the top 10 most segregated cities list, which includes places like Detroit, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Trenton. It is no coincidence that these were places where major Black Lives Matter protests occurred even before the 2020 demonstrations, and that they were also sites of major racial uprisings in the 1960s. 61 These were also places where the Great Migration (1916-1970) had the strongest pull. 

As these tables suggest, we find that contrary to prevailing impressions of the United States, the most segregated regions are the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic, followed by the West Coast (See Figure 1). Southern states have lower overall levels of racial residential segregation, and the Mountain West and Plains states have the least. 62

Consistent with the regional pattern, many mid-Atlantic and Midwestern cities like Scranton and Green Bay have had large increases in segregation in the last 30 years (see Table 1, above). Conversely, southern cities in states like Florida and Texas have had equally significant demographic change, but managed to reduce racial residential segregation (see Table 2, above).

In addition to using a relatively new measure of segregation, we created a functionally new measure of integration for this project that identifies places that are both diverse and have lower levels of residential racial isolation (this is also described in the Technical Appendix). Some communities and regions may appear to have relatively little racial residential segregation, but that could be because they are not very diverse. Thus, we combine diversity thresholds with our preferred measure of segregation to find places that can be truly characterized as integrated. 

Although there are many integrated neighborhoods around the country, very few cities and metropolitan areas meet our definition. Out of the 113 largest cities examined, only Colorado Springs, CO and Port St. Lucie, FL qualify as “integrated” under our rubric. Similarly, out of the 221 largest metropolitan regions, only San Luis Obispo-Paso Robles, CA and Colorado Springs, CO qualify as “integrated.” Overall, the United States remains very racially segregated. 

Using our preferred measures of segregation and integration, we have a clearer and more accurate view of the extent racial residential segregation around the country. Moreover, using these measures we can better understand the relationship between segregation and key life outcomes.

IV. Key Findings

Examining demographic data (income, race, etc.) and our preferred measures of segregation and integration, we find a number of apparent and sometimes startling relationships. Most prominently, we find a striking relationship between income by race and racial residential segregation. Specifically, we find that Black and Latino income is higher in more integrated neighborhoods. Poverty rates are significantly lower (14 percent compared to 21 percent) in integrated neighborhoods compared to segregated communities of color. 63  

Table 4 below includes a summary of our main findings, which compares conditions and outcomes in integrated neighborhoods with outcomes in highly segregated white neighborhoods and highly segregated communities of color (“POC Segregation”). Despite the strong correlations, we caution that this analysis cannot prove that racial segregation is the cause of these neighborhood outcomes, but the consistent direction of outcomes across a large set of variables along these types of neighborhoods is highly suggestive and consistent with the “neighborhood effects” literature, which attributes life outcomes to community conditions. 64

Table 4: 2019 Segregation and Select Neighborhood Outcomes 65 66

The best life outcomes are found, however, in highly segregated white neighborhoods, which is consistent with a theory of “opportunity hoarding” that predominantly white cities and communities have greater resources and often have the fewest people of color living in them. 67 Household incomes in these neighborhoods are nearly twice those in segregated communities of color. That income differential contributes to wealth disparities, as home values are also nearly twice as high. Even life expectancy is four years longer in these neighborhoods than in segregated communities of color. 68 But critically, these neighborhoods are difficult to access: monthly rents are more than $300 and $400 per unit higher than in either integrated or highly segregated POC neighborhoods, respectively. 

It is also notable that home ownership is much higher in both white segregated neighborhoods and integrated neighborhoods than in segregated communities of color. Homeowner occupancy is 77 percent in highly segregated white neighborhoods, 59 percent in well-integrated neighborhoods, but just 46 percent in highly segregated communities of color. Homeownership is a critical pathway to wealth accumulation. 

We also examined economic outcomes (and rates of incarceration) for children of different races born between 1978 and 1984 across these neighborhood types (as measured in 1990). 69 We found clear and consistent evidence that children raised in integrated neighborhoods had better outcomes than children raised in segregated communities of color (see Table 5). 70 Black children raised in integrated neighborhoods earn nearly $1,000 more per year as adults than those raised in highly segregated communities of color. Latino children raised in integrated neighborhoods earn $844 more per year as adults than Latino children raised in highly segregated communities of color.

The best economic outcomes, however, again occurred in highly segregated white neighborhoods. Average income is substantially higher in those neighborhoods, not just for white children, but for Black and Latino children as well. Black children raised in highly segregated white neighborhoods earned nearly $4,000 more as adults than Black children raised in highly segregated communities of color. Similarly, Latino children raised in highly segregated white neighborhoods earned about $5,000 more per year as adults than Latino children raised in segregated communities of color.

Neighborhood segregation appears to affect outcomes for people of all races residing in them, not just members of certain racial groups. By shaping outcomes for all residents irrespective of race, these results reinforce our view that racial residential segregation is a structural force that allocates and distributes vitalizing resources.

Table 5: 1990 Neighborhood Segregation and Select Outcomes for Racial Groups

Although the form that racial residential segregation takes in the United States has evolved in ways described in the previous section, we nonetheless find that federal policy in the New Deal and post-war period may continue to shape those patterns. Using digitized Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) city survey security maps, we analyzed the relationship between levels of segregation in our map and the designation of neighborhoods by the HOLC, an agency created during the 1930s to slow the tide of foreclosures and extend credit for home loans. 71

The HOLC ranked neighborhoods as part of its survey program. Neighborhoods marked in Green (grade A) were considered “Best,” blue (grade B) were considered “Still Desirable,” yellow (grade C) were “Definitely Declining,” and red (grade D, hence the term “redlining”) were deemed “Hazardous.” 72 Using the digitized HOLC security maps from the 1930s and our preferred measure of segregation, we can infer the extent to which federal policy nearly a century ago may be shaping racial residential segregation today. 73

Table 6 indicates the percentage of HOLC graded neighborhoods within each level and type of racial residential segregation. 74 For example, of well-integrated neighborhoods as of 2010 that were given a HOLC grade in the 1930s, 5.8 percent were graded A, 25 percent were graded B, 46.5 percent were graded C, and 22.6 percent were graded D. This shows that very few integrated neighborhoods today were given high HOLC grades.

The most important finding from the table is the evidence of the lingering effects of past governmental policy. Of the highly segregated communities of color as of 2010, only 2 percent were graded “A” in the 1930s, while 83 percent were graded either “C” or “D.” This suggests that lower HOLC grades (and by extension federal mortgage insurance policy) may have contributed to the perpetuation of racial residential segregation. The unsurprising corollary to this finding is that highly segregated white neighborhoods as of 2010 had the fewest percentage of “C” and “D” HOLC rankings and the highest percentage of “A” rankings among the neighborhood types presented. Nearly a century later, federal policy has a long tail.

Table 6: HOLC Grades by 2010 Neighborhood Segregation Type

Another issue we examined was the relationship between segregation and political polarization. Some scholars have argued that racial residential segregation may be a driver of political racial polarization, and have found evidence supporting this claim. 75 For example, a recent study found that “cross-ethnic” exposure in childhood predicted political preferences decades later. 76 We apply our preferred measure of segregation to investigate this issue.

Political polarization is a nuanced concept that refers not simply to partisanship or the intensity of partisan feelings, but the degree to which people gravitate to the ends of the political spectrum rather than cluster in the middle. 77 Aggregate election results by themselves do not necessarily tell us the degree of political polarization that may exist (since options in general elections are essentially binary, i.e. Republican vs. Democrat), but measures of political segregation can indicate regional political polarization.

We analyzed the relationship between racial residential segregation and regional political segregation for 314 metropolitan areas, and the results are illustrated in Figure 2 below.

Figure 2 presents our percentile rank of racial residential segregation on the vertical axis and metropolitan political polarization on the horizontal axis (see endnote for a description of our measure). 78 The graph shows a strong correlation (.54). In simple terms, the greater the level of racial residential segregation, the greater the level of political polarization. Whether there is a causal relationship between the two or some deeper force explaining both is a matter of some academic interest, but one we need not resolve here.

In any case, the finding presents a very important policy implication. When racial segregation is greater, political gerrymandering—the process of drawing political districts for political advantage—may be easier. By sorting people across space within a region, racial residential segregation makes gerrymandering techniques like “packing” and “cracking” easier at the same time that racial political polarization makes race a stronger predictor of political voting patterns. 79 This is yet another reason to be concerned about racial residential segregation.

V. Using our Interactive Mapping Tool

Our preferred measure of segregation and novel measure of integration is not just more revealing, it helps us present more intuitive visualizations of the reality and extent of racial residential segregation in the United States. To accompany this report, we created a new interactive mapping tool to illustrate the level of segregation for every city, region and neighborhood in the United States while also indicating the racial composition of any neighborhood selected. (There are several other, excellent mapping tools that represent educational segregation, which our map does not do). 80

After clicking “begin,” the map’s default layer displays the holistic level of segregation for every city and metro area in the country using our preferred measure. Users can then either enter an address or city into the search bar or use the zoom function to locate any specific area of the country and directly observe the level of segregation that exists there, at the level of census tract, or neighborhood. 81 The color scheme and legend indicate the level of segregation (or integration). When selecting a census tract on the map, the chart on the left-hand side of the map provides the racial composition of the tract, the tract number, and the specific segregation value and percentile.

For example, take a look at the Detroit metropolitan region, one of the most segregated regions in the country (99th percentile of segregation). Blacks and Latinos are heavily over-represented (89 percent of the city compared to 27 percent of the metro in 2010), and highly isolated within the city (see Figure 3 below). The surrounding cities within the region are often either more integrated and representative areas like Eastpointe City (48th percentile), or highly white segregated areas like Livonia City (90 percent white, 77th percentile). 82

Figure 3: Detroit

Not only does the interactive map indicate the level of racial residential segregation for every neighborhood in the United States, but also for different census years (as well as for different measures of segregation, which we describe in the Technical Appendix to this report). The default left-hand menu allows you to view the level of segregation for any place in 1980, 1990, 2000, 2010, or 2019 (2020 census data has not yet been released at the time of this publication). 83 Using the slider, you can compare how segregation has changed in your own community or any other community of interest.

For example, if we look at a neighborhood in the French Quarter of New Orleans, we find that the level of segregation is “moderate” as of 2010, our default year. But if we use the slider, we find that the level of segregation for that neighborhood was “low” in 1980 and became more segregated in the intervening years (peaking in 2000). 

Users may also switch between different measures of segregation and select any corresponding geography they would like to retrieve scores or values for those measures (see the Technical Appendix for a description of measures). Users may also use the slider to move forward to backward in time for their preferred measure. 

In addition to allowing users to directly observe the level of racial residential segregation for any place in the United States since 1980, we have developed nine city snapshots that briefly highlight cities in the country that have 1) most rapidly integrated over this time period or 2) remain the most stubbornly segregated places in the country. Simply click the “storybook” icon to read the city snapshot. We have provided snapshots of Chicago, New Orleans, Detroit, Boston, Aurora (CO), Colorado Spring (CO), Inglewood (CA), Killeen (TX), and New York City.

A great paradox of racial segregation in America is that segregation persists despite the nation’s growing diversity, and also despite the fact that there are fewer and fewer places that are racially homogenous.

It is our hope that this tool can be used by local grassroots organizations and fair housing advocates to support fair housing litigation and policy reforms, as well as the development of local histories. With the underlying data (both segregation and racial composition) made readily available to any user for free, it should be relatively simple for fair housing advocates to input key data points to support arguments on behalf of integration.

To aid in the development of local histories, we have created a backend database of reports, articles, essays, chapters, and books pertaining to specific localities that provide accounts of how segregation occurred in those places. An annotated bibliography  of these resources is viewable on the right-hand menu to this web report or as a layer in the map. We provide those narratives not only to contextualize the data in our map, but also as models for other groups to emulate.

VI. Conclusion

As the “root” metaphor suggests, reducing racial disparities in health care, criminal justice enforcement or education without addressing racial residential segregation is treating symptoms and not causes. Segregation remains one of the principal causes of group-based inequality, by separating people from life-enhancing resources, such as good schools, healthy environments, and access to jobs. This was the raison d'être for public accommodations segregation in the Jim Crow South: to maintain a racial caste system. But residential segregation does this with nearly the same wicked efficiency today. We must act if we are serious about remedying systemic and structural racism. But before we can act, we first need to recognize the problem. Our primary goal with this report is to better help us do just that.

We have made progress toward integration in the past (and, in fact, most American cities were more racially residentially integrated in the nineteenth century than they were in the twentieth), and can do so again in the future. 84 But it takes focused attention and deliberate effort. In the educational context, between 1968 and the early 1990s, we made enormous strides in creating more integrated school systems. 85 Although many schools have gradually re-segregated since, these efforts prove it was possible. 

Our concerns with persistent racial residential segregation in the United States are primarily empirical, not philosophical. They are based upon a careful review of the ever-accumulating and already voluminous social science evidence that racial residential segregation is associated with harmful impacts in terms of health, educational attainment, employment, income and wealth. This evidence supports our view that racial residential segregation is the mechanism that sorts people into advantaged or disadvantaged environments based upon race, and therefore is the taproot of systemic racial inequality.  

Although this project is based upon a careful review of the evidence of the harms caused by racial residential segregation, there are other grounds to be concerned about the persistence of racial residential segregation. As we said in another recent publication , “racial residential segregation undermines the possibility of a national community with a sense of shared purpose and common destiny; this is a less immediate danger and more difficult to perceive and fully appreciate.” 86

Indeed, this was one of the principal insights of the prophetic Kerner Commission report of 1968. As it stated in its chapter on “The Future of the Cities,” integration is “the only course which explicitly seeks to achieve a single nation” rather than a dual or permanently divided society. 87 Even if it were possible, however unlikely, to ameliorate extreme inequalities between segregated communities and achieve the "separate, but equal" status which was a transparent fiction in Plessy v. Ferguson , that would merely reinforce societal balkanization, not help engender a cohesive yet diverse nation where everyone belongs.

Click for the Technical Appendix .

• 1 This project has been in development for many years, and the authors would like to thank Lindsey Burnside, Peter Mattingly, Karina French, and Ruqayah Ghaus for their research support and contributions to this project. The authors would also like to thank external reviewers Richard Rothstein, George Galster, Sheryll Cashin, Alex Schafran, and Nancy McCardle for their expert feedback on this project.
• 2 “Protestors’ Anger Justified Even If Actions May Not Be,” Monmouth University Polling Institute, June 2, 2020, https://www.monmouth.edu/polling-institute/reports/monmouthpoll_us_060220/; Michael Tesler, “Support For Black Lives Matter Surged During Protests, But Is Waning Among White Americans,” FiveThirtyEight, August 19, 2020, https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/support-for-black-lives-matter-surged-during-protests-but-is-waning-among-white-americans/
• 3 See e.g. Linda Villarosa, “Why America’s Black Mothers and Babies Are in a Life-or-Death Crisis,” New York Times, April 11, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/11/magazine/black-mothers-babies-death-maternal-mortality.html.
• 4 Jacob S. Rugh and Douglas S. Massey, “Racial Segregation and the American Foreclosure Crisis,” American Sociological Review 75, no. 5 (2010): 629-651, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0003122410380868.
• 5 Douglas S. Massey, “Still the Linchpin: Segregation and Stratification in the USA,” Race and Social Problems 12, no. 1 (2020): 1, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12552-019-09280-1.
• 6 See e.g. Mosi Secret, “‘The Way to Survive It Was to Make A’s’,” New York Times, September 7, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/07/magazine/the-way-to-survive-it-was-to-make-as.html; Steve Maas, “As Southern Schools Desegregated, Share of Black Teachers Declined,” NBER Digest, no. 9 (2019): 6, https://www.nber.org/digest/sep19/southern-schools-desegregated-share-black-teachers-declined; Sharon Washington, “We’re Still Waiting For The Promise Of Brown v. Board Of Education To Be Fulfilled,” Huffington Post, May 16, 2021, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/brown-v-board-of-education-integration_n_609fc167e4b063dcceaa219d.
• 7 Kevin D. Brown, “Termination of Public School Desegregation: Determination of Unitary Status Based on the Elimination of Invidious Value Inculcation,” George Washington Law Review 58, no. 6 (1990): 1105-1164, https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1747&context=facpub#:~:text=For%20the%20purposes%20of%20the,to%20the%20relevant%20educational%20authorities.
• 8 Even if it seems more logical in retrospect, given that much school segregation is a byproduct of neighborhood segregation. See e.g. David Brooks, “Integration Now, Integration Forever,” New York Times, March 29, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/29/opinion/integration-now-integration-forever.html.
• 9 “Housing Discrimination Under the Fair Housing Act,” United States Department of Housing and Urban Development, accessed May 7, 2021, https://www.hud.gov/program_offices/fair_housing_equal_opp/fair_housing_act_overview.
• 10 Nikole Hannah-Jones, “Living Apart: How the Government Betrayed a Landmark Civil Rights Law,” ProPublica, June 25, 2015, https://www.propublica.org/article/living-apart-how-the-government-betrayed-a-landmark-civil-rights-law; john a. powell, “Reflections on the Past, Looking to the Future: The Fair Housing Act at 40,” Indiana Law Review 41, no. 3 (2008): 606, https://journals.iupui.edu/index.php/inlawrev/article/view/3949; Stephen Menendian, “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing: A Reckoning with Government‐Sponsored Segregation in the 21st Century,” National Civic Review 106, no. 3 (2017): 20-27, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ncr.21332.
• 11 Richard H. Sander, Yana A. Kucheva and Jonathan M. Zasloff, Moving Toward Integration: The Past and Future of Fair Housing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 166-198 (investigating the “puzzle” of why some cities integrated more than others between 1970 and 1980). See our technical appendix for a different and more nuanced definition of what we mean by “integration.”
• 12 By “White,” we deviate from contemporary census conventions, and mean the term to refer to non-Hispanic white people. Further, although the US Census classifies Asian, African-American/Black, and white/Caucasian as racial categories and Hispanic as an ethnic category, we refer to Latino/a as a racial category that generally encompasses groups that the census counts as “Hispanic, non-white,” and classify “non-Hispanic whites” as simply white, and so on. We recognize that racial and ethnic categories are contested and politically fraught, but adopt this taxonomy for ease of analysis and simplicity in discussion. We further recognize the gendered nature of Latino, but, we use “Latino” in a gender neutral manner, or alternatively Latinx. Relatedly, we classify Native American peoples as a racial category, although tribal membership is not necessarily an indicator of racial identity.
• 13 David M. Cutler, Edward L. Glaeser and Jacob L. Vigdor, “The Rise and Decline of the American Ghetto,” Journal of Political Economy 107, no. 3 (1999): 455-506, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/250069?seq=1.
• 14 See e.g. Allison Roda and Amy Stuart Wells, “School Choice Policies and Racial Segregation: Where White Parents’ Good Intentions, Anxiety, and Privilege Collide,” American Journal of Education 119, no. 2 (2013): 261-293, https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/668753?mobileUi=0&journalCode=aje&. (for a scholarly example) and the New York Times podcast Nice White Parents (for a more popular example) Chana Joffe-Walt, “1: The Book of Statuses,” July 30, 2020, in Nice White Parents, produced by Simplecast, MP3 Audio, 1:00:45, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/23/podcasts/nice-white-parents-serial.html.
• 15 “Brown at 65 -- No Cause for Celebration,” UCLA Civil Rights Project, May 10, 2019, https://www.civilrightsproject.ucla.edu/news/press-releases/press-releases-2019/brown-at-65-no-cause-for-celebration.
• 16 Alvin Chang, “We Can Draw School Zones to Make Classrooms Less Segregated. This is How Well Your District Does,” VOX, August 27, 2018, https://www.vox.com/2018/1/8/16822374/school-segregation-gerrymander-map, (showing how school demographics replicate neighborhood demographics). There are exceptions, of course, in that some school districts have managed to maintain integration through special programs. For a list of initiatives promoting school integration, see Halley Potter and Michelle Burris, Here Is What School Integration in America Looks Like Today (New York, NY: The Century Foundation, 2020), https://tcf.org/content/report/school-integration-america-looks-like-today/.
• 17 Ibram X. Kendi, How to be an Antiracist (New York, NY: One World, 2019), 176.
• 18 This report and project is focused on illuminating the extent of racial residential segregation in the United States and its harmful consequences. We do not attempt to explain how racial residential segregation was created and perpetuated (although we may allude to some contributing factors), nor do we offer a set of solutions to this problem. Such an effort would be beyond the scope of our narrow purpose: to raise awareness of the extent and nature of the problem. There are many different theories on what causes or sustains racial residential segregation. For a sense of the (unresolved) scholarly debate on the causes of racial residential segregation, see Stephen Menendian, “Recent Writing on the Causes, Consequences, and Politics of Racial Segregation,” Othering & Belonging Institute, October 31, 2019, https://belonging.berkeley.edu/recent-writing-causes-consequences-and-politics-racial-segregation. For sources on solutions to the problem, see e.g. Stephen Menendian, Samir Gambhir, and Arthur Gailes, Racial Segregation in the San Francisco Bay Area, Part 5: Remedies, Solutions, and Targets (Berkeley, CA: Othering & Belonging Institute, 2020); Richard Rothstein, “Considering Fixes,” in The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (New York, NY: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2017); Richard Sander, Yana A. Kucheva and Jonathan M. Zasloff, Moving Toward Integration: The Past and Future of Fair Housing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 409-444.
• 19 It is worth emphasizing this nuanced distinction. While equity advocates accurately appreciate the harms of segregation in terms of the distribution of tangible resources, the courts and many social scientists have also regularly understood the harms of segregation in intangible terms as well. In Brown v. Board of Education (1954), most notably, the US Supreme Court stipulated that “the Negro and white schools involved have been equalized, or are being equalized, with respect to buildings, curricula, qualifications and salaries of teachers, and other ‘tangible’ factors.” Brown, 347 U.S. at 492. It did so, based upon an agreement of the parties, so that the Court might rule against the doctrine of ‘separate, but equal’ on broader grounds, not as a legal fiction to be made honest. See john a. powell, RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 7, no. 1 (2021): 20-31, https://www.rsfjournal.org/content/7/1/20. Similarly, in United States v. Virginia, 518 U.S. 515 (1996), the Supreme Court struck down the state of Virginia’s female-only alternative to its prestigious military institute, VMI. As the Court observed in a landmark opinion delivered by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, VMI’s reputation, unique history, unique training, and alumni network could not be duplicated at a sister institution, no matter how well resourced. In any assessment of the harms of segregation, we must try to look beyond tangible resources and simple disparities.
• 20 Exec. Order No. 9066, 72 Fed. Reg. 93 (February, 19, 1942), https://www.archives.gov/historical-docs/todays-doc/?dod-date=219. This order was challenged in the United States Supreme Court, which upheld it. Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214 (1944).
• 21 Johnson v. California (03-636) 543 U.S. 499 (2005).
• 22 Katherine Aron-Beller, “Ghettoization: The Papal Enclosure and Its Jews,” in A Companion to Early Modern Rome, 1492-1692, eds. Pamela M. Jones, Barbara Wisch, and Simon Dutchfield (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2019), 232-246; Luis Suarez-Fernandez, Documentos acerca de la expulsion de los Judios, trans. Edward Peters, (Valladolid: C.S.I.C., 1964), 391-395, http://www.sephardicstudies.org/decree.html.
• 23 Michael Sullivan, “An Untouchable Subject? Indian Government Wants Caste System off U.N. Agenda,” NPR, August 29, 2001, https://legacy.npr.org/programs/specials/racism/010828.caste.html.
• 24 Balla Satish, “Why This India Priest Carried an 'Untouchable' Into a Temple,” BBC, April 20, 2018, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-43807951.
• 25 “17-year-old Dalit youth not allowed to enter temple, shot dead by upper caste men for arguing,” Times Now, last modified June 9, 2020, https://www.timesnownews.com/mirror-now/crime/article/17-year-old-dalit-youth-not-allowed-to-enter-temple-shot-dead-by-upper-caste-men-for-arguing/603464.
• 26 Ben Hubbard and Vivian Yee, “Saudi Arabia Extends New Rights to Women in Blow to Oppressive System,” New York Times, August 2, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/02/world/middleeast/saudi-arabia-guardianship.html.
• 27 “Saudi Arabia's Ban On Women Driving Officially Ends,” BBC, June 24, 2018, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-44576795#.
• 28 “Saudi Arabia Ends Gender Segregation in Restaurants,” BBC, December 9, 2019, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-50708384.
• 29 Jeff Wallenfeldt, “The Troubles,” Encyclopedia Britannica, August 21, 2020, https://www.britannica.com/event/The-Troubles-Northern-Ireland-history; Tim Pat Coogan, The Troubles: Ireland's Ordeal 1966–1995 and the Search for Peace (Clerkenwell, London: Head of Zeus, 2015).
• 30 See Gemma Catney, “‘Religious’ Concentration and Health Outcomes in Northern Ireland,” in Social-Spatial Segregation: Concepts, Processes and Outcomes, ed. Christopher D. Lloyd, Ian Shuttleworth, and David W. Wong (Bristol, United Kingdom: Policy Press, 2014), 335-362.
• 31 Paul Nolan, “Two Tribes: A Divided Northern Ireland,” The Irish Times, April 1, 2017, https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/two-tribes-a-divided-northern-ireland-1.3030921.
• 32 Stephen Menendian and Arthur Gailes, Racial Segregation in the San Francisco Bay Area, Part 4: The Harmful Effects of Segregation (Berkeley, CA: Othering & Belonging Institute, 2019), https://belonging.berkeley.edu/racial-segregation-san-francisco-bay-area-part-4.
• 33 David R. Williams and Chiquita Collins, “Racial Residential Segregation: A Fundamental Cause of Racial Disparities in Health,” Public Health Reports 116, no. 5 (2001): 404- 416; David R. Williams, Jourdyn A. Lawrence, and Brigette A. Davis, “Racism and Health: Evidence and Needed Research,” Annual Review of Public Health 40, (2019): 105-125; Zinzi D. Bailey, “Structural Racism and Health Inequities in the USA: Evidence and Interventions,” The Lancet 389, no. 10077 (2017): 1453-1463; Michael R. Kramer and Carol R. Hogue, “Is Segregation Bad for Your Health?,” Epidemiologic Reviews 31, no. 1 (2009): 178-194; Gilbert C. Gee and Chandra L. Ford, “Structural Racism and Health Inequities: Old Issues,” Du Bois Rev 8, no. 1 (2011): 115; Kellee White and Luisa N. Borrell, “Racial/Ethnic Residential Segregation: Framing the Context of Health Risk and Health Disparities,” Health & Place 17, no. 2 (2011): 438- 448, quoted in Jason Richardson et al., The Lasting Impact of Historic “Redlining” on Neighborhood Health: Higher Prevalence of Covid-19 Risk Factors (Washington, D.C.: National Community Reinvestment Coalition, 2020), 11, https://ncrc.org/holc-health/.
• 34 Anthony P. Polednak,"Trends in US Urban Black Infant Mortality, By Degree of Residential Segregation," American Journal of Public Health 86, no. 5 (1996): 723-726, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8629726/.
• 35 Diane Alexander and Janet Currie, "Is it Who You Are or Where You Live? Residential Segregation and Racial Gaps in Childhood Asthma," Journal of Health Economics 55 (2017): 186-200.
• 36 Kiarri N. Kershaw et al., "Neighborhood-Level Racial/Ethnic Residential Segregation and Incident Cardiovascular Disease: The Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis," Circulation 131, no. 2 (2015): 141-148.
• 37 Sharrelle Barber et al., “Abstract MP58: Racial Residential Segregation is Associated With Worse Cardiovascular Health in African American Adults: The Jackson Heart Study.” Circulation 137, no. suppl_1 (2018).
• 38 Kiarri N. Kershaw et al., "Metropolitan-Level Racial Residential Segregation and Black-White Disparities in Hypertension," American Journal of Epidemiology 174, no. 5 (2011): 537-545; Barber et al.,”Abstract MP58.”
• 39 Lindsay R. Pool et al., "Longitudinal Associations of Neighborhood-Level Racial Residential Segregation With Obesity Among Blacks," Epidemiology 29, no. 2 (2018): 207-214.
• 40 Kirsten M. Beyer et al., “New Spatially Continuous Indices of Redlining and Racial Bias in Mortgage Lending: Links to Survival After Breast Cancer Diagnosis and Implications for Health Disparities Research,” Health & Place 40, (2016): 34-43; Rachel Morello-Frosch and Bill M. Jesdale, “Separate and Unequal: Residential Segregation and Estimated Cancer Risks Associated with Ambient Air Toxics In U.S. Metropolitan Areas,” Environmental and Health Perspectives 114, no. 3 (2006): 386-393; Michelle Precourt Debbink and Michael D. M. Bader, “Racial Residential Segregation and Low Birth Weight in Michigan's Metropolitan Areas,” American Journal of Public Health 101, no. 9 (2011): 1714-1720; Renee Mehra, Lisa M. Boyd, and Jeannette R. Ickovics, “Racial Residential Segregation and Adverse Birth Outcomes: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis,” Social Science & Medicine 191, (2017): 237-250; Michael McFarland and Cheryl A. Smith, “Segregation, Race, and Infant Well-Being,” Population Research and Policy Review 30, (2011): 467–493, quoted in Jason Richardson et al., The Lasting Impact of Historic “Redlining” on Neighborhood Health: Higher Prevalence of Covid-19 Risk Factors (Washington, D.C.: National Community Reinvestment Coalition, 2020), 11, https://ncrc.org/holc-health/.
• 41 Jason Richardson et al., The Lasting Impact of Historic “Redlining” on Neighborhood Health: Higher Prevalence of Covid-19 Risk Factors (Washington, D.C.: National Community Reinvestment Coalition, 2020),10, https://ncrc.org/holc-health/.
• 42 Danyelle Solomon, Connor Maxwell, and Abril Castro, “Systemic Inequality: Displacement, Exclusion, and Segregation,” Center for American Progress, August 7, 2019, https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/race/reports/2019/08/07/472617/s.
• 43 Dayna Bowen Matthew, Edward Rodrigue, and Richard V. Reeves, “Time For Justice: Tackling Race Inequalities in Health and Housing,” Brookings Institution, October 19, 2016, https://www.brookings.edu/research/time-for-justice-tackling-race-inequa.
• 44 See e.g. “Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School Dist. No. 1, et al.: Brief of 553 Social Scientists as Amici Curiae in Support of Respondents,” UCLA Civil Rights Project, https://civilrightsproject.ucla.edu/legal-developments/court-decisions/statement-of-american-social-scientists-of-research-on-school-desegregation-submitted-to-us-supreme-court/amicus_parents_v_seatle.pdf. See also Brief of the Caucus for Structural Equity (Columbus, OH: Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, 2006), 12-27, http://www.kirwaninstitute.osu.edu/reports/2006/10_2006_Caucus_for_Structural_Equity_Brief.pdf.
• 45 Brief for the American Educational Research Association as Amicus Curiae, Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, 127 S. Ct. 2738 (2007), quoted in Linda Darling-Hammond, “What Can PISA Tell Us about U.S. Education Policy?,” New England Journal of Public Policy 26, no. 1 (2014): 6.
• 46 Cody Tuttle, “The Long-Run Economic Effects of School Desegregation,” University of Maryland, Department of Economics, (2019): 1, http://econweb.umd.edu/~tuttle/files/tuttle_busing.pdf.
• 47 Sean F. Reardon et al., “Is Separate Still Unequal? New Evidence on School Segregation and Racial Academic Achievement Gaps,” CEPA Working Paper, no. 19-06 (2019): 1, https://vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/bitstream/handle/10919/97804/SeparateStillEqual.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y.
• 48 Rucker C. Johnson, "Long-Run Impacts of School Desegregation and School Quality on Adult Attainments,” NBER Working Paper, no. 16664 (2011): 2, https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w16664/w16664.pdf.
• 49 Gregory Acs et al., The Cost of Segregation: National Trends and the Case of Chicago, 1990-2010 (Washington, DC: Urban Institute, 2017), https://www.urban.org/research/publication/cost-segregation/view/full_report; Ingrid Gould Ellen, Justin P. Steil, and Jorge De la Roca, “The Significance of Segregation in the 21st Century” City & Community 15, no. 1 (2016): 8–13; Justin Steil, Jorge de la Roca, and Ingrid Gould Ellen, “Desvinculado y Desigual: Is Segregation Harmful to Latinos?,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 660, no. 1 (2015): 92-110.
• 50 David M. Cutler and Edward Glaeser, “Are Ghettos Good or Bad?” Quarterly Journal of Economics 112, no. 3 (1997): 827-872.
• 51 Vicki Been, Ingrid Ellen, and Josiah Madar, “The High Cost of Segregation: Exploring Racial Disparities in High-Cost Lending,” Fordham Urban Law Journal 36, no. 3 (2009): 361-393.
• 52 This issue parallels the debate over “in place” interventions versus “mobility strategies.” To see a description of the failure of many place-based interventions, see powell and Menendian, “Opportunity Communities: Overcoming the Debate Over Mobility Versus Place-Based Strategies”, Squires, Gregory D., and Walter F. Mondale, eds. 2018. The fight for fair housing: causes, consequences, and future implications of the 1968 Federal Fair Housing Act.
• 53 See e.g. Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (New York, NY: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2017).
• 54 We know this because, inter alia, of the exposure index results, which tell us the average community for members of each race. Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton, “The Dimensions of Residential Segregation,” Social Forces 67, no. 2 (1988): 287.
• 55 Maria Krysan and Kyle Crowder, Cycle of Segregation: Social Processes and Residential Stratification (New York, NY: The Russell Sage Foundation, 2017), 33.
• 56 John R. Logan, Separate and Unequal in Suburbia (Washington, D.C.: United States Census Bureau- US2010 Project, 2014), 4, https://s4.ad.brown.edu/Projects/Diversity/Data/Report/report12012014.pdf.
• 57 Alex Schafran, The Road to Resegregation: Northern California and the Failure of Politics (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2018), 24. See also Claude S. Fischer et al., "Distinguishing the Geographic Levels and Social Dimensions of U.S. Metropolitan Segregation, 1960-2000," Demography 41, no. 1 (2004): 45, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1515212.(describing how segregation has evolved from 1960, especially that most Black segregation is now regional rather than ‘tract-within-place’ segregation).
• 58 Reynolds Farley et al., ““Chocolate City, Vanilla Suburbs:” Will the Trend Toward Racially Separate Communities Continue?,” Social Science Research 7, no. 4 (1978): 319-344, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0049089X78900170; Jenny Schuetz, “Metro Areas Are Still Racially Segregated,” Brookings Institution, December 8, 2017, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2017/12/08/metro-areas-are-still-racially-segregated/.
• 59 Even when controlling for just Black-white Divergence, there are many cities that are much more segregated than the Black-white dissimilarity score would suggest. For example, Las Vegas, El Paso, Raleigh, Charlottesville, VA, Gainesville, FL, and Durham-Chapel Hill, NC have much higher Black-white divergence scores than Black-white dissimilarity scores. See Table 1 in our technical appendix, and the table “Comparing Black-White Segregation Measures” on the right-hand menu.
• 60 John R. Logan and Brian J. Stults, The Persistence of Segregation in the Metropolis: New Findings from the 2010 Census (Washington, D.C.: United States Census Bureau- US2010 Project, 2011), 6, https://s4.ad.brown.edu/Projects/Diversity/Data/Report/report2.pdf (listing Detroit, Milwaukee, New York, Newark, Chicago, Philadelphia, Miami, Cleveland, St. Louis, and Nassau as the top 10 most segregated cities in 2010 in Table 1). It is notable that at least 7 of our top 10 list are the same regions.
• 61 Protests and Uprisings in 1967 [map], 1:18, 475,000, “Othering & Belonging Institute,” https://belonging.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/protest_cities_v2.png. See also “Race & Inequality in America: The Kerner Commission at 50 Conference, February 27- March 1, 2018,” Othering & Belonging Institute, 2018, https://belonging.berkeley.edu/kerner50.
• 62 There is considerable nuance lost in drawing broad conclusions about the overall level of segregation across regions, and these conclusions are highly sensitive to the measure used. For a scholarly investigation that came to a very different conclusion while also comparing other measures of segregation, see Trevon D. Logan and John M. Parman, "The National Rise in Residential Segregation," The Journal of Economic History 77, no. 1 (2017): 127-170.
• 63 The term “people of color” typically encompasses all non-white groups. However, for the purposes of identifying “highly segregated communities of color,” we are referring only to segregated Black and/or Latino communities. The reason for this is that there are vanishingly few tracts in the United States that are highly segregated and predominantly Native American and/or Asian. Therefore, “segregated communities of color” is almost coterminous with “segregated Black and/or Latino” neighborhoods. This does not mean that the few predominantly Asian and/or Native American tracts in the country are being characterized as white, but that they are not included in this specific analysis, presented in Tables 4 and 5 or on the “detailed” view of the map delineating between these types of neighborhoods. As you can see from the last two rows of Table 4, not all tracts are included in this analysis because they are either not highly segregated, not integrated, or not predominantly white and/or Black or Latino. Asian and Native Americans, however, are accounted for in the city and metro rankings, as they are in nearly all of our Divergence Index calculations.
• 64 See e.g. Robert J. Sampson, Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect (Chicago, Illinois: The University of Chicago Press, 2012), 47, 358; Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, and Lawrence F. Katz, "The Effects of Exposure to Better Neighborhoods on Children: New Evidence from the Moving to Opportunity Experiment," American Economic Review 106, no. 4 (2016): 855-902.
• 65 Census tracts are classified into four groups for the purpose of this report: High White Segregation: Divergence Index in the top third nationally, majority white, and a white Location Quotient above 1.25. High POC Segregation: Divergence Index in the top third nationally, but not in the above category. Well Integrated: Divergence Index in the bottom third nationally, an Entropy score in the top 50% nationally, and at least 20% Black and Latino. Low-Medium Segregation: All other census tracts not covered by the other three categories. In practice, this means they are neither highly segregated nor integrated by our definition.
• 66 All figures are the average between the Census tracts in each category, weighted by population or households.
• 67 John L. Rury and Argun Saatcioglu, “Opportunity Hoarding,” The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Race, Ethnicity, and Nationalism (2015): 1-3, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/9781118663202.wberen435. The findings of this report are largely consistent with that report and our series on racial segregation in the San Francisco Bay Area, where we found similar results. Stephen Menendian et al., Racial Segregation in the San Francisco Bay Area (Berkeley, CA: Othering & Belonging Institute, 2020).
• 68 “U.S. Small-Area Life Expectancy Estimates Project (USALEEP),” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, last modified June 9, 2020, https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/usaleep/usaleep.html.
• 69 “The Opportunity Atlas,” Opportunity Atlas, accessed May 7, 2021, https://www.opportunityatlas.org/. Whereas our correlations are merely suggestive of some causal relationship, the authors of Opportunity Atlas have established a causal relationship based upon sibling pairs. See Raj Chetty and Nathaniel Hendren, “The Impacts of Neighborhoods on Intergenerational Mobility: Childhood Exposure Effects and County-Level Estimates,” Harvard University and NBER (2015): 1-144, http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/images/nbhds_paper.pdf.
• 70 These results control for income by focusing only on children born to parents at the bottom 25th percentile of income. Also, the results are in 2015 dollars, and are not adjusted for inflation.
• 71 See Amy E. Hillier, “Residential Security Maps and Neighborhood Appraisals: The Home Owners' Loan Corporation and the Case of Philadelphia,” Social Science History 29, no. 2 (2005): 207-233; Kristen B. Crossney and David W. Bartelt, “The Legacy of the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation,” Housing Policy Debate 16, no. 3-4 (2005): 547-574; Todd M. Michney and LaDale Winling, “New Perspectives on New Deal Housing Policy: Explicating and Mapping HOLC Loans to African Americans,” Journal of Urban History 46, no. 1 (2020): 150-180, quoted in Jason Richardson et al., The Lasting Impact of Historic “Redlining” on Neighborhood Health: Higher Prevalence of Covid-19 Risk Factors (Washington, D.C.: National Community Reinvestment Coalition, 2020), 9, https://ncrc.org/holc-health/.
• 72 See e.g. Anthony L. Nardone et al., “Associations Between Historical Redlining and Birth Outcomes from 2006 through 2015 in California,” PLoS ONE 15, no. 8 (2020), https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0237241.
• 73 There is more nuance to this story than we can present here. In brief, HOLC lending mostly wound down by 1936, but the appraisal system it created would live on for decades longer. In particular, this system spread throughout the private market, even where it had not already been implicitly present, and to the FHA redlining maps. See Price V. Fishback et al., “Race, Risk, and the Emergence of Federal Redlining,” NBER Working Paper, no. 28146 (2020), https://www.nber.org/papers/w28146. There are also many other researchers using the digitized HOLC maps to assess their possible impact over time. See e.g. Daniel Aaronson, Daniel Hartley, and Bhash Mazumder, “The Effects of the 1930s Holc 'Redlining' Maps,” FRB of Chicago Working Paper, no. 2017-12 (2017): 1-81, https://www.chicagofed.org/publications/working-papers/2017/wp2017-12 and Jacob W. Faber, “We Built This: Consequences of New Deal Era Intervention in America’s Racial Geography,” American Sociological Review 85, no. 5 (2020): 739-775, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0003122420948464.
• 74 This is a very complicated table to render for a number of methodological reasons. But not every city was given a HOLC grade, and not every neighborhood within graded cities was graded at the time (because it may not have existed). Also, HOLC grades were not uniformly distributed. Overall, 6 percent of areas were grade A, vs 45 percent being grade C, which helps explain why such a large percentage of neighborhood types are “C” grades today.
• 75 See Jessica Trounstine, Segregation by Design: Local Politics and Inequality in American Cities (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2018). (Arguing that racial segregation could be both a cause and effect of political polarization). It could be a cause, as Trounstine argues, because racial residential segregation undermines broad support for investments in public goods. But it could also be an effect because racial residential segregation facilitates political gerrymandering. Indeed, the Supreme Court has suggested that racial gerrymandering is in effect state-based racial segregation. Shaw v. Reno, 509 U.S. 630, 1993 (Justice O’Connor characterized racial redistricting as "an effort to segregate voters into separate voting districts because of their race.”) See also Miller v. Johnson, 515 U.S. 900 (1995) (Justice Kennedy wrote that “the essence of the equal protection claim recognized in Shaw is that the state has used race as a basis for separating voters into districts”). The problem is that the Court has essentially refused to regulate political gerrymandering not based explicitly or obviously on race. Gill v. Whitford, 585 U.S. ___ (2018)
• 76 Jacob R. Brown et al., “Childhood Cross-Ethnic Exposure Predicts Political Behavior Seven Decades Later: Evidence From Linked Administrative Data,” Science Advances 7, no. 24 (2021): 1-14, https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/7/24/eabe8432.
• 77 Polarization is an elusive concept. As a helpful analog, economic polarization is when a larger part of the income distribution exists at the tails rather than in the middle.
• 78 To operationalize a measure of political polarization, we use the Divergence Index formula: Broadly speaking, we define political polarization as the degree of “divergence” in political attitudes to ideological extremes. For this analysis, we calculate the share of Democratic and Republican votes from the 2020 US Presidential Election for individual voting precincts and compare that share with the greater metropolitan area. Using the Divergence Index, we configure how extreme ideologies are in a precinct based on how over- or underrepresented that ideology is relative to the surrounding precincts within that area. For example, the metropolitan area of Jackson, Mississippi ranks first in political divergence, indicating the presence of ideological extremes where precincts overwhelmingly voted in favor of one party while neighboring precincts voted in favor of the other party. Comparatively, the metropolitan area of Carson City, Nevada has one of the lowest political divergence scores, suggesting that neighboring precincts tended to vote less in favor of one candidate and that the share of votes between parties was relatively consistent across all precincts within that area.
• 79 Nicholas Stephanopoulos and Eric McGhee, “Partisan Gerrymandering and the Efficiency Gap,” University of Chicago Law Review 82 (2015): 831-900, https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=12542&context=journal_articles.
• 80 See e.g. "Educational Opportunity in the U.S.,” The Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University, https://edopportunity.org/explorer/#/split/none/districts/avg/ses/all/3.15/37.39/-96.78/; Kate Rabinowitz, Armand Emamdjomeh and Laura Meckler, “How The Nation’s Growing Racial Diversity is Changing Our Schools,” The Washington Post, September 12, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/local/school-diversity-data/; Alvin Chang, “We Can Draw School Zones to Make Classrooms Less Segregated. This is How Well Your District Does,” Vox, last modified August 27, 2018, https://www.vox.com/2018/1/8/16822374/school-segregation-gerrymander-map. These mapping tools allow users to look up schools and school districts to assess the level of segregation among other uses.
• 81 We anchor these findings with the Metropolitan/Micropolitan (Core-Based) Statistical Area or county, as available. “Core-Based Statistical Areas,” United States Census Bureau, last modified December 7, 2016, https://www.census.gov/topics/housing/housing-patterns/about/core-based-statistical-areas.html.
• 82 We aggregate place population from the census tract, so our reported percentages differ slightly from official Census counts. See the Technical Appendix for more details https://belonging.berkeley.edu/technical-appendix.
• 83 As soon as the tract-level 2020 census results are out, we will update our map and key findings in this report.
• 84 See e.g. James H. Carr and Nandinee K. Kutty, “The New Imperative for Equality,” in Segregation: The Rising Costs for America, eds. James H. Carr and Nandinee K. Kutty (New York, NY: Routledge, 2008), 3-4.
• 85 See Carl Kaestle, “Federalism and Inequality in Education: What Can History Tell Us?,” in The Dynamics of Opportunity in America: Evidence and Perspectives, eds. Henry Braun and Irwin Kirsch (Switzerland: Springer International Publishing AG, 2016), 48, table 3.1.
• 86 Nirali Beri, Richard Rothstein, and Stephen Menendian. The Road Not Taken: Housing and Criminal Justice 50 Years after the Kerner Commission Report. (Berkeley, CA: Othering & Belonging Institute, 2019). https://belonging.berkeley.edu/road-not-taken.
• 87 Otto Kerner et al., Report of The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (Washington, D.C.: United States Government Publishing Office, 1968), 406.

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Neighborhood Disadvantage, Residential Segregation, and Beyond—Lessons for Studying Structural Racism and Health

• Published: 01 June 2017
• Volume 5 , pages 357–365, ( 2018 )

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• Alicia R. Riley 1  

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A recent surge of interest in identifying the health effects of structural racism has coincided with the ongoing attention to neighborhood effects in both epidemiology and sociology. Mindful of these currents in the literature, it makes sense that we are seeing an emergent tendency in health disparities research to operationalize structural racism as either neighborhood disadvantage or racial residential segregation. This review essay synthesizes findings on the relevance of neighborhood disadvantage and residential segregation to the study of structural racism and health. It then draws on recent literature to propose four lessons for moving beyond traditional neighborhood effects approaches in the study of structural racism and health. These lessons are (1) to shift the focus of research from census tracts to theoretically meaningful units of analysis, (2) to leverage historic and geographic variation in race relations, (3) to combine data from multiple sources, and (4) to challenge normative framing that aims to explain away racial health disparities without discussing racism or racial hierarchy. The author concludes that research on the health effects of structural racism should go beyond traditional neighborhood effects approaches if it is to guide intervention to reduce racial and ethnic health disparities.

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Riley, A.R. Neighborhood Disadvantage, Residential Segregation, and Beyond—Lessons for Studying Structural Racism and Health. J. Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities 5 , 357–365 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40615-017-0378-5

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• Published: 25 March 2021

Residential housing segregation and urban tree canopy in 37 US Cities

• Dexter H. Locke   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-2704-9720 1 ,
• Billy Hall 2 ,
• J. Morgan Grove 1 ,
• Steward T. A. Pickett   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-1899-976X 3 ,
• Laura A. Ogden 4 ,
• Carissa Aoki 5 ,
• Christopher G. Boone   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-7643-0806 6 &
• Jarlath P. M. O’Neil-Dunne 7  

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Redlining was a racially discriminatory housing policy established by the federal government’s Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) during the 1930s. For decades, redlining limited access to homeownership and wealth creation among racial minorities, contributing to a host of adverse social outcomes, including high unemployment, poverty, and residential vacancy, that persist today. While the multigenerational socioeconomic impacts of redlining are increasingly understood, the impacts on urban environments and ecosystems remain unclear. To begin to address this gap, we investigated how the HOLC policy administered 80 years ago may relate to present-day tree canopy at the neighborhood level. Urban trees provide many ecosystem services, mitigate the urban heat island effect, and may improve quality of life in cities. In our prior research in Baltimore, MD, we discovered that redlining policy influenced the location and allocation of trees and parks. Our analysis of 37 metropolitan areas here shows that areas formerly graded D, which were mostly inhabited by racial and ethnic minorities, have on average ~23% tree canopy cover today. Areas formerly graded A, characterized by U.S.-born white populations living in newer housing stock, had nearly twice as much tree canopy (~43%). Results are consistent across small and large metropolitan regions. The ranking system used by Home Owners’ Loan Corporation to assess loan risk in the 1930s parallels the rank order of average percent tree canopy cover today.

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Introduction.

Spatial, social, and environmental inequities pose significant challenges for American cities 1 , 2 . Urban inequity is the result of historical and systemic forces, including structural racism and segregation, which have enduring effects on the ways cities function socially, economically, and ecologically 3 , 4 , 5 . For instance, decades of racial discrimination in housing policy created barriers to homeownership, employment, and access to quality education for people of color, making it difficult to build wealth across generations 6 , 7 , 8 . While the mechanisms linking structural racism to wealth creation and socioeconomic status are well understood 9 , it is less clear how housing segregation may have played a role in shaping urban ecosystems.

This paper investigates how the historic practice of redlining, one of the most consistent, wide-spread, spatial, and racial forms of US housing practices, relates to the contemporary distribution of urban tree canopy, commonly understood as a vital component of urban ecosystem health and sustainability 10 , 11 . Trees provide a host of ecosystem services and social benefits, including heat island mitigation 12 , 13 . In the United States, ~1500 heat-related deaths occur each year 14 , and the impact of heat stress is likely to increase given current climate projections 15 . Existing tree canopy cover 13 and the replacement of impervious surfaces with tree canopy can lower urban temperatures 12 and save lives. But trees and tree canopy are not distributed equitably 16 , 17 , 18 . Recent meta-analyses show that lower-income urban areas 16 and areas with more racial minorities 17 have less tree canopy cover, an environmental injustice that can exacerbate health problems for already disadvantaged groups.

These racial and geographic disparities in urban tree canopy parallel other striking patterns of racialized environmental inequity documented by environmental justice (EJ) research. For more than three decades, EJ researchers have developed an enormous body of evidence highlighting the disproportionate concentration of environmental hazards and burdens in communities of color, and conversely, the privileged access to environmental amenities in predominantly white communities 19 , 20 , 21 , 22 . More recent waves of this scholarship have begun to explicitly connect racial disparities in environmental “goods” and “bads” to structural racism and discrimination in policy 23 , 24 . Institutionalized policies and practices intended to racially segregate (and concentrate wealth in white communities) have been increasingly shown to produce racially uneven landscapes of environmental privilege and risk, even decades later 2 , 25 , 26 , 27 .

In thinking about urban tree canopy, the space to plant trees is often a legacy of the urban built environment, which in the United States stems from histories of deliberate and systematic racial discrimination in housing and urban development 26 , 28 . In 1933, the US Congress created the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) to assist Americans struggling to pay their mortgages in the wake of the Great Depression. To guide lending criteria, the HOLC developed neighborhood appraisal maps for 239 urban areas, ranking the perceived risk of investing in particular neighborhoods using a color-coded scale of “A” (green), “B” (blue), “C” (yellow), and “D” (red) 29 . Appraisals were based primarily on an area’s demographic characteristics and the age and physical condition of its housing stock. Areas with predominantly U.S.-born, white populations, and newer housing stock were often codified as the “safest” places for banks to invest and were graded “A” and “B.” Meanwhile, areas with somewhat older structures and/or a presence of foreign-born residents were commonly ascribed a “C” grade, while areas with significant numbers of racial and ethnic minorities, foreign-born residents, families on relief, and having older housing were almost always viewed as “hazardous” and given the lowest grade, “D.” The term “redlining” is used because areas graded “D” were shaded red on the HOLC maps. In effect, while race was not the only criterion considered in designating grades, the maps formally embedded race into neighborhood appraisal processes by systematically factoring in the race of an area’s occupants into the perceived long-term value of an area 30 , 31 .

Some context is important to better understand HOLC’s residential security maps and its practices from 1934 to 1951. While the HOLC created uniform guidelines for neighborhood appraisal, because appraisals were produced in direct consultation with local municipal officials, loan officers, appraisers, and realtors, evidence suggests some variation in the grading across cities 32 . Still, these agents were familiar with their city’s specific patterns of residential segregation. More importantly, many local actors were already part of the power structures that had created, maintained, or profited from the prevailing racist housing policies and practices. These policies and practices included segregation ordinances, racially-restrictive deed covenants, and zoning plans that promoted their agendas of racial and immigrant exclusion 33 , 34 , 35 , 36 , 37 . Thus, the HOLC maps helped codify the local real estate industry’s consensus of perceived neighborhood value, which often institutionalized existing local inequities in borrowers’ access to credit 31 , 38 .

The extent to which the HOLC’s maps, guidelines, and practices influenced the actual distribution of mortgages remains uncertain. Some evidence suggests that lending practices varied by lender and geography, despite the HOLC’s systematic guidelines 32 . In addition, some have argued that it is unlikely that the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), which issued long-term mortgages, cooperated directly with the HOLC 32 . Yet it has been demonstrated that the FHA overwhelmingly prioritized granting mortgages for new homes, which would have been located in areas graded “A” by the HOLC. For instance, between 1934 and 1962, the FHA and the Veterans Administration lent over $120 billion for new housing, and 98% of this money was distributed to white residents compared to <2% for African Americans and other people of color 39 , 40 . During this period, African Americans represented ~10% of the US population 41 . Studies in Houston and Boston show that even when controlling for income, whites were nearly three times as likely to receive a mortgage loan 3 , 42 .

A large consensus among housing policy scholars is that the federal government helped institutionalize a two-tiered, racialized lending system. One tier provided federally-backed mortgages to higher-graded neighborhoods with predominantly U.S.-born, affluent, white populations occupying newer housing stock. A second-tier subjected residents in the “yellow” and “red” neighborhoods, which housed predominantly low-income African Americans and immigrants in older buildings. Homeowners in the second tier experienced predatory lending schemes or no mortgage lending at all 35 , 43 . For decades, many whites benefited from privileged access to credit, home ownership, and wealth accumulation based on home equity, while African Americans were largely denied this route to economic prosperity 3 , 33 , 44 , 45 , 46 . Redlining created systematic disinvestment in minority communities that were located in the denser, older urban core while protecting the property values and resources of white communities moving into desirable homes in the suburbs. Indeed, the post-World War II suburban development supported by federal subsidies created new, exclusively white geographies that generated enormous new wealth 31 , 47 .

Although Congress officially outlawed racial discrimination in housing with the Fair Housing Act of 1968, studies continue to document its enduring effects. Many formerly redlined areas continue to struggle with segregation, poverty, unemployment, low educational attainment, and poor health outcomes today 3 , 48 , 49 . Research shows that compared to areas receiving higher grades by the HOLC, lower-graded areas exhibit declines in home ownership, housing value, and credit scores 50 .

Despite the abundance of evidence on the social and economic impacts of racist housing policy, little is known about the relationships among redlining, social disadvantage, and environmental quality. It is well-documented that various social disadvantages are bundled in racially segregated urban areas (3), and environmental justice scholars have demonstrated that these outcomes are the product of profound historical and present-day racist and discriminatory policies and institutions, such as redlining, blockbusting, and zoning 51 , 52 , 53 , 54 , 55 . Environmental justice scholars and activists have convincingly argued that fair processes governed by just institutions are equally if not more important than equitable environmental outcomes because process change can lead to enduring systemic change 56 , 57 .

It has also been documented that lower-income areas 16 and areas with more racial minorities 17 tend to have less tree canopy cover. However, the relationships among long-term discriminatory housing practices and contemporary environmental conditions remain poorly understood. The distribution of current urban tree canopy cover offers one perspective on environmental inequities related to housing segregation.

Research in Baltimore, MD has shown that redlining and other racially-biased housing practices have historically shaped the location of investments in environmental amenities such as trees and parks and the allocation of environmental disamenities via non-conforming zoning 2 , 38 , 58 , 59 . Redlined, African American neighborhoods of East and West Baltimore, graded D in the HOLC system, had overcrowded and poor quality housing and higher exposure to noise and other pollution from nearby industries 2 . These denser, D-graded areas had less available space for trees and tree planting, while A-graded areas comprised of single-family homes on larger lots could maintain, grow, and plant additional trees. Race-based evaluations of credit-worthiness also shaped access to wealth accumulation and related political power. Residents in A-graded areas directed municipal investments into street tree plantings, creating public parks with trees, and invested their own resources into trees on their private lands 26 , 59 . At the same time, residents in D-graded areas had less access to public investments and were more likely to spend their lower wages on other necessities such as rent, food, or transportation. Thus, differences in lot sizes, money, and access to power along HOLC neighborhood lines played an important role in shaping the distribution of Baltimore’s urban tree canopy over the long term 2 .

Our goal in this paper is to examine whether there are similar patterns in the distribution of tree canopy by HOLC-graded neighborhoods in other cities. These analyses are possible because redlining was a national process, initiated by the Federal government in collaboration with state and local governments. It was a practice that was spatially-explicit and applied to 239 cities in the same time period throughout the country. These characteristics make the practice of redlining particularly well-suited for within- and cross-city comparisons. We examined whether historic redlining is statistically associated with contemporary spatial distributions of tree canopy for a range of metropolitan areas across a spectrum of area, population, and climate. This paper assesses whether there are differences in current tree canopy cover among historic HOLC classes and whether differences among HOLC classes are consistent among cities.

There is a strong relationship between HOLC grades and tree canopy: areas formerly graded D have 21 percentage points less tree canopy than areas formerly graded A. One-way ANOVA showed significant differences in tree canopy by HOLC grade [F(3, 3184) = 253.9, p  < 0.001]. Post hoc comparisons using the Tukey HSD test indicated that the same hierarchical ranking system used by HOLC to assess loan risk in the 1930s is paralleled by the rank order of average percent tree canopy cover today. Areas formerly graded D have significantly less tree canopy (M = 20.9 percentage points, SD = 12.2), than areas graded C (M = 24.6, SD = 10.9), B (M = 32.4, SD = 13.8), or A (M = 41.1, SD = 14.7). All six pairwise combinations were significantly different at the p  < 0.0001 level. The same model was re-fit as a linear regression so that areas graded A are the reference, with differences in means as estimated coefficients, as a baseline model (Table 1 , Model 1).

To test for unobserved city-specific factors, a separate unconditional one-way ANOVA was performed. This second ANOVA showed significant differences in tree canopy by city [F(36, 3151) = 21.60, p  < 0.001]. The intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) indicated that 23% of the variance in tree canopy cover was from city to city (Table 1 , Model 2). A mixed effects model with fixed effects for HOLC grade and random effects for city (Table 1 , Model 3) showed that the areas given less-favorable grades by HOLC have significantly less canopy cover than their higher-graded counterparts, with overlap between C and D areas (i.e., D ≤ C < B < A). Comparing the three model specifications (fixed effects for HOLC grade only, random effects for city, and a specification with both HOLC fixed effects and city random effects) with an AIC-minimization criterion showed that Model 3’s added complexity provided the best fit (Table 1 ). Model 3’s regression-adjusted estimates of tree canopy cover suggest that areas formerly graded D had 21 percentage points less tree canopy ( γ 30  = −20.79, 95% [−22.27, −19.31]) (or 22% cover) than areas formerly graded A ( γ 00  = 43.44, 95% [40.80–46.07]) and the HOLC categories explained 19% of the tree canopy variance while city-to-city variation explained an additional 25%.

Results of further tests and robustness checks

A-graded neighborhoods were often the rarest, making within-city analyses under-powered statistically. In cities with 10 or more A-graded neighborhoods (Fig. 1 ), within-city analyses of tree canopy cover by grade confirmed the pooled analyses’ findings (Fig. 2 ). Wilcoxon tests showed lower median tree canopy in D neighborhoods compared to A neighborhoods, except in Seattle ( p  = 0.093). Although the sample sizes for many cities do not permit statistical analyses of within-city analyses of canopy by HOLC grade, the boxplots in Fig. S1 illustrate variation among classes within each city. Tree canopy today is almost always in rank order of HOLC grades.

Larger and more segregated metropolitan areas tend to have more HOLC-defined neighborhoods. Cities are sorted by the number of A-graded neighborhoods. Only eight cities have ≥10 Grade-A neighborhoods (left) to permit within-city analyses. In the main analysis, all neighborhoods are used. *Johnson City/Birmingham, NY; **Holyoke/Chicopee, MA.

Seattle is an exception, where two formerly D-Graded neighborhoods have the most tree canopy today and are public parks. The number of A-Graded neighborhoods constrains analyses within cities; only cities with ≥10 A-graded neighborhoods are shown. See Fig. S2 for the distribution of tree canopy for all cities Note that the rank order of tree canopy cover mirrors the HOLC grades A through D. Significance tests for A to D provided via two-sample Wilcoxon test (aka Mann–Whitney test). # end August 13, 2020.

It is possible that the main results reported in Model 3 are driven by the patterns and sample size in the largest 16 cities with at least 50 HOLC-defined neighborhoods. We therefore re-fit Model 3 excluding the largest 16 cities and the results were substantively the same (Table S1 ); formerly D-graded areas have about 23% tree canopy, while formerly A-graded areas have nearly twice as much canopy today (43%). Therefore, the findings are not attributable to the patterns found in the largest cities.

The link between redlining and socioeconomic outcomes such as poverty and home foreclosure has previously been documented 3 , 29 , 33 , 44 , 45 , 46 , 48 , 49 , 50 , 60 . The lack of access to wealth via homeownership had a powerful influence on real estate markets. People of color were deprived of an important path to wealth accumulation in many urban areas across the US 29 , 33 , 34 . However, the relationships among historic discriminatory housing practices and current environmental conditions remain poorly understood. Redlining was one of the most consistent, wide-spread, spatial, and racial forms of US housing practices. The relationship between redlining and the current distribution of urban tree canopy cover offers a preliminary window into these larger, long term, and complex dynamics. Our research supports prior work on social disparities corresponding to redlining grades by adding evidence pertaining to environmental inequities.

Trees are an important component of the urban environment. They reduce the urban heat island effect 12 , 13 and provide a number of other public health benefits 61 such as crime reduction 62 . In order to consider whether historic social disparities are paralleled by contemporary disparities in tree canopy, this paper examined variations in tree cover by HOLC-defined neighborhoods and the metropolitan regions containing those neighborhoods. The difference was significant: formerly D-graded areas have about 23% tree canopy today while formerly A-graded areas have nearly twice as much (43%). We found that just two variables, HOLC neighborhood grade and city, explained 43% of the variance (Table 1 ).

To be very clear, this study used a cross-sectional, observational quantification of social-ecological patterns that is fundamentally incapable of finding, identifying, and/or ascribing causality for complementary or competing explanations of the process. The findings are consistent with other recent examinations of HOLC grades and vegetation cover 63 , the urban heat island effect 64 , and even premature births 65 : formerly D-graded areas on average have less vegetation, are hotter, and are associated with statistically significantly more preterm births 65 . The determinants of tree canopy cover in urban areas are complex 28 . Our paper highlights one possible factor that may have played a role while also ruling out random chance. We argue that redlining is an understudied process in urban ecology and that our findings suggest that the role of redlining in shaping tree canopy, in concert with other explanatory factors, warrants further process-based research. HOLC’s redlining was a moment in a long-term history of discriminatory housing practices in the United States 31 . Thus, in-depth and comparative research is needed to understand the systemic processes among long-term discriminatory housing practices and contemporary environmental conditions 2 .

There may be several systemic explanations for our pattern-based results. If redlining reflected existing differences in lot size and reinforced those differences through preferred investment over the long term, we could expect to see more extensive contemporary tree canopy within formerly A-graded areas. This contemporary distribution of canopy cover may be due in part to the fact that residential lots in these areas would have been larger and had more space for trees. A-graded areas were also more affluent, and households may have had higher disposable incomes to invest in landscaping such as trees. Further, because redlining helped shape wealth accumulation and related political power by race and geography, the privilege of those living in formerly A-graded neighborhoods may have served to direct public investments in tree canopy over the long term for street trees and trees in parks or through continued private household investment in landscaping on their own larger residential properties 66 , 67 , 68 , 69 . In this way, complex and reinforcing positive feedback loops may have occurred, perpetuating relationships among housing markets, affluence, race, and trees. Such a positive feedback loop may have also been mirrored in formerly D-graded areas with lower tree canopy today due to smaller lots, industrial land uses not conducive to tree canopy cover, fewer resources for maintaining trees on properties, and less influence over public investments over the long term. Our results are consistent with both of these rationales. A process-based study is beyond the scope of this paper, but our findings provide a robust starting point to examine the longitudinal dynamics between redlining and tree canopy cover.

Our results point to at least three other areas that could benefit from further research. First, more research may be needed to understand the mechanisms for why the strong association between HOLC categories and urban tree canopy exists some 80 years after the HOLC maps were drawn and the roles that different actors may have played to maintain these differences. Many A-graded areas were suburban areas that had been zoned for single-family housing with large lot sizes 70 . D-graded areas had denser housing stock, but they may have also contained non-residential land uses, such as industrial sites, which might have been unfavorable for trees. A next step could be to examine different residential densities, land uses associated with different jurisdictions, policies, and tree planting programs in the different cities over time. For example, D-graded areas could have been more susceptible to urban renewal projects, supporting highways, and other large-scale infrastructure projects that could have required tree removals or made space for new trees. Analyses of changing land uses, local policies, demographic trends, or historic aerial imagery could enable a greater understanding of the extent to which HOLC grades ‘locked in’ urban forms that are more or less amenable to tree canopy.

A second approach would be to examine areas that do not match the overall pattern. So-called statistical “deviant case analyses” 71 may help to build better theory about spatial, social, and environmental inequities, including historic processes of urban renewal and contemporary processes of gentrification and climatic conditions. For example, tree canopy cover in Seattle, WA in formerly A-graded neighborhoods is generally greater than in formerly D-graded neighborhoods (Fig. 2 ), but the differences were not statistically significant ( p  = 0.093). Moreover, the two areas with the highest percent of tree canopy cover in Seattle were graded D and are now public parks. The distribution of tree canopy in Gary, IN appears relatively invariant to HOLC grades and may warrant further investigation, too (Fig. S1 ). Third, additional research may disaggregate redlined neighborhoods by race and ethnicity to examine whether there are significant differences between neighborhoods with larger numbers of African-American residents, US-born white residents, and white immigrant residents, including Irish, Italian, Polish, German, and Jewish communities. A methodological challenge would be to identify realistic counterfactuals for analyzing the spatial distribution of urban tree canopy across metropolitan areas that were not redlined. Canadian cities may offer a point of comparison.

While urban trees provide ecosystem services such as urban heat island mitigation, it is important to acknowledge that trees can produce disservices 72 , 73 . Not everyone wants trees, so their absence may be a desired condition for some residents 74 , 75 , 76 , 77 , 78 . In addition, a pixel of tree canopy cover cannot reveal whether a tree was purposefully planted or sprouted through seed dispersal.

Given the long history of disinvestment in African-American communities in the United States, we sought to understand the extent to which a program in the 1930s that altered the distribution and flow of land and capital along racial lines is associated with contemporary tree canopy cover in urban areas. Our investigation into 37 cities reveals a strong association between HOLC grades inscribed on maps roughly nine decades ago and present-day tree canopy. The study design cannot identify causal pathways, but the inequity invites careful scrutiny of the social, economic, and ecological processes that have created the demonstrably uneven and inequitable distribution of urban tree canopy in the United States.

Sample and data

Two hundred and thirty-nine cities were redlined. As part of the Mapping Inequality project, the University of Richmond’s Digital Scholarship Lab georectified and digitized more than 150 HOLC maps where HOLC-defined neighborhoods are represented as polygons 79 . Shapefiles for areas with available land cover data, described below, were downloaded.

The heterogeneity of urban environments necessitates high-resolution and high-accuracy measures of tree canopy. 30 m 2 resolution datasets such as Landsat scenes or derivative products such as the National Land Cover Database (NLCD) are insufficient for mapping trees in a way that effectively operationalizes lived experience in cities 80 , 81 . For consistency, high-resolution tree canopy data were obtained from eleven sources.

Land cover data for 23 areas were downloaded from The Spatial Analysis Lab (The SAL, http://gis.w3.uvm.edu/utc/ , Table S2 ) at the University of Vermont. The SAL routinely maps large spatial extents such as counties and their methods are detailed elsewhere 82 , 83 , 84 . Next, tree canopy data for the entire state of Pennsylvania were obtained for all HOLC-mapped cities in Pennsylvania from SAL (Altoona, Johnstown, New Castle, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh, http://letters-sal.blogspot.com/2015/09/pennslyvania-statewide-high-resolution.html ). Tree canopy data for eight cities (Baltimore, MD; Johnson City-Binghamton, Syracuse, and Utica, NY; Lynchburg, Norfolk, Richmond, and Roanoke, VA) were obtained (Chesapeake Bay Program, https://chesapeakeconservancy.org/conservation-innovation-center/high-resolution-data/ ). Data for New Jersey (Atlantic City, Camden, and Trenton) were obtained (Pennsylvania Spatial Data Access, http://www.pasda.psu.edu/uci/DataSummary.aspx?dataset=3193 ). Finally, a literature review was used to identify ( n  = 8) sources for additional land cover data overlapping HOLC-graded areas and corresponding authors were contacted for data access (Los Angeles and Sacramento, CA; Denver, CO; Miami and Tampa, FL; Hollyoke-Chicopee, MA; Toledo, OH; and Seattle, WA). In total, there were 3188 HOLC-defined neighborhoods, from 37 cities, in 16 states from 11 sources (Table S2 ). Statistical analyses were conducted in R v. 3.6.1 85 using the tidyverse 86 , simple features 87 , ggpubr 88 , lme4 89 , sjPlot 90 , and sjstats 91 packages.

Dependent variables

The dependent variable was the percentage of tree canopy cover within each HOLC zone. Consistent with previously published literature 18 , 92 , we define and operationalize tree canopy as “the layer of leaves, branches, and stems of trees that cover the ground when viewed from above” 93 . After projecting the HOLC polygons obtained from the Mapping Inequality Project to match the land cover data, the Tabulate Area tool was used in ArcMap Version 10.2.2 (ESRI, 2014) to calculate the percent of tree canopy cover for each polygon. In seven cities (Boston, Denver, Detroit, New Haven, New York City, Seattle, and Toledo), tree canopy data were not available for the entire extent of the HOLC-defined neighborhoods, which occasionally extended into suburban areas surrounding the municipalities of interest and 156 polygons had to be omitted. This represents 4.67% of the dataset and was unavoidable. As a robustness check, described below, our main regression model was re-fit with those seven cities entirely removed.

Empirical strategy

We conducted two analyses of variance (ANOVA) with tree canopy as the dependent variable. In the first ANOVA, the independent variable was the HOLC categories in order to test our main hypothesis that mean canopy cover varied by grade. A post hoc Tukey HSD was then used to examine which pairs of grades differed from each other. This initial ANOVA was re-fit as a linear regression model so that Grade A would be the base-case for comparison, and letters B, C, and D would be estimated as differences in means from A. This is Model 1.

In the second ANOVA, the independent variable was the city in which each neighborhood was located (hereafter Model 2). This analysis was conducted because we were concerned that unobserved city-specific characteristics pertaining to such things as land use policy, urban form, climate, and other factors may have influenced tree canopy cover. The purpose of Model 2 was to test whether tree canopy cover varied across each study city.

As anticipated, tree canopy varies significantly by city. We therefore fit a mixed-effect model with the four-category HOLC grades as the fixed effects, with random intercepts for city, as shown in Eq. ( 1 ) and termed Model 3.

Where η ij is tree canopy as a percentage land area for HOLC polygon i in city j . HOLC grade A is the reference, and γ 00 is the intercept and mean value of percent tree canopy cover in formerly A-graded neighborhoods. γ 10 , γ 20 , γ 30 , are the coefficients of interest, which represent the differences in mean tree canopy from A by HOLC grades B, C, and D, respectively. μ 0 j represents the city-specific random intercept, which was included to capture unobserved aspects of each city, e ij is the observation-level residuals, σ 2 is the within-city variance, and τ 00 represents the variance across cities. The variance partitioning coefficient, also known as the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) is “a population estimate of the variance explained by the grouping structure” 94 , which was calculated as the between-group-variance ( τ 00 , random intercept variance) divided by the total variance (i.e., sum of between-group-variance τ 00 and within-group σ 2 residual variance), shown in Eq. ( 2 ).

T-statistics were treated as Wald Z-statistics for calculating the confidence intervals and p -values, assuming a normal-distribution. An approximate R 2 was computed as the proportion of variance explained in the random effect after adding the categorical HOLC fixed effect to the model. This is computed as the correlation between fitted and observed values 95 . AIC minimization was used to compare Models 1, 2, and 3, and to determine the best fitting model 96 .

Cities with enough A- and D-graded neighborhoods were examined in order to determine if the patterns from cross-city, pooled analyses hold within individual cities. D-graded areas are common, but A-graded areas were limiting. For each city with ≥10 HOLC-defined A-neighborhoods ( n  = 8: Los Angeles, Chicago, Cleveland, New York City, Lynchburg, Seattle, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia), Wilcoxon rank-sum tests were used to compare pairwise differences in tree canopy cover from A to D neighborhoods. All other pairwise tests were omitted for parsimony (Fig. 2 ).

Methods for further tests and robustness checks

Four types of checks were conducted: one set to assess the potentially undue influence of cities with many HOLC-defined neighborhoods, a second to assess the influence of metropolitan areas with partially missing data, and a third to examine the sensitivity of grouping the five boroughs of New York City, and Chelsea and Cambridge with Boston, and a fourth to examine data from different sources.

Two strategies were used in order to evaluate whether the results of Models 1, 2, and 3 were driven by the metropolitan areas with the most HOLC-defined neighborhoods. First, the boxplots for all cities are provided in Fig. S1 so that the within-city patterns can be examined visually. Second, as a robustness check, Model 3 was re-fit without data from the metropolitan areas with ≥50 neighborhoods to see if the patterns would still hold (Table S1 ). The inferences from this smaller model remain unchanged, however, the confidence intervals are larger by construction.

Tree canopy data were not available for the entire extent of the HOLC-defined areas in seven metropolitan areas. The missing data are usually at the edges of the geographic extent, and therefore non-random. Specifically, tree canopy data were not available for the entire extent HOLC-defined neighborhoods in Boston, Denver, Detroit, New Haven, New York City, Seattle, and Toledo, which collectively represent 4.67% of the total dataset’s observations. To address non-random, partially missing data at the edges of these metropolitan regions, Model 3 was re-fit with these cities removed entirely (Table S1 , Model 5). Model 5 provides substantively similar results and interpretation to the main Model 3 and the point estimates remain within the bounds of Model 3’s confidence intervals.

The sensitivity of the analytical decision to group the five boroughs of New York City, and Chelsea and Cambridge with Boston was also examined. A version of Model 3 (Table S1 , Model 5) was fit without grouping, which adds 6 additional random intercepts. Again, no substantive changes were observed.

Finally, land cover data for Sacramento, Denver, Miami, Tampa, Holyoke-Chicopee, Toledo, and Seattle all came from different sources (Table S1 , Model 6). It is possible that data from those cities may have influenced the results if the land cover data were not comparable to those produced by SAL. Based on Model 6, no substantive changes were observed. All robustness check models supported the inferences of the main results: formerly D-graded areas had roughly half as much tree canopy as formerly A-graded areas.

Limitations

Cross-city analyses 97 and meta-analyses 16 , 17 have demonstrated inequitable distribution of tree canopy by already disadvantaged groups. This paper builds on those studies by using a consistent approach across 37 cities. These 37 cities (or ~15% of all redlined cities) were chosen based on availability of data. However, this convenience sample nevertheless covers a range of characteristics in population from ~42,000 people (Lynchburg, VA) to ~7.2 million people (New York City) at the time they were redlined in 15 states. When they were redlined, these 37 urban areas analyzed housed ~28.7 million people.

Data availability

All data generated and analyzed as part of this study are openly available from the Environmental Data Initiative (EDI) Data Portal via the following https://doi.org/10.6073/pasta/4ccbc7087959dc2a25063e589dee7718 98 . The data are as follows: (1) City-specific file geodatabases with feature classes of the HOLC polygons obtained from the Mapping Inequality Project https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/ , and tables summarizing tree canopy, and in some cases other land cover classes. (2) An *.R script that replicates all of the analyses, graphs and tables in the article describing the related study. Other double checks, exploratory and miscellaneous outputs can also be created by the script. (3) A *.csv file containing city, the HOLC grade, and the percent tree canopy cover. This can be used to create the main findings of the article and this flat file is provided as an alternative to running the R script to extract information from the geodatabases, combine and analyze them. The intention is that this file is more widely accessible; the underlying information is the same.

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This work was supported by the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC) under funding received from the National Science Foundation DBI-1639145. This work was also supported by the Baltimore Ecosystem Study (BES) DEB-1637661 and DEB-1855277. Thanks to all data providers, the team in the Spatial Analysis Lab at the University of Vermont, and the Mapping Inequality project. Thanks to Mary Cadenasso and the Cadenasso Landscape and Urban Ecology lab at UC Davis for the Sacramento, CA data, and Monika Moskal and the Remote Sensing and Geospatial Analysis Laboratory at the University of Washington for the Seattle data, and NCDC Imaging and City and County of Denver GIS team. Thanks to Shawn Landry and the Water Institute at the University of South Florida for the Tampa, FL data and for providing thoughtful input on an earlier draft that improved the paper. Thank you Liz Wise, Brian Falasca, Michele Romolini, and LARIAC for access the LA Land cover data. Amanda Phillips de Lucas provided important insights about large-scale infrastructure projects and urban renewal. The findings and opinions reported here do not necessarily reflect those of the funders of this research.

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D.H.L., B.H., and J.M.G. designed the research; D.H.L and B.H. performed the research; D.H.L. and J.O.D. analyzed the data; D.H.L., B.H., J.M.G., S.T.A.P., L.A.O., C.F.A., and C.G.B. interpreted the data and findings; D.H.L., B.H., J.M.G., S.T.A.P., L.A.O., C.F.A., and C.G.B. revised and provided critically important content; and D.H.L., B.H., J.M.G., S.T.A.P., L.A.O., C.F.A., and C.G.B. wrote the paper.

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Locke, D.H., Hall, B., Grove, J.M. et al. Residential housing segregation and urban tree canopy in 37 US Cities. npj Urban Sustain 1 , 15 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42949-021-00022-0

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U.S. neighborhoods are more segregated than a generation ago, perpetuating racial inequity

There’s an adage among housing justice advocates: “Tell me your zip code and I’ll tell you how long you’ll live.” In fact, we can also estimate how much money you earn, the quality of your education and even the likelihood you’ll go to jail.

As a society, there’s a growing awareness of the role that race plays in shaping life outcomes, from maternal mortality rates to the chance of incarceration . Yet we often overlook one of the root causes in staggering disparities in health, income and incarceration — where we live.

Racial residential segregation in the United States is the mechanism by which people are sorted into neighborhoods and communities that offer opportunity and deny it. Your residence determines the schools your children are zoned for, the amenities in your neighborhood, the safety of your streets and air and drinking water, your proximity to jobs, the strength of your municipal tax base and local economy and the degree of police surveillance and harassment you may endure.

Opinion Your baby isn't colorblind — pretending they are won't make them less racist

Although economic segregation has been rising in recent decades, racial residential segregation is higher and stronger . Even affluent and middle-class people of color disproportionately reside in lower-opportunity neighborhoods, while lower-income white people have access to higher-opportunity communities .

Residential segregation was carefully built into our metropolitan areas during the course of the 20th century through collective private action and government policy. And although fair housing laws now prohibit discrimination in housing, segregation persists for a variety of complicated reasons, including differences in wealth and income and local land use policies.

But until now, our understanding of the issue has been incomplete. Using more precise measures of housing segregation that better capture America’s growing diversity rather than exclusively focusing on Black and white populations, new research developed by our team at the University of California at Berkeley shows that racial residential segregation is both more widespread than is generally appreciated and more harmful. To our great surprise, we found that more than 80 percent of major metropolitan areas in the United States were actually more segregated in 2019 than they were in 1990.

Part of the reason for this is that two fast-growing racial groups, Asian Americans and Latinos, are more segregated today than they were in the past. And whites, who are the most segregated group, frequently use racial composition of the neighborhood as a signal for neighborhood and school quality, as well as property value potential, at times paying a premium for this equation.

But the main reason is that the United States continues to be a place of segregation, not integration. In a period of growing diversity, the only way our regions can become less segregated is if that diversity is more evenly distributed across and within neighborhoods than pre-existing demographic patterns. This tends not to be the case, even though there are very few completely racially homogeneous communities anymore. The result is that our nation’s growing diversity also produces more, not less, segregation.

Opinion We want to hear what you THINK. Please submit a letter to the editor.

Moreover, our research is clear that segregated and integrated neighborhoods have distinct outcomes for all residents in them, irrespective of the race of the individual. Residents of highly segregated Black and Latinx neighborhoods, including white residents, have lower life expectancies , lower incomes, lower home values and lower educational attainments. Conversely, Black and brown people in integrated or highly segregated white communities have much better life outcomes along these measures.

Despite this evidence, and the enormous academic literature on segregation in the fields of health, economics and education, there remains considerable ambivalence about ending it. For African Americans who participated in school desegregation plans, like Vice President Kamala Harris , for example, the experience was often fraught. Evidence shows that Black students who attended desegregated schools had their life trajectories changed for the better (on average, and as measured by the types of factors described above), but at the cost of greater exposure to racism and loss of many supportive teachers and mentors. As a result, many anti-racism treatises today are skeptical of integration as a solution to structural racism, calling for redistribution of resources and equalizing school funding instead.

The problem, however, is that virtually all available empirical evidence indicates it is unlikely that we can ever close out racial disparities, let alone significantly improve life outcomes for racially marginalized people in a racially segregated society. That’s because, in every known human society with segregation, from Northern Ireland to India , this practice separates social groups from critical resources.

Policies that redistribute resources can help reduce these inequities, but racial residential segregation so effectively sorts vitalizing resources and social connections that no such plan can fully remedy the underlying mechanism. And they won’t fully solve structural racism, as cases, such as public schools in New York City in which school funding has been greatly increased, demonstrate . A recent report shows that while the city’s schools have some of the highest per pupil expenditures in the country, and significant resources have been put into trying to equalize educational spending across the district, it has had little effect in reducing racial disparities. When students of much greater need and disadvantage are concentrated together, equalizing funding can’t come close to eliminating persistent disparities.

Racial residential segregation also undermines the possibility of a national community with a sense of shared purpose and common destiny. As the Kerner Commission wrote in its landmark report of 1968, integration is “the only course which explicitly seeks to achieve a single nation” rather than a dual or permanently divided society.

More to the point, redistribution without integration is tantamount to pursuing the notoriously flawed dictum of Plessy v. Ferguson: “separate but equal.” As the Supreme Court ultimately recognized in Brown v. Board of Education, separate can never be equal. And even if it were somehow possible to transform Plessy’stransparent fiction into social fact, it would merely cement the balkanized nation the Kerner Commission feared, moving us ever further away from a nation where everyone belongs.

Opinion America has been measuring segregation wrong. It's not too late to get it right.

The Biden administration has initiated a broad and remarkable set of interventions across the federal bureaucracy aimed at promoting racial equity , but they may only marginally reduce extreme racial disparities and improve the lives of people of color. What’s needed are bold and ambitious plans that not only improve the economic conditions of segregated neighborhoods but deliberately promote racial integration.

This can start by reinstating an Obama-era rule from 2015 that required federal funds for housing projects to be used to support integration, a rule that was dropped under the Trump administration but that the Biden administration is looking to put back. Meanwhile, our state and municipal governments have a role to play, too. A handful of cities, for instance, are loosening exclusionary zoning and other land-use rules that limit the construction of affordable housing, which our research found to be key barriers to integration.

In the wake of last year’s unprecedented protests demanding racial justice, too many people directed their attention at symptoms rather than root causes. If the goal is to reduce — or even zero out — racial inequities in our society, that goal will remain ever elusive in a racially segregated society.

Stephen Menendian is the assistant director and director of research at the Othering and Belonging Institute at the University of California at Berkeley. He is a lead researcher on the recent study  “The Roots of Structural Racism: Twenty-First Century Racial Residential Segregation in the United States .” 

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Attacking the Black–White Opportunity Gap That Comes from Residential Segregation

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Residential segregation between black and white Americans remains both strikingly high and deeply troubling. Black–white residential segregation is a major source of unequal opportunity for African Americans: among other things, it perpetuates an enormous wealth gap and excludes black students from many high-performing schools. While some see residential segregation as “natural”—an outgrowth of the belief that birds of a feather flock together—black–white segregation in America is mostly a result of deliberate public policies that were designed to subjugate black people and promote white supremacy.

Because the federal, state, and local policy arenas were the laboratory for engineering black–white residential segregation, that is where people must work to help undo it. In order for these heinous differences to be reversed, people in government at all levels have to be proactive in eliminating policy that supports segregation and in creating anti-segregation policies.

It is time for bold action. The first part of this report outlines why all Americans should care about black–white residential segregation: the perpetuation of an opportunity gap between blacks and whites. The second part delineates the ways in which black–white segregation is rooted primarily in deliberate government policies enacted over generations. And the last part of the report sketches a four-prong strategy for undoing this horrible creation.

First, policymakers should address the legacy of generations of racial discrimination in housing by implementing the “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing” provision of the Fair Housing Act and providing new mortgage assistance to buy homes in formerly “redlined” areas. Second, government should seek to reduce contemporary residential racial discrimination by increasing resources allocated to fair housing testers and reestablishing the federal interagency task force to combat lending discrimination. Third, officials should counter contemporary residential economic discrimination that disproportionately hurts African Americans by curbing exclusionary zoning, funding “disparate impact” litigation, adopting “inclusionary zoning” policies, banning source of income discrimination, and beefing up housing mobility programs. Fourth, policy officials should respond to the re-segregating effects of displacement that can come with gentrification by revising tax abatement policies that promote gentrification, implementing longtime owner occupancy programs, and investing in people, not powerbrokers.

How Black–White Segregation Perpetuates an Opportunity Gap

Residential segregation between black and white Americans remains very high more than fifty years after passage of the 1968 Fair Housing Act. An analysis of U.S. Census Data from 2013–17 found that the “dissimilarity index” between blacks and non-Hispanic whites for metropolitan areas was 0.526 for the median area—meaning that 52.6 percent of African Americans or whites would have to move for the area to be fully integrated. (A dissimilarity index of 0 represents complete integration between two groups, while 100 represents absolute apartheid.) The index for black–white segregation was higher than it was for segregation between non-Hispanic whites and Asians (0.467), and segregation between non-Hispanic whites and Hispanics (0.407). 1 And while the nation is also seeing increasing residential segregation by income, racial segregation today remains starker and more pervasive than economic segregation. 2 Analyzing data over time, Paul Jargowsky of Rutgers University writes of African Americans: “Few groups in American history have ever experienced such high levels of segregation, let alone sustained them over decades.” 3

Residential segregation matters immensely, because where people live affects so much of their lives, such as their access to transportation, education, employment opportunities, and good health care. In the case of black–white segregation in particular, the separateness of African-American families and white families has contributed significantly to two entrenched inequalities that are especially glaring: the enormous wealth gap between these races, and their grossly unequal access to strong public educational opportunities.

It is well established that historical and contemporary racial discrimination has given rise to a substantial income gap between black and white Americans. African Americans make, on average, about 60 percent of what whites make. 4 But housing segregation helps explain the ways in which African-American families are further disadvantaged compared to white families who have the same income and education levels. Typically, higher levels of education and income translate into higher levels of wealth and less exposure to concentrated poverty. In the case of African Americans, however, residential segregation by race imposes a penalty that interrupts these positive patterns. Stunningly, African-American households headed by an individual with a bachelor’s degree have just two-thirds of the wealth, on average, of white households headed by an individual who lacks a high school degree . 5 Equally astonishingly, middle-class blacks live in neighborhoods with higher poverty rates than low-income whites. 6 As the following sections will show, these negative outcomes are largely a result of residential segregation; furthermore, when black–white segregation is reduced, outcomes for black families are shown to improve.

How Residential Segregation Affects Wealth Accumulation

Racial residential segregation inhibits home value appreciation in predominantly African-American neighborhoods. Research finds that some white families remain distressingly resistant to buying homes in predominantly African-American neighborhoods; for example, even when all other characteristics of homes and neighborhoods are identical, white respondents view predominantly black neighborhoods as less safe and less desirable than predominantly white neighborhoods. 7 Fewer potential buyers—particularly among the whiter and thus usually wealthier segment of the market—means significantly lower rates of home appreciation.

Because homes are typically the largest financial asset for most Americans, segregated markets significantly reduce the accumulated wealth of blacks. This phenomenon—on top of the penalties endured during the historical legacy of slavery and Jim Crow—helps explain why the black–white wealth gap is so much larger than the black–white income gap. While median income for black households is 59 percent that of white households, black median household net worth is just 8 percent of white median household net worth. 8 (See Figure 1.)

The segregation-driven wealth gap imposes enormous burdens on African Americans. Having or lacking wealth influences many of life’s big decisions—from financing a child’s education to saving for retirement.

How Residential Segregation Affects Exposure to Concentrated Poverty, Particularly in Schools

Racial residential segregation also means that African Americans are more likely to be steered toward high-poverty neighborhoods, further contributing to the opportunity gap. Typically, families with higher levels of income have access to more-affluent neighborhoods, which tend to have more amenities, and, in particular, higher-performing public schools. Yet persistent racial residential segregation (and the wealth gap it creates) means even middle-class black families are more likely to live in concentrated poverty, and thus are more likely to send their children to high-poverty schools than are low-income whites . In fact, sociologist Patrick Sharkey finds that middle-class African Americans earning $100,000 or more per year live in neighborhoods with the same disadvantages as the average white household earning less than $30,000 per year. 9 Living in a neighborhood with concentrated poverty is associated with a variety of learning disadvantages, including lower scores on cognitive tests. One study by Harvard University’s Robert Sampson and colleagues on African-American children in Chicago found that living in a high-poverty neighborhood was associated with lower scores on vocabulary and reading tests that were roughly the equivalent of a full grade of school learning. 10

Even middle-class black families are more likely to live in concentrated poverty, and thus are more likely to send their children to high-poverty schools than are low-income whites .

Some students can use public school choice policies to circumvent residential segregation to attend integrated magnet or charter schools outside their neighborhood, but most cannot. Seventy-five percent of American students attend a neighborhood public school—that is, they are simply assigned to the school nearest their homes. 11 This inability of most students to attend schools beyond their neighborhood is troubling, because low-income students who are given the chance to attend socioeconomically integrated schools are shown to achieve at much higher levels than do low-income students in high-poverty schools. On the 2017 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) given to fourth graders in math, for example, low-income students attending schools that are more affluent scored roughly two years of learning ahead of low-income students in high-poverty schools. 12 Controlling carefully for students’ family background, another study found that students in mixed-income schools showed 30 percent more growth in test scores over their four years in high school than peers with similar socioeconomic backgrounds in schools with concentrated poverty. 13

Because of racial residential segregation, low-income African Americans are much less likely to be afforded the opportunity to attend socioeconomically integrated schools. According to a 2017 analysis by Emma Garcia of the Economic Policy Institute , 81.1 percent of poor black children attended high poverty schools in 2013, compared with just 53.5 percent of poor white children. 14 (See Figure 2.) That is to say, less than one in five poor black children had access to a predominantly middle-class school, compared to almost half of poor white children.

When Racial Segregation Is Reduced, African Americans Have Better Outcomes

Would outcomes for African Americans improve if residential racial segregation were reduced? Because levels of black–white segregation vary across the country, it is possible for researchers to examine different outcome levels for African Americans in communities with higher or lower levels of black–white segregation.

Scholars have found that African Americans in moderately segregated metropolitan areas have much better employment levels, earnings, and mortality rates than do African Americans in metropolitan areas with very high segregation levels. The University of California at Los Angeles’s Richard H. Sander and Jonathan M. Zazloff, along with Yana A. Kucheva of the City College of New York, looked at outcomes for African Americans in metropolitan areas where the black–white dissimilarity index was below 0.60 outcomes and compared them with outcomes for African Americans living in areas with a dissimilarity index above 0.80. The outcomes were consistently better for African Americans living in moderately segregated areas than highly segregated areas, both in absolute terms and when compared with non-Hispanic whites living in the same regions. 15

The unemployment rate for black men ages 25–34, for example, was 17.4 percent in highly segregated areas, compared with 10.1 percent in moderately segregated areas. Unemployment was 3.48 times the level of non-Hispanic whites in highly segregated areas, but 1.44 times the level of non-Hispanic whites in moderately segregated areas. Earnings for black men aged 25–34 were $4,000 higher in moderately segregated areas than in highly segregated areas, and, relative to non-Hispanic whites, the earnings were higher—68 percent in moderately segregated areas compared with 47.6 percent in highly segregated areas. (See Figure 3.) Likewise, for all blacks, age-adjusted mortality (relative to non-Hispanic whites) was better in moderately segregated regions (1.14) than in highly segregated areas (1.42). 16

Part of the reason for better outcomes, the authors of the study suggest, is that blacks are more likely to live in concentrated poverty in metropolitan areas with high levels of racial segregation than those with moderate levels of racial segregation. The researchers found, for example, that 17 percent of low-income blacks living in moderately segregated metro areas reside in concentrated poverty, compared with 33 percent of low-income blacks living in highly segregated areas. 17

The Deliberate Social Engineering of Black–White Residential Segregation

Both currently and historically, segregation is best understood as a tool used to promote and preserve white supremacy, deployed to make it easier to isolate, divest from, surveil, and police black (and brown) people concentrated in certain communities. The ingenuity of this racist tool is that its evil use creates its own justification—that is, once employed, it creates perspectives and data that seem to support its further use. As communities of color suffer under the deprivations that come with segregation—economic disinvestment, political disenfranchisement, educational inequity, and unfair, ineffective policing practices—those who build and install resilient and enduring racist systems that sustain segregation explain their decisions in terms of protecting and promoting safety, strong schools, and stable housing markets. These indeed are desirable neighborhood attributes—but they are the very same attributes that the conditions of segregation disrupted for blacks.

The ingenuity of this racist tool is that its evil use creates its own justification—that is, once employed, it creates perspectives and data that seem to support its further use.

In fact, regarding neighborhood characteristics, African Americans express the same values and desires as most Americans, even though they have much more difficulty in realizing them. According to a study of black Long Islanders, residents considered the most important neighborhood characteristics to be a low crime rate (89 percent), landlords/homeowners who maintain their property (81 percent), high quality public schools (80 percent), and good public services (78 percent). Yet only 16 percent rated their local public schools as excellent , and 43 percent of residents reported feeling that their local government services were not a good value for the taxes that they pay. 18

Extensive evidence suggests that black residents in many segregated communities do not believe that their needs and desires are met in their current environments. Survey results indicate that most Americans prefer integrated neighborhoods, but white and black Americans define “integrated” differently. For African Americans, an integrated community is one where between 20 to 50 percent of residents are African American. White definitions of integration indicate that they accept diversity only when they can continue to dominate, defining integration as a scenario where only 10 percent of neighborhood residents are black. 19 A recent Pew Survey found that blacks are much more supportive of integrated schools than are whites, particularly when that integration necessitates children going to schools outside of their neighborhoods. Sixty-eight percent of blacks say that “students should go to schools that are racially and ethnically mixed, even if it means some students don’t go to school in their local community,” compared to just 35 percent of whites. 20 Given the close relationship between housing and school integration, such data exposes how the African-American value of integrated school options is crushed by the reality of racially isolated neighborhoods.

Certainly, integration is not a panacea for past and present injustices. In fact, pro-integration advocates should respect the ways that integration might lead to new hardships for black folks—increased discomfort and fear of police encounters, elevated levels of surveillance and suspicion from neighbors, disproportionate discipline of black children in predominantly white schools, and so on. 21 In large part due to the very attitudes that sustain segregation, communities of color have a reasonable desire to live in a safe and affirming space when living in a discriminatory society; and despite typically having fewer resources to work with, black and brown people so often foster loving, culturally rich, and affirming communities for themselves. And so one challenge of contemporary housing integration efforts becomes how to dismantle the racist system of policies that created and continue to sustain residential segregation without simultaneously destroying valuable cultural and economic institutions that black and brown communities have created in response to it.

Integration best functions (and is best incentivized) when public policies and private citizens tackle the myriad of inequities and indignities that complicate, and sometimes limit, the lives of African Americans. Despite this caveat, it remains true that (1) both historically and currently, black people have risked their comfort, livelihoods, and sometimes lives to gain access to integrated spaces; and, most importantly, that (2) segregation itself is a white supremacist practice that has proven both durable and highly effective at limiting black wealth and opportunity.

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From racial zoning to economic zoning.

Members of government and private entities began to deliberately segregate residential areas by race in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, largely by prohibiting blacks from purchasing homes in majority-white neighborhoods. After the Civil War, those newly liberated black people dispersed throughout the United States, but an abrupt end to Reconstruction ushered in an era of heightened white paramilitary violence, exploitative sharecropping arrangements, and Jim Crow laws. As anti-black discrimination formalized and intensified, many communities systematically expelled African Americans, excluded them from public goods and services, and adopted policies that forbade blacks from residing in towns, or even remaining within town borders after dark. 23 Communities who forbade blacks from being within their borders after dark came to be known as “sundown towns”; by 1930, at least 235 counties had “sundowned” black people, often enforcing their rules through violence. 24

Pioneered by Baltimore in 1910, racial zoning quickly emerged as an effective way to further subjugate and segregate black folks. Baltimore’s then-mayor did not mince words when discussing the motivation for such an ordinance: “Blacks should be quarantined in isolated slums in order to reduce the incidence of civil disturbance, to prevent the spread of communicable disease into nearby white neighborhoods, and to protect property values among the white majority.” 25 Soon, similar policies spread to other cities, including Atlanta, Birmingham, Dade County (Miami), Charleston, Dallas, Louisville, New Orleans, Oklahoma City, Richmond, St. Louis, and others. 26

The U.S. Supreme Court in 1917 struck down explicit racial zoning with its decision in Buchanan v. Warley , arguing that such ordinances interfered with the rights of property owners. 27 The ruling failed to put an end to segregation, however, instead motivating a new wave of racist creativity by white leaders and communities. Localities quickly found a way to circumvent the ruling and preserve the racial caste system in housing. Some localities created and enforced laws in flagrant violation of Buchanan. Richmond, Virginia, for example, passed a law prohibiting anyone from moving onto a block where they could not marry the majority of people on that block. Because the state had then-enforceable anti-miscegenation laws on the books, the ordinance effectively prevented neighborhood integration without explicitly mentioning race. 28

Other localities were slightly more subtle. Switching from race-based zoning to economic zoning, cities and localities designed policies now known as “exclusionary zoning,” which require that neighborhoods consist exclusively of single-family homes, have minimum lot sizes, and/or have minimum square footage requirements. These policies rapidly proliferated. In 1916, just eight cities had zoning ordinances; by 1936, that number had risen to 1,246 . 29

The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the practice of exclusionary zoning in Euclid v. Ambler (1926), finding that zoning ordinances were reasonable extensions of police power and potentially beneficial to public welfare. While arguments against placement of factories or landfills next to residences can reasonably be said to protect public safety, when it came to siting residences, the opinion in Euclid stated additional concerns: that an apartment could be “a mere parasite, constructed in order to take advantage of the open spaces and attractive surroundings created by the residential character of a neighborhood,” adding later that “apartment houses . . . come very near to being nuisances.” 30 Of course, because many blacks could not afford to buy around the expensive housing restrictions, such “race-neutral” economic zoning policies had a racially discriminatory effect.

Restrictive Covenants, Redlining, and Racial Violence

This supposedly “race-neutral” form of economic discrimination emerged alongside longstanding, more explicit political and economic racism. In order to continue to exclude middle- and upper-class blacks from white neighborhoods, public and private interests conspired to establish a web of racist policies and practices surrounding housing and homeownership. One practice for many white homeowners was to band together and adopt racially restrictive covenants in their neighborhoods, which forbade any buyer from reselling a home to black buyers. Initially upheld in Corrigan v. Buckley (1926), the U.S. Supreme Court reasoned that covenants were private contracts not subject to the Constitution. 31 But the Court’s logic was faulty, because (1) private contracts are not enforceable except through the power of the state, and (2) the state was using that power of enforcement. In city after city, courts and sheriffs successfully evicted African Americans from homes that they had rightly purchased in order to enforce racially restrictive covenants. 32 The racist contracts were so widely accepted that the commissioner of the Federal Housing Administration continued to recommend their use well after the U.S. Supreme Court declared them unconstitutional in Shelley v. Kramer (1948), dismissing the ruling and declaring that it was not “the policy of the government to require private individuals to give up their right to dispose of their property as they see fit.” 33 Still today, racially restrictive covenants appear in real estate records , even if they are unenforceable . 34

In order to continue to exclude middle- and upper-class blacks from white neighborhoods, public and private interests conspired to establish a web of racist policies and practices surrounding housing and homeownership.

The official position of the Federal Housing Administration—which underwrote $120 billion in new housing construction between 1934 and 1962—was that blacks were an adverse influence on property values. 35 In response, the FHA warned against insuring mortgages for homes in racially mixed neighborhoods, and counseled lenders to reject or give poor ratings to loan applicants from black and brown neighborhoods. Baking racial exclusion into programs designed to promote homeownership, an FHA manual suggested that the best financial bets were those where safeguards—such as highways separating communities—could prevent “the infiltration of lower class occupancy, and inharmonious racial groups.” 36 The FHA’s chief economist Homer Hoyt designed a racial ranking system that positioned “Mexicans” and “Negroes” as the least desirable neighborhood residents, and worked with the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation to map cities and design areas into various risk categories congruent with that racial hierarchy. Homebuyers seeking to purchase in “red” zone neighborhoods—those with high percentages of black residents, regardless of the wealth of those residents—would likely be denied a mortgage loan and received no federal support. The FHA provided the strongest financial support to green-zoned areas that, as one appraiser noted , lacked “a single foreigner or Negro.” 37 In 1940, the FHA actually denied insurance for a white developer with a project located near an African-American community until the builder agreed to construct a half-mile, six-foot high concrete wall to separate the two neighborhoods. 38 Not only did this practice of redlining explicitly encourage and perpetuate racial segregation, it also shut black Americans out of key opportunities for one of the country’s most effective wealth-building strategies: homeownership. Of all of the homeownership loans approved by the government between 1934 and 1968, whites received 98 percent of them. 39

The U.S. Supreme Court ultimately struck down racially restrictive covenants in Shelley v. Kramer (1948), but even then, many black families faced grave risks when attempting to move into white neighborhoods. Extralegal violence became an all-too-common method of maintaining segregation through intimidation and fear. 40 In one case, when a middle-class black family moved into an all-white neighborhood in a suburb of Philadelphia, some 600 white demonstrators gathered in front of the house and pelted the home and family with rocks. Shortly after, several whites rented a unit next door to the family, hoisting up a Confederate flag and blaring music throughout the night. Klan and community members burned a cross in the family’s yard. Law enforcement largely declined to intervene, with one sergeant suffering a demotion to patrolman after objecting to his orders not to interfere with the rioters. 41 In Richmond, California, members of the neighborhood homeowners association insisted that they could enforce a racially restrictive covenant against a black war veteran and his wife after they purchased a home there—four years after the Supreme Court had ruled such covenants unconstitutional. When the black family arrived, a mob of 300 gathered outside of their home, threw bricks at the house, and burned a cross in the front yard. As in Pennsylvania, the police refused to step in for several days, only intervening after the NAACP pressed the governor to do so. Still, no arrests were made. 42 In Los Angeles, of the more than one hundred incidents of move-in bombings and vandalism between 1950 and 1965, only one led to arrest and prosecution. 43 This harassment and racial terrorism was not declared a federal crime until the Fair Housing Act made it so in 1968. Still, the Southern Poverty Law Center found that, in 1985–86, only one-quarter of these incidents were prosecuted. 44

Ongoing Discrimination by Realtors, Banks, and Government Officials

To this day, forms of discrimination stymie racial integration and housing opportunities for black Americans. Attorneys and academics alike identify realtor bias and racial steering as factors that continue to disadvantage black people in the housing market. African Americans frequently encounter discrimination when searching for housing at all stages: they are more likely to receive subpar service when interacting with realtors, and are shown fewer homes for sale or rent than are whites. A 2003 study found that realtor steering of residents away from neighborhoods due to their racial composition is shockingly persistent, even if illegal. The practice showed up in up to 15 percent of tests that made their determination based on clear and explicit indications by the realtor. 45 Some scholars have explained that “agents typically accept the initial request as an accurate portrayal of a white’s preferences but adjust the initial request made by a black to conform to their preconceptions. In the case of houses with visible problems, agents refuse to accept the initial request that whites want such a house, but have no trouble making this inference for blacks.” 46 Now, there is evidence that such discrimination might have moved onto new platforms, with technology reinforcing human and societal biases. In March 2019, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) announced a lawsuit against social media giant Facebook , alleging that the platform allowed advertisers to use data in order to exclude certain racial groups from seeing home or apartment advertisements. 47

Relatedly, black homebuyers are also more likely to be steered toward high-interest and high-risk loans when seeking to purchase a home, regardless of income or creditworthiness. A black family that earns $157,000 per year is less likely to qualify for a prime loan than is a white family earning $40,000 per year, which means that white families can borrow heavily at favorable rates, while black families are far less likely to receive a safe, fair loan product. 48 In 2006, 53.7 percent of blacks and 46.6 percent of Latinx applicants received high-priced loans; only 17.7 percent of white borrowers did. This pattern remains even after controlling for borrower characteristics (income, credit score) and the amount of the loan, though the gaps do become less stark. Interestingly, these disparities actually worsened at higher income levels. 49 Because predatory lenders are more likely to set up shop in predominantly black neighborhoods, their actions wind up leading to generational wealth loss in communities of color. One study indicated that, since 2005, more than half of all borrowers who were issued subprime loans could have qualified for lower-cost loans with more favorable terms. 50 Because of their costs and risky nature, subprime loans are more likely to result in foreclosures, which have been disproportionately located in low-income and predominantly black neighborhoods. In the run-up to the subprime mortgage crisis, federal regulators failed in their obligation to recognize the targeting of African Americans and enforce the laws against bad actors who participated in this predatory behavior. The result was a staggering collapse of wealth among black communities; in Prince George’s County, Maryland, for example, during the crisis, “high-earning blacks were 80 percent more likely to lose their homes than their white counterparts. ” 51

Current public policy choices hardly indicate that government will readily act as a reliable partner in seeking housing desegregation. To this day, public policy choices by state and local officials tend to steer public housing units, which are disproportionately occupied by black and brown residents, into high-poverty areas with fewer resources and opportunities. And the federal government’s two major programs that seek to help low-income people rent homes in the private market—the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) program and Section 8 housing vouchers—often perpetuate economic and racial segregation.

To this day, public policy choices by state and local officials tend to steer public housing units, which are disproportionately occupied by black and brown residents, into high-poverty areas with fewer resources and opportunities.

The Low-Income Housing Tax Credit program, which allocates a certain number of tax credits for states to distribute to developers according to housing needs, allows consideration of several factors that help determine where new housing will be located. Because housing agencies can consider community support levels when determining housing locations, and more affluent areas are more likely to organize in opposition to such developments, this housing is more likely to be steered into already-low-income communities. 52 The nation’s largest low-income housing program—Section 8 vouchers—is directed toward individuals rather than state agencies or developers, in theory giving people more control over where they live. But despite this program’s potential advantage for integration, the limited nature of the vouchers does not provide sufficient support for families to rent in higher-income and more-advantaged areas. Moreover, some states actually allow landlords to reject Section 8 housing vouchers , as income (unlike race) is not a protected class. 53

Public Policy Remedies

Government is the laboratory in which many of the schemes for black–white segregation were (and still are) concocted; it is also, therefore, where much of the effort must be placed in order for racial segregation to be undone. Members of government who want to reverse segregation must work to remove policies that promote and protect white supremacy, and replace them instead with ones that actively fight segregation. The rest of this report outlines a four-part strategy to address the following four key facets of black–white segregation: (1) the legacy of generations of racial discrimination in housing; (2) contemporary residential racial discrimination; (3) contemporary residential economic discrimination that disproportionately hurts African Americans; and (4) the re-segregating effects of displacement that can come with gentrification.

Addressing the Legacy of Generations of Racial Discrimination in Housing

When Congress passed the Fair Housing Act (FHA) in 1968, it intended for the executive branch to take steps to reduce housing segregation, with several courts interpreting the FHA as assigning HUD a nonnegotiable “statutory duty to promote fair housing.” 54 But it was not until decades later, in 2015, that the Obama administration introduced a rule to implement the Fair Housing Act’s “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing” (AFFH) requirement. The 2015 rule charged HUD with “taking meaningful actions, in addition to combating discrimination, that overcome patterns of segregation and foster inclusive communities free from barriers that restrict access to opportunity based on protected characteristics” and “replacing segregated living patterns with truly integrated and balanced living patterns.” 55

The failure to implement the AFFH requirements for nearly a half century after passage of the Fair Housing Act allowed segregation to remain the norm—particularly in predominantly black areas. “Segregation decreases most quickly in metro areas with small black populations,” observes NYU’s Furman Center . “Conversely, metropolitan areas with large black populations living in poverty showed the highest levels of black–white segregation, as measured by the dissimilarity index, in 2010.” 56 As noted in the first section of this report, while the black–white dissimilarity index has declined over time, it remains extremely high. Furthermore, although the portion of neighborhoods that have only a tiny share of black residents has declined, the proportion of black people living in racially integrated neighborhoods in certain communities has also declined. In New York City, for example, the proportion has actually decreased from 41 percent in 1970 to 21 percent in 2010. 57 Rigorous enforcement of the AFFH rule is as important as ever.

Despite this need, President Donald Trump and Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson suspended the AFFH rule in 2018. HUD also removed, without public comment, the Assessment of Fair Housing (AFH) tool, which aided communities in determining housing needs and segregation patterns. This suspension aligns with Secretary Carson’s public disdain for the AFFH rule, which he unfairly derided as “social engineering” and “a tortured reading of fair housing laws.” 58

Housing justice and the fulfillment of the Fair Housing Act should not be held hostage to the political whims of an administration led by a man who was himself investigated for racial discrimination in his own real estate holdings . 59 Reinstatement and rigorous enforcement of the AFFH are clear next steps in the quest to narrow the black–white housing opportunity gap.

In addition, government should undertake efforts to address the legacy of discrimination in the financing of homes. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), for example, has appropriately proposed providing new mortgage assistance to buy homes in formerly redlined neighborhoods.

Addressing Contemporary Racial Residential Discrimination

Attacking contemporary racial discrimination will require additional tools specifically aimed at both racial bias in the sale and rental of properties and in the financing of residential purchases.

Increase the Number of, and Resources for, Fair Housing Testers and Enforcement

Fair housing testing is an effective means to uncovering evidence of discrimination in renting or purchasing homes. Typically responding to tips from prospective homebuyers belonging to a protected group, individual testers (with no true intent to purchase or rent a home) pose as potential buyers or renters for the purpose of gathering information on possible FHA violations. In accordance with the Fair Housing Act, testers are looking to uncover discrimination based on race, color, religion, national origin, sex, disability, and familial status.

When testing is conducted, results can be eye opening. A study by the Chicago Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, “Fair Housing Testing Project for the Chicago Commission on Human Relations,” tested for source of income and racial discrimination in seventy properties in six Chicago neighborhoods. Of the tests conducted, thirty revealed one or both forms of discrimination. 60

HUD funds many of these exercises through the Fair Housing Initiatives Program (FHIP), and should increase the resources allotted to the program to match the prevalence and gravity of the problem. Because discrimination can be difficult to prove, and because evidence indicates that it is quite widespread, increased resources for testing have been productively used to unearth cases of bias and secure remedies for victims of housing discrimination. When HUD offered grants to a small number of localities for testing programs in the mid-1990s, the Iowa Civil Rights Commission was able to conduct over 900 tests, found 136 possible violations, and filed 41 complaints. During the expansion of this program within Bill Clinton’s first term as president, HUD settled 6,517 cases out of court , took enforcement action on another 1,085, and received nearly $18 million in compensation for housing discrimination victims. 61 Localities need more resources to continue the work of rooting out tough-to-prove acts of discrimination.

Reestablish and Strengthen Federal Interagency Taskforces That Combat Lending Discrimination

Established early in the Obama administration, the Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force (FFETF) brought together a broad coalition of law enforcement, regulatory, and investigatory agencies to combat financial fraud. As part of its mandate, the FFETF looked closely at discrimination in lending practices, such as racialized loan steering.

In 2015, based upon the work of the coalition, the U.S. Department of Justice filed its largest residential fair lending suit in history against Countrywide Financial Corporation and its subsidiaries. The complaint alleged that Countrywide engaged in a widespread practice of discrimination against more than 200,000 qualified African-American and Hispanic borrowers in their mortgage lending between 2004 and 2008. Countrywide did so by charging them higher fees and interest rates, and by steering thousands of black and Hispanic borrowers into subprime mortgages when non-Hispanic white borrowers with similar credit profiles received prime loans. Disturbingly, the suit also alleged that Countrywide was aware of this racial discrimination and took no meaningful action to stop it or prevent it from continuing.

The federal government, which at one time was itself a purveyor of racist lending and housing practices, should provide the appropriate resources and coordination to seek justice for continued fallout of financial racism on the well-being of black Americans.

This was the first time that the Department of Justice alleged and obtained relief for victims of loan steering, but the process of investigating and organizing the suit made clear how challenging these cases are to prove and bring forth. The federal government, which at one time was itself a purveyor of racist lending and housing practices, should provide the appropriate resources and coordination to seek justice for continued fallout of financial racism on the well-being of black Americans.

Addressing Ongoing Economic Discrimination That Disproportionately Hurts African Americans

Action should also be taken to curb the discrimination against African Americans (which is illegal) cloaked as income discrimination (which, unfortunately, frequently is still legal). 62 As noted above, after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down racial zoning laws in 1917, jurisdictions rapidly adopted economically exclusionary zoning policies that ban apartment buildings and other multifamily units, in order to achieve much the same result. Today, exclusionary zoning is pervasive in the United States and has been found to exacerbate both economic and racial segregation. Jonathan Rothwell and Douglas Massey have found that “a change in permitted zoning from the most restrictive to the least would close 50 percent of the observed gap between the most unequal metropolitan area and the least, in terms of neighborhood inequality.” 63

In another study, Rothwell concludes that local and exclusionary land-use regulations are largely responsible for differences in racial segregation between cities. 64 One study by Harvard researcher Matthew Resseger finds that in Massachusetts, census blocks “zoned for multi-family housing have black population shares 3.36 percentage points higher and Hispanic population shares 5.77 percentage points higher than single-family zoned blocks directly across a border from them.” 65

To address contemporary income discrimination, we need a five-pronged approach: (1) adoption of an Economic Fair Housing Act that launches a direct assault on exclusionary zoning; (2) funding of disparate impact litigation under the Fair Housing Act that challenges exclusionary zoning when it disproportionately affects people of color; (3) adoption of “inclusionary zoning” policies that set aside a portion of new housing developments for families of modest means; (4) adoption of laws outlining “source of income” discrimination targeting public housing residents; and (5) adoption of “mobility programs” modeled after the federal Moving to Opportunity Act, which provided residents of public housing the chance to live in high opportunity neighborhoods. Each of these approaches will reduce economic segregation and also reduce, indirectly, racial segregation.

Institute an Economic Fair Housing Act

We need an Economic Fair Housing Act —to parallel the 1968 Fair Housing Act—to curb explicit economic discrimination in the form of exclusionary zoning laws. 66 The concept of an Economic Fair Housing Act is straightforward: just as it is illegal to discriminate in housing based on race, it should be illegal for municipalities to employ exclusionary zoning policies (such as banning apartment buildings, townhouses, or houses on modestly sized lots) that discriminate based on income and exclude the non-rich from many neighborhoods and their associated schools. At the individual housing unit level, free market forces would continue to discriminate by income, because some apartments and houses will be more expensive than others—that simply is what markets do. But government zoning policies should not, on top of that, discriminate based on income by rendering off-limits entire communities where it is impossible to rent an apartment, live in a townhouse, or purchase a home on a modest plot of land.

One alternative to a complete ban on exclusionary zoning would be a federal (or state) policy to reduce the amount of mortgage interest that a family can deduct in jurisdictions that practice exclusionary zoning, as the University of North Carolina’s John Boger has suggested. 67 Another variation would bar federal funding for infrastructure to municipalities that insist on exclusionary zoning policies. For example, HUD currently allocates $50 billion for a variety of forms of public housing , including $5 billion in community planning and development grants. Although exclusive suburbs do not often rely on these housing grants, there are other federal spending programs that can provide leverage over wealthy communities. 68

Federal legislators have begun to propose action along these lines. Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ), for example, has proposed legislation to curtail exclusionary zoning . 69 Under Booker’s proposal, states, cities, and counties would receive $16 billion in a variety of infrastructure programs, and would be required to develop strategies to reduce barriers to housing development and increase the supply of housing. Plans could include authorizing more high density and multifamily zoning and relaxing lot size restrictions. The goal is for affordable housing units to comprise not less than 20 percent of new housing stock.

Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), likewise, has proposed a comprehensive housing plan that includes a new $10 billion infrastructure program with powerful incentives to reduce exclusionary zoning rules, such as “minimum lot sizes or mandatory parking requirements.” As she explained in March 2019, “to even apply for these grants,” localities “must reform land-use rules to allow for the construction of additional well-located affordable housing units.” 70

Similar legislation to reduce exclusionary zoning, particularly near mass transit hubs, has been introduced and debated in California. Spurred by affordability concerns (even more than concerns about segregation), Massachusetts and Seattle have also considered proposals to curtail exclusionary zoning. And in Minneapolis, the city recently adopted a proposal to end single-family zoning restrictions entirely.

California activist Brian Hanlon notes that progressives are rightfully proud of their openness to immigrants, so why, he asks, are some standing by exclusionary zoning, which says, “we welcome outsiders—but you’ve got to have a $2 million entrance fee to live here.” 71

Fund Disparate Impact Litigation

Government should devote greater resources to bringing litigation to challenge economic zoning laws that don’t explicitly discriminate based on race but have a “racially disparate” impact. Over time, the courts interpreted the Fair Housing Act to allow plaintiffs to bring such lawsuits targeting policies that have a discriminatory impact on minorities, even absent a discriminatory intent. The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed this interpretation of the act in the 2015 case of Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. Inclusive Communities Project. 72

Adopt Inclusionary Zoning Policies

More localities should support “inclusionary zoning” policies. Under such programs, a developer must set aside a portion of new housing units to be affordable for low- and moderate-income residents. In exchange, the developer receives a “density bonus,” allowing them to develop a larger number of high-profit units than the area is zoned for. This benefit for developers has proven critical to the idea’s political acceptance. Among the states most dedicated to inclusionary zoning are New Jersey, Massachusetts, Maryland, and California. 73 In all, about 400 municipalities have inclusionary zoning programs. 74 According to researcher David Rusk, 11 percent of Americans now live in jurisdictions with inclusionary zoning policies. 75

A leading example is Montgomery County, Maryland, which adopted a groundbreaking program in 1974. Under the policy, when a developer builds more than a certain number of units, 12.5 percent to 15 percent of a developer’s new housing stock must be affordable for low-income and working-class families. Between 1976 and 2010, the program produced more than 12,000 moderately priced homes, of which the housing authority has the right to purchase one-third for public housing. 76 Unfortunately, almost 90 percent of American municipalities lack any inclusionary zoning policies.

Expand Housing Choice Vouchers and Ban of Source-of-Income Discrimination

More states and localities should pass legislation to ban discrimination based on “source of income”—that is, discrimination against individuals using government subsidies to pay for part of their rent. According to the Poverty and Race Research Action Council, as of May 2017, fourteen states and sixty localities had passed legislation to bar source of income discrimination. 77 Senator Warren has also called for making it illegal for landlords to discriminate against renters with federal housing vouchers. 78 In addition to banning discrimination based on source of income, the Housing Choice Vouchers Program (formerly known as Section 8 housing assistance) should be fully funded. Housing Choice Vouchers (along with a few other smaller programs) served only 4.7 million households in 2016 of the 25.7 million who qualified. 79 The combination of full funding and reduced discrimination could greatly reduce economic and racial segregation in America.

Expand Housing Mobility Programs

“Housing mobility” programs, which allow public housing residents to live in high-opportunity neighborhoods, should be expanded. The primary federal foray into this area was the federal Moving to Opportunity Act, a 1990s experiment in housing mobility that eventually produced substantial wage gains for people who moved to higher-opportunity areas as children. 80 Harvard’s Raj Chetty and his colleagues found that the total mean income for those who moved before age 13 was 31 percent higher than for the control group . The researchers also observed in this group a 16 percent increase in the likelihood of attending college between the ages of 18 and 20. 83 Such programs, which reduce both income and black–white segregation, should be expanded.

Addressing Displacement from Gentrification that Fosters Re-Segregation

New tools are also needed to dismantle the ills caused by gentrification and displacement. As formerly segregated neighborhoods become more diverse, they do not automatically become more equitable, as rising costs often displace long-term residents and threaten cultural institutions and practices. Washington, D.C. provides many recent examples of this common phenomenon. Residents of an expensive, high-rise, majority white apartment in the historically black Shaw neighborhood allegedly complained about go-go music —a cultural institution of working-class black D.C.—loudly playing from a longstanding neighborhood shop run by a black owner. After the owner was forced to turn down the music, black Shaw and D.C. residents began to protest, not only arguing that the music was the enduring soundtrack of the block, but that this was but one example of how white gentrifiers wanted the economic benefits of the neighborhood but lamented their actual neighbors. 84 Not far from the site of these protests, students at Howard University, one of the nation’s oldest and most esteemed historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), decried that new white residents of the surrounding neighborhood used the private university’s historic yard as a dog park. When a news station interviewed a white male neighbor about the controversy, he suggested that if students of the 152-year-old historic institution did not want dogs on the yard, they should “just move the campus.” 85 Incidents like these highlight how residents of color frequently experience gentrification as colonization rather than as revitalization.

Racially concentrated poverty is an evil that public policy must address, but pro-integration housing plans should seek solutions that respect and amplify the economic and cultural power of the longstanding institutions and people in that neighborhood.

Reconsider Tax Abatements and Implement Longtime Owner Occupancy Programs

In a desire to revitalize disinvested neighborhoods, policymakers frequently introduce laws that entice wealthy individuals and investors into the area but ultimately underserve or harm current residents. One example of such a policy is long-term tax abatements, which allows owners of newly constructed or significantly renovated properties in underserved neighborhoods to avoid paying property taxes for an extended time period.

Offering wealthy investors long-term tax relief, with no guarantees that those investments will materially improve the lives and economic stations of current residents, prioritizes property over poor people. Such policies allow the wealthy to live and operate in a neighborhood while having no obligation to contribute to the public good of it—the upkeep of its streets and parks, its public safety, its schools, and so on. Meanwhile, the neighborhood’s original residents continue to shoulder this burden because they have received no such tax abatements. This type of trickle-down real estate might spur growth, but such growth will be inequitable.

From 2014 to 2016, for example, the City of Philadelphia’s controversial ten-year tax abatement on new property applied to nearly 4,300 properties, forgoing more than $420 million in revenue. A conservative estimate based on recent market trends found that, over the next decade, the struggling Philadelphia School District could lose out on nearly $1 billion in property tax revenue due to this abatement plan. 86

However, Philadelphia’s Longtime Owner Occupants Program (LOOP) seeks to productively respond to the possibility of the displacement of long-term residents. LOOP assists those below 150 percent area median income (AMI) who have lived in their homes for over ten years and have experienced at least a three-fold increase in assessed home values. Too often long-term residents experiencing this increase lack the liquidity to pay outright the higher taxes imposed on the newly appreciated property. The average LOOP participant is a senior citizen who purchased their home in the 1970s and 1980s. 87 An April 2018 report by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia found that LOOP had proven effective in both reducing tax delinquencies and reducing displacement in gentrifying areas. 88

Localities need to strongly consider reevaluating tax abatement programs, making them shorter or partial, or writing stipulations into them that encourage investors to focus on equity (as explained further below). Simultaneously, they should design programs that protect black, brown, and low-income people whose intellect, labor, and creativity helped shape the original neighborhood.

Invest in People, Not Power-Brokers

Why are people who craft public policy so eager to provide funding to area newcomers—who are unlikely to hail from the same racial or socioeconomic station as long-term residents—but unlikely to offer black, brown, and poor folks in the same area that same opportunity? First, this choice likely reflects society’s consistent favoritism of fiscal capital above the social and cultural capital created and accumulated by poor and nonwhite communities. This preference makes sense only if the benefits of those financial advantages are redistributed, and thereby consistently felt by the residents with the greatest need. Unfortunately, this is no guarantee. Second, the choice of policymakers to invest in newcomers over long-term and legacy residents seems to reveal a historical tendency to distrust people of color with self-governance. The tendency of many Americans to assign moral judgment to poverty and wealth—alongside the nation’s enduring current of racism—has led some policymakers to conclude that segregated, marginalized communities struggle due to the moral and intellectual failings of their residents, rather than due to the moral and political failings of those who ensured that their poverty was intractable. Lawmakers pursuing any and all neighborhood revitalization plans that might lead to gentrification should also consider the following actions to prevent displacement and re-segregation:

• If tax abatements are deemed necessary for growth, offer them with enforceable stipulations that new businesses must employ, at a living wage, members of the community that host it. Offer tax abatements first to already existing small businesses to allow them to expand and employ more people.
• Invest in educational programs, community gardens, health care facilities, and job programs in equal or greater amounts as the investments made in real estate.
• Require that new housing developments set aside a percentage of homes at affordable rates. AMI for the entire city is an insufficient threshold for inclusion. “Affordable” should be scaled to median and below-median incomes for the neighborhood in which the new development is located.
• Regard long-term residents as decision makers in their neighborhood. Developers and policymakers should not only consult with, but also take direction from the democratic representatives of community members when determining what gets built and where.

Black–white racial segregation, deliberately created by whites over decades to subjugate black people, continues to thwart opportunities for millions of African Americans. Of the many ways in which American society unfairly treats black people, the continued segregation of residential areas remains a central source of racial inequality. Taking bold action of the type outlined in this report would constitute an important step in cleansing this enduring stain from the fabric of American society, and making it solely the resident of history.

• “Residential Segregation Data for U.S. Metro Areas,” Governing , https://www.governing.com/gov-data/education-data/residential-racial-segregation-metro-areas.html.
• Richard Fry and Paul Taylor, “The Rise of Residential Segregation by Income,” Pew Research Center, August 1, 2012, http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2012/08/01/the-rise-of-residential-segregation-by-income/ . See also Paul Jargowsky, “Segregation, Neighborhoods and Schools,” in Choosing Homes, Choosing Schools , ed. Annette Lareau and Kimberly Goyette (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2014), 107–8 (finding a poor/non-poor dissimilarity index of 0.354 but noting that the poor/non-poor and black–white dissimilarity indexes “cannot be compared directly. In part, the lower levels [of income segregation] stem from the fact that income is continuous, so something just above the poverty line is hardly distinguishable from someone just below it. In contrast, race and ethnicity are categorical measures and reflect sharper and more visible distinctions between groups”). The poor/affluent dissimilarity index (roughly first and fourth quintile by income) was 0.46 in 2009.
• Paul Jargowsky, “Segregation, Neighborhoods and Schools,” in Choosing Homes, Choosing Schools , ed. Annette Lareau and Kimberly Goyette (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2014), 103-4.
• Carmen DeNavas-Walt, Bernadette D. Proctor, and Jessica C. Smith, “Income, Poverty and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States, 2009,” U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Reports, P60-238, 2010, http://www.census.gov/prod/2010pubs/p60-238.pdf , 5, Table 1.
• William Darity Jr., “A New Agenda for Eliminating Racial Inequality in the United States: The Research We Need,” William T. Grant Foundation (2019), 1, https://wtgrantfoundation.org/library/uploads/2019/01/A-New-Agenda-for-Eliminating-Racial-Inequality-in-the-United-States_WTG-Digest-2018.pdf .
• John R. Logan, “Separate and Unequal: The Neighborhood Gap for Blacks, Hispanics and Asians in Metropolitan America,” US2010 Project, July 2011, 5.
• See, e.g., Maria Krysan, Reynolds Farley and Mick P. Couper, “In the Eye of the Beholder: Racial Beliefs and Residential Segregation, Du Bois Review 5, no. 1 (2008): 5–26, https://igpa.uillinois.edu/system/files/cas/media/pubs/Krysan_Farley_Couper_2008.pdf ; and Robert Cervero and Michael Duncan, “Neighbourhood Composition and Residential Land Prices: Does Exclusion Raise or Lower Values?” Urban Studies , February 2004, http://usj.sagepub.com/content/41/2/299.
• Kayla Fontenot, Jessica Semega, and Melissa Kollar, “Income and Poverty in the United States: 2017,” United States Census Bureau, September 12, 12, 2018, “Table 1: Income and Earnings Summary Measures by Selected Characteristics: 2016 and 2017,” https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2018/demo/p60-263.html ; Survey of Consumer Finance Combined Extract Data, 2013.
• Patrick Sharkey, “Spatial Segmentation and the Black Middle Class,” American Journal of Sociology 119, no. 4 (2014): 903–54, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25032266.
• Robert Sampson, Patrick Sharkey and Stephen Raudenbush, “Durable Effects of Concentrated Disadvantage on Verbal Abilities among African American Children,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105 (3): 845-52 (2008).
• “Public School Choice Programs,” National Center for Education Statistics, https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=6 (indicating that 13 percent of public school parents choose a school outside their neighborhood; roughly 10 percent use private school).
• See Richard D. Kahlenberg, Halley Potter and Kimberly Quick, “A Bold Agenda for School Integration,” The Century Foundation, April 8, 2019, Figure 1, https://tcf.org/content/report/bold-agenda-school-integration/ .
• G. Palardy, “Differential school effects among low, middle, and high social class composition schools,” School Effectiveness and School Improvement 19, no. 1 (2008): 37.
• Emma Garcia, “Poor black children are much more likely to attend high-poverty schools than poor white children,” Economic Policy Institute, January 13, 2017, https://www.epi.org/publication/poor-black-children-are-much-more-likely-to-attend-high-poverty-schools-than-poor-white-children/ .
• Richard H. Sander, Yana A. Kucheva and Jonathan M. Zasloff, Moving Toward Integration: The Past and Future of Fair Housing (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2018), 1–4.
• Richard H. Sander, Yana A. Kucheva and Jonathan M. Zasloff, Moving Toward Integration: The Past and Future of Fair Housing (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2018), 2, Table 0.1
• Richard H. Sander, Yana A. Kucheva and Jonathan M. Zasloff, Moving Toward Integration: The Past and Future of Fair Housing (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2018), 4, Table 0.2.
• “Housing and Neighborhood Preferences of African Americans on Long Island, 2011 Survey Research Report,” ERASE Racism, February 2012, http://www.racialequitytools.org/resourcefiles/ERASE_Racism_Housing.pdf.
• Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (New York: Liveright Publishing Corp/W. W. Norton, 2017), 223–24.
• “Americans See Advantages and Challenges in Country’s Growing Racial and Ethnic Diversity,” Pew Research Center, May 8, 2019, https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2019/05/08/americans-see-advantages-and-challenges-in-countrys-growing-racial-and-ethnic-diversity/.
• Sandra E. Garcia, “Black Boys Feel Less Safe in White Neighborhoods, Study Shows,” The New York Times , August 14, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/14/us/black-boys-white-neighborhoods-fear.html.
• Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (New York: Liveright Publishing Corp/W. W. Norton, 2017), 237.
• Jeannine Bell, Hate Thy Neighbor: Move-In Violence and the Persistence of Racial Segregation in American Housing (New York: NYU Press, 2013), 14.
• Elizabeth Brown and George Barganier, Race and Crime: Geographies of Injustice (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018), 168.
• Ibid., 47. See also Douglas Massey, “Residential Segregation and Neighborhood Conditions in U.S. Metropolitan Areas,” in America Becoming: Racial Trends and Their Consequences , vol. I, ed. Neil J. Smelser, William Julius Wilson, and Faith Mitchell (Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press, 2001), 392 (“As [African Americans] moved into urban areas from 1900 to 1960 . . . their segregation indices rose to unprecedented heights, compared with earlier times”).
• Buchanan v. Warley , 245 U.S. 60 (1917).
• Katie Nodjimbadem, “The Racial Segregation of American Cities Was Anything But Accidental,” Smithsonian Magazine , May 30, 2017, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-federal-government-intentionally-racially-segregated-american-cities-180963494/.
• William A. Fischel, “An Economic History of Zoning and a Cure for its Exclusionary Effects,” Urban Studies 41, no. 2 (February 2004), http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0042098032000165271.
• Euclid v. Ambler , 272 U.S. 365 (1926), at 394–95.
• Corrigan v. Buckley , 271 U.S. 323 (1926).
• Richard Kahlenberg, “An Economic Fair Housing Act,” The Century Foundation, August 2017, https://tcf.org/content/report/economic-fair-housing-act/#easy-footnote-bottom-25.
• Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (New York: Liveright Publishing Corp/W. W. Norton, 2017), 86.
• Kimberly Quick, “The Myth of the Natural Neighborhood,” The Century Foundation, March 2016, https://tcf.org/content/commentary/11312/ ; see also, Margalynne J. Armstrong, “Race and Property Values in Entrenched Segregation,” University of Miami Law Review 52, no. 4 (January 1997): 1051–65, https://repository.law.miami.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1686&context=umlr.
• Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (New York: Liveright Publishing Corp/W. W. Norton, 2017), 67.
• Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Case for Reparations,” The Atlantic, June 2014,  https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/.
• Ibid, 76; Richard D. Kahlenberg, “An Economic Fair Housing Act,” The Century Foundation, August 3, 2017. https://tcf.org/content/report/economic-fair-housing-act/.
• Sam Fulwood III, The United States’ History of Segregated Housing Continues to Limit Affordable Housing, Center for American Progress (December 2016), https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/race/reports/2016/12/15/294374/the-united-states-history-of-segregated-housing-continues-to-limit-affordable-housing/ , citing Testimony of George Lipsitz of the University of California-Santa Barbara before the National Commission on Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity.
• Jeannine Bell, Hate Thy Neighbor: Move-In Violence and the Persistence of Racial
• Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (New York: Liveright Publishing Corp/W. W. Norton, 2017), 140–42.
• Ibid., 139–40.
• Ibid., 147.
• Michael B. de Leeuw, Megan K. Whyte, Dale Ho, Catherine Meza, and Alexis Karteron, “The Current State of Residential Segregation and Housing Discrimination: The United States’ Obligations Under the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination,” Michigan Journal of Race and Law 13, 2 (2008): 337, https://repository.law.umich.edu/mjrl/vol13/iss2/1.
• Jan Ondrich et al., “Now You See It, Now You Don’t: Why Do Real Estate Agents Withhold Available Houses from Black Customers? Review of Economics and Statistics 85, (2003): 872; Bo Zhao et. al., “Why Do Real Estate Brokers Continue to Discriminate? Evidence from the 2000 Housing Discrimination Study,” Journal of Urban Economics 59, (2006): 394.
• Katie Benner, Glenn Thrush, and Mike Isaac, “Facebook Engages in Housing Discrimination With Its Ad Practices, U.S. Says,” New York Times , March 28, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/28/us/politics/facebook-housing-discrimination.html.
• Amanda Kolson Hurley, “The Problem of Resegregation in Suburbia,” CityLab , February 15, 2016, https://www.citylab.com/equity/2016/02/the-problem-of-resegregation-in-suburbia/462396/.
• Rick Brooks and Ruth Simon, “Subprime Debacle Traps Even Very Credit-Worthy,” Wall Street Journal , December 3, 2007 (citing analysis showing that 55 percent of subprime loans issued in 2005 went to borrowers with credit scores high enough to qualify for conventional loans with far better terms; this figure rose to 61 percent by the end of 2006).
• Nathalie Baptiste, “Them That’s Got Shall Get,” American Prospect , October 12, 2014, https://prospect.org/article/staggering-loss-black-wealth-due-subprime-scandal-continues-unabated.
• Richard D. Kahlenberg, “An Economic Fair Housing Act,” The Century Foundation, August 3, 2017. https://tcf.org/content/report/economic-fair-housing-act/.
• Hills v. Gautreaux , 425 U.S. 284, 302 (1976); “Poverty and Race Research and Action Council to Office of the General Counsel,” Department of Housing and Urban Development, October 15, 2018, https://prrac.org/pdf/affh_anpr_letter_of_civil_rights_and_Fair_housing_organizations.pdf.
• Ibid.; 24 CFR § 5.512, https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/24/5.152.
• “NYU Furman Center to Department of Housing and Urban Development,” October 15, 2018, https://prrac.org/pdf/furman_center_comments.pdf.
• Ibid., citing Ronald J. O. Flores and Arun Peter Lobo, “The Reassertion of a Black/Non-Black Color Line: The Rise in Integrated Neighborhoods without Blacks in New York City,” 1970–2010, Journal of Urban Affairs 35 (2012): 266.
• Ben S. Carson, “Experimenting with failed socialism again,” Washington Times , July 23, 2015, https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/jul/23/ben-carson-obamas-housing-rules-try-to-accomplish-/.
• Decades-Old Housing Discrimination Case Plagues Donald Trump,” NPR, September 29, 2016, https://www.npr.org/2016/09/29/495955920/donald-trump-plagued-by-decades-old-housing-discrimination-case.
• “Fair Housing Testing in Chicago Finds Discrimination Based on Race and Source of Income,” National Low Income Housing Coalition, January 28, 2019, https://nlihc.org/resource/fair-housing-testing-chicago-finds-discrimination-based-race-and-source-income ; source of income discrimination is defined as discrimination based on a renter’s alternative means to pay for the rental property, such as a housing choice voucher.
• Kathryn Lodato, Krista Joy Martinelli, Larissa Ng, Richard Todd Schwartz, and Lara Vinnard, “Investigatory Testing as a Tool for Enforcing Civil Rights Statutes Current Status and Issues for the Future,” Public Law Research Institute, http://gov.uchastings.edu/public-law/docs/plri/testing.pdf.
• Portions of this section are drawn from Richard D. Kahlenberg, “An Economic Fair Housing Act,” The Century Foundation, August 3, 2017, https://tcf.org/content/report/economic-fair-housing-act/.
• Jonathan Rothwell and Douglas Massey, “Density Zoning and Class Segregation in U.S. Metropolitan Areas,” Social Science Quarterly 91, no. 5 (December 2010): 1123–43, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3632084/
• Jonathan Rothwell, “Racial Enclaves and Density Zoning: The Institutionalized Segregation of Racial Minorities in the United States,” American Law and Economics Review 13 (2011): 290–358, https://academic.oup.com/aler/article-abstract/13/1/290/182611/Racial-Enclaves-and-Density-Zoning-The.
• Matthew Resseger, “The Impact of Land Use Regulation on Racial Segregation: Evidence from Massachusetts Zoning Borders,” November 26, 2013, https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/resseger/files/resseger_jmp_11_25.pdf.
• Richard D. Kahlenberg, “An Economic Fair Housing Act,” The Century Foundation, August 3, 2017, https://tcf.org/content/report/economic-fair-housing-act/.
• Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (New York: Liveright Publishing Corp/W. W. Norton, 2017), 204–06 (referencing proposal by Jack Boger).
• “FACT SHEET: The President’s Fiscal Year 2017 Budget: Overview,” U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, February 9, 2016, https://portal.hud.gov/hudportal/documents/huddoc?id=ProposedFY17FactSheet.pdf. Of course, the conditioning of federal funds would have to comply with the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, 567 U.S. 519 (2012).
• In 2018, Booker introduced the Housing, Opportunity, Mobility and Equity (HOME) Act the provided incentives to reduce exclusionary zoning in states, cities and counties receiving federal funding under the $3.3 billion federal Community Development Block Grant. See Richard D. Kahlenberg, “Taking on Class and Racial Discrimination in Housing: Cory Booker’s big idea to rein in exclusionary zoning,” The American Prospect , August 2, 2018. In June 2019, Booker expanded the proposal along the lines outlined in the text. See Cory Booker, “Cory’s Plan to Provide Safe, Affordable Housing for All Americans,” Medium , June 5, 2019, https://medium.com/@corybooker/corys-plan-to-provide-safe-affordable-housing-forall-americans-da1d83662baa.
• Elizabeth Warren, “My Housing Plan for America,” Medium, March 16, 2019, https://medium.com/@teamwarren/my-housing-plan-for-america-20038e19dc26.
• Hanlon, quoted in Farhad Manjoo, “America’s Cities are Unlivable. Blame Wealthy Liberals,” New York Times , May 22, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/22/opinion/california-housing-nimby.html.
• Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. The Inclusive Communities Project, Inc. (2015).
• Brian R. Lerman, “Mandatory Inclusionary Zoning—The Answer to the Affordable Housing Problem,” Boston College Environmental Affairs Law Review 33 (2006): 383–416, http://socialeconomyaz.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/Mandatory-Inlusionary-Zoning-The-Answer-to-Affordable-Housing-Problem-Brian-R.-Lerman.pdf.
• National Low Income Housing Coalition, “40 Years Ago: Montgomery County, Maryland Pioneers Inclusionary Zoning,” May 16, 2014.
• David Rusk, cited in Nicholas Brunick and Patrick Maier, “Renewing the Land of Opportunity,” Journal of Affordable Housing 19, no. 2 (2010), http://socialeconomyaz.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/RenewingtheLandofOpportunity.pdf.
• Carl Chancellor and Richard D. Kahlenberg, “The New Segregation,” Washington Monthly , November/December 2014; Heather Schwartz, “Housing Policy Is School Policy,” in The Future of School Integration , ed. Richard D. Kahlenberg (New York: The Century Foundation, 2012).
• “Expanding Choice: Practical Strategies for Building a Successful Housing Mobility Program APPENDIX B: State, Local, and Federal Laws Barring Source-of-Income Discrimination,” Poverty and Race Research Action Council, May 2017, http://www.prrac.org/pdf/AppendixB.pdf.
• Rachel M. Cohen, “Elizabeth Warren Introduces Plan to Expand Affordable Housing and Dismantle Racist Zoning Practices,” The Intercept , September 28, 2018, https://www.theintercept.com/2018/09/28/elizabeth-warren-affordable-housing-bill.
• Corianne Payton Scally, Samantha Batko, Susan J. Popkin, and Nicole DuBois, “The Case for More, Not Less Shortfalls in Federal Housing Assistance and Gaps in Evidence for Proposed Policy Changes,” Urban Institute, January 2018, https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/95616/case_for_more_not_less.pdf.
• Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren and Lawrence F. Katz “The Effects of Exposure to Better Neighborhoods on Children: New Evidence from the Moving to Opportunity Experiment,” American Economics Review 106, no. 4 (2016): 855–902, 875, Figure 1, https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/lkatz/files/chk_aer_mto_0416.pdf.
• Christian Paz, “Thousands Rally to Preserve Go-Go Culture as Gentrification Debate Continues in DC,” NBC Washington, May 8, 2019, https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/Thousands-Rally-to-Preserve-DCs-Go-Go-Culture-as-Gentrification-Debate-Continues-in-the-District-509645931.html.
• Theresa Vargas “The Howard University controversy was never just about dogs. It was about respect.” Washington Post , April 24, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/the-howard-university-controversy-was-never-just-about-dogs-it-was-about-respect/2019/04/24/e0286c14-66a2-11e9-a1b6-b29b90efa879_story.html.
• Darrell L. Clarke, “Time for an Honest Discussion about Fair Taxation in Philly,” The Philadelphia Inquirer , January 22, 2018, https://www.philly.com/philly/opinion/commentary/darrell-clarke-allan-domb-property-taxes-philadelphia-city-council-20180122.html.
• Jared Brey, “Who’s Paying For Public Services in a Changing City?” Next City, July 2, 2018, https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/who-paying-for-public-services-in-a-changing-city.
• Lei Ding and Jackelyn Hwang, “Effects of Gentrification on Homeowners: Evidence from a Natural Experiment,” Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, April 2018, https://www.philadelphiafed.org/-/media/community-development/publications/discussion-papers/discussionpaper-effects-of-gentrification-on-homeowners.pdf?la=en.

Tags: housing discrimination , housing segregation , black americans , segregation , high poverty neighborhoods , racial inequality , racial divide

Kimberly Quick, Contributor

Kimberly Quick is a senior policy associate at The Century Foundation working on education policy in the foundation’s Washington, D.C. office.

Richard D. Kahlenberg, Former Senior Fellow

Richard D. Kahlenberg is a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute and was formerly a senior fellow at The Century Foundation. He is the author of Excluded: How Snob Zoning, NIMBYism and Class Bias Build the Walls We Don’t See (PublicAffairs, 2023).

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Homeownership, racial segregation, and policy solutions to racial wealth equity

About the authors, rashawn ray, david m. rubenstein fellow – governance studies, andre m. perry, senior fellow – metropolitan policy program, david harshbarger, research analyst – metropolitan policy program at brookings, samantha elizondo, research assistant, the race, prosperity, and inclusion initiative – the brookings institution, alexandra gibbons, research intern – governance studies.

Homeownership is often viewed as the entree to the American dream and the gateway to intergenerational wealth. However, this pathway is often less achievable for Black Americans who post a homeownership rate of 46.4% compared to 75.8% of white families. [1] Compounding matters, homes in predominately Black neighborhoods across the country are valued at $48,000 less than predominately white neighborhoods for a cumulative loss in equity of approximately $156 billion. [2] These are significant contributing factors to the racial wealth gap.

In 2016, white families posted the highest median family wealth at $171,000. Black families, in contrast, had a median family wealth of $17,600. [3] Because wealth (as measured by the total amount of assets a person owns minus debts) is a critical predictor of education, health, employment, and other quality of life metrics, a strategy to maximize homeownership and home value is needed.

Lower Black homeownership and the racial wealth gap are byproducts of systemic racism, including the legacies of slavery, Jim Crow segregation, redlining, and other anti-Black policies that targeted Black people and predominately Black neighborhoods. Residential segregation facilitates the extraction of wealth and other vital resources that fuel economic and social mobility. The loss of wealth in Black communities hastens a downward socioeconomic spiral. For instance, schools predominated by Black, Latinx, and Asian students receive $23 billion less in funding than predominately white districts. [4] This is because schools primarily rely on local property taxes rather than a broader pool of funding to equalize school resources.

Furthermore, education as a solution to closing the wealth gap is inherently flawed. White college graduates have seven times more wealth than Black college graduates. [5] This racial wealth gap reveals how little a strategy singularly focused on increasing college degree attainment will have on reducing the racial wealth gap.

Additionally, subpar neighborhood resources lead to fewer banking options, more payday lenders, and less opportunity for financial literacy. Because most people start their businesses using the equity in their homes, Black business development is throttled by Black families’ lack of homeownership and lack of wealth overall.

Recent public policy has not helped matters. The federal government’s first Covid-19 relief package may have exacerbated the problem. The first round of Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans (part of the CARES Act, the federal COVID-19 relief package) gave relief only to employer firms. This framework disproportionately excluded Black businesses: 95% of Black-owned firms are non-employer businesses, compared to 78% of white-owned firms. [6]  This negatively impacted entire communities. According to a Bloomberg analysis, 27% of businesses in white-majority congressional districts received PPP loans, compared with 17% of businesses in districts where minorities make up more than half the population. [7] A Stanford University study estimated that over 40% of Black-owned small businesses closed during the COVID-19 pandemic. [8] A report examining COVID-19 disparities in Detroit found that small businesses in the city, compared to those in the broader Detroit area, were less likely to receive PPP loans and less likely to receive similar amounts even if loans were allocated. [9]

Segregation and racial bias are robbing Black people of opportunities to build wealth, restricting millions from reaching their potentials. At a time when America is at a precipice of a racial awakening, it is important to provide empirical research on a set of problems that if solved, can significantly improve the racial wealth gap.

At a time when America is at a precipice of a racial awakening, it is important to provide empirical research on a set of problems that if solved, can significantly improve the racial wealth gap.

This report aims to provide an empirical analysis and overview of the role that racial residential segregation plays in 17 cities across the United States. Using a dissimilarity index that captures how far apart racial groups in a city live away from each other, we aim to provide information on cities and how racial disparities in housing fuel the racial wealth gap. We focus on homeownership rates and values, banks, credit scores, and educational attainment.

Methodology

For this analysis, we rely on publicly available data sources including the US Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS) and the Federal Reserve System. Additionally, we utilize credit scoring data from numerous credit bureaus, accessed and compiled by the Urban Institute , as well as the ProsperityNow Scorecard . Further, we utilize credit scoring data from numerous credit bureaus, accessed and compiled by the Urban Institute , as well as the ProsperityNow Scorecard . Where possible, we center the Black population of each of the 17 cities included in the analysis, drawing comparisons when necessary to the non-Black population or white population of the city, where appropriate. We define the Black population as Black, non-Hispanic in accordance with Census conventions.

We employ a metric known as the “Dissimilarity Index,” one of many possible calculations used to measure residential segregation between two groups. The index requires that researchers choose two groups to be compared as well as a certain sub-geography of a larger area (here, cities) to compare. We choose Census Tracts, as they are the unit that best approximates our conception of “neighborhoods” for which the latest Census data are available from the 2019 ACS. In addition, we choose to compare Black populations in cities with the remainder of the city entirely, not simply the white population, as is sometimes done in studies of residential segregation. This is to account for the fact that while the cohort of cities in the analysis includes widely differing shares of Latino or Hispanic population, Black and Latino or Hispanic populations are not always spatially segregated to the same degree within cities. In recognition of the fact that residential segregation exists, the index can be thought of as a measure of the proportion of the two groups which would have to move from their current location in order to achieve an evenly spread population where each neighborhood has a representative share of each group. Cities in which a high proportion of a group would have to move are more segregated.

When we study topics other than residential segregation, such as discrepancies in home values, educational attainment, income, and more, we present data that speak to the gap between Black and white populations, rather than Black and non-Black populations. As white populations often (though importantly, not always) have higher incomes, rates of homeownership, and other outcomes often show the true effect of systemic racism for Black residents of these cities.

Where possible, we use data disaggregated by race at the city level. However, in the case of unbanked and underbanked populations, disaggregated data at the city level are not reliable. Instead, we examine the unbanked and underbanked population of the nation, disaggregated by race.

In the case of home values (as reported by the Census Bureau), data are not disaggregated by the race of the homeowner or head of household. Instead, we examine home values in Black-majority neighborhoods and compare them with home values in all other neighborhoods within the city. Some cities in the cohort do not have Black-majority neighborhoods, even if they may have neighborhoods with a high Black population, and so are not included in that portion of the analysis. Median home values are computed by the Census Bureau at the neighborhood level, but the custom sub-geography of “all Black-majority neighborhoods” requires that we compute medians by hand. Rather than employing a cruder estimate of the true median, we more accurately estimated the median home value of homes in all Black-majority neighborhoods in a given city by summing the recorded tallies of homes within each income band and then interpolating linearly within the median band. The same process is used by the U.S. Census Bureau to calculate median estimates for all non-custom geographies for which they disseminate data.

Segregation of Black residents persists in cities.

There are significant differences in the racial compositions of the cities in this analysis. [10] In Redding, Chico, Albuquerque, El Paso, Fairfax, San Antonio, Phoenix, Los Angeles, and Denver, under 10% of the population is Black. Sacramento, Minneapolis, Houston, and Oakland have populations that are between 10 and 25% Black. Proportionally, the largest Black populations are located in Cleveland, Atlanta, Baltimore, and Detroit. With the exception of Cleveland, in which 48.8% of residents are Black, these cities are more than 50% Black. Detroit has the largest percentage of Black residents in the sample at 78.3%.

To measure the extent to which Black residents are segregated from other racial groups in the cities, we utilized indices of dissimilarity. The dissimilarity index represents the percentage of one of the two groups included in the analysis that would have to move in order to achieve racial compositions within smaller geographic units that match the racial composition of the entire city. A value of 0 represents a completely integrated city, while a value of 1 represents a completely segregated city in which 100 percent of one group would have to move to achieve integration. Generally, indices above 0.6 are considered high, indices between 0.3 and 0.6 are moderate, and indices below 0.3 are low. [11]

In this report, dissimilarity indices represent the levels of segregation between the Black, non-Hispanic population of a city and the remainder of the city population, using Census tracts as the geographic unit of analysis. Racial segregation has a range of consequences, and often results in a dearth of resources such as parks [12] and well-funded schools [13] in majority-Black communities.

Based on these cutoffs, only two cities, Sacramento and Fairfax, have low levels of racial segregation between non-Hispanic Black residents and the rest of the city population. [14] The majority of cities exhibit moderate levels of segregation of Black residents. In Albuquerque, Oakland, Chico, Phoenix, San Antonio, El Paso, Redding, Minneapolis, Denver, Los Angeles, and Houston, between 30% and 60% of the Black population would have to move to a new Census tract to achieve a uniform distribution of Black residents.

Black residents are extremely segregated from the rest of the population in four cities, with dissimilarity indices above 0.6: Detroit, Baltimore, Cleveland, and Atlanta. In Atlanta, the city with the highest levels of Black segregation in our sample, almost 70% of Black residents would have to move to new Census tracts to produce racial distributions within Census tracts that match that of the larger city. Notably, these four cities also have the highest proportions of Black residents in the sample, which reflects the impact of historic and modern policies aimed at segregating cities, particularly those with large Black populations.

Black residents are extremely segregated from the rest of the population in four cities: Detroit, Baltimore, Cleveland, and Atlanta.

Black residents face significant barriers in becoming homeowners.

There are significant gaps in homeownership rates between Blacks and whites. The homeownership rate is defined as the ratio of owner-occupied units to all occupied units based on data from 2019. Homeownership rates are important to examine because owning a home is an essential step in building wealth. [15]

Among Black homeowners, housing comprises about 37% of total wealth, compared to about 32% for white homeowners. [16] Financial difficulties brought on by COVID-19 threaten to exacerbate the racial homeownership gap further, especially as the federal forbearance program expired June 30, 2021. [17] Only one city, Detroit, has a gap in homeownership rates between Black and white residents under 10% with Blacks owning homes at a rate of 45.9% and whites owning homes at a rate of 53.4%. [18]

There are five cities with gaps in Black and white homeownership that range from 15% to 20%: Denver, Los Angeles, Baltimore, Oakland, and Cleveland. Rates of Black homeownership in this group of cities range from 27% in Los Angeles to 42.36% in Baltimore. In contrast, Los Angeles is the only city in this group in which the homeownership rate for whites is under 50%.

In Houston, El Paso, Sacramento, Atlanta, San Antonio, and Albuquerque, the gap in homeownership rates between Blacks and whites is between 20% and 30%. Again, the majority of whites own their homes in every city in this group except Houston (which is slightly below 50% for whites). The highest Black homeownership rate of these cities, 41.08%, is in El Paso.

Among cities in this report, Fairfax, Phoenix, Chico, Minneapolis, and Redding have the biggest Black-white disparities in homeownership rates with differences of over 30%

Fairfax, Phoenix, Chico, Minneapolis, and Redding have the biggest Black-white disparities in homeownership rates with differences of over 30%. Chico, CA has the lowest Black homeownership rate with only 10.82% of Black residents owning their homes. The largest observed Black-white gap in homeownership rate is in Redding, CA, with 56.14% of whites owning homes compared to only 16.53% of Blacks. With the exception of Minneapolis, these cities all have relatively small proportions of Black residents. Furthermore, all of these cities have dissimilarity indices under 0.6. Although levels of spatial segregation are lower in these cities than in others in our sample, Black residents face significant barriers in becoming homeowners, limiting their opportunities to build intergenerational wealth.

Homes in majority-Black neighborhoods are significantly devalued.

Black residents are less likely to own homes in all of these cities, and when they do successfully obtain a home, it is often devalued. There are countless stories of Black homeowners receiving low home appraisals until a white friend stands in. [19] For instance, in Denver, a biracial couple hoped to renovate their home and received an initial appraisal of $405,000. During this appraisal, Lorenzo, a Black man, was at home with the couple’s children. The couple got a second appraisal, and this time, Gwen, a white woman, stayed home. They received an appraisal of $550,000, a $145,000 increase. [20]

Beyond discrimination in individual appraisals, homes located in majority-Black neighborhoods have been chronically undervalued, [21] further exacerbating the racial wealth gap. To examine differences in home values by race, we compared the median value of homes in Black-majority Census tracts to the median value of homes in all other Census tracts. Chico, Redding, Sacramento, Denver, Albuquerque, El Paso, San Antonio, and Fairfax have no majority-Black Census tracts and are thus excluded from the analysis.

Detroit has the smallest gap in median home value between Black-minority and Black-majority neighborhoods, with homes in Black-minority neighborhoods worth about $16,043 more than those in Black-majority neighborhoods. In Cleveland, homes in Black-minority neighborhoods were valued at median prices almost twice as high as homes in Black-majority neighborhoods, with a gap in median home value of $38,297. Shockingly, these are the only two cities in the sample in which the gap in median home values is under $100,000.

In Minneapolis, the median value of homes in Black-minority neighborhoods is also almost twice as high as the median value of homes in Black-majority neighborhoods. Since housing costs are higher in Minneapolis than in Cleveland, this amounts to a difference in median value of $110,625. A similar pattern exists in Baltimore, with the median home in Black-minority neighborhoods worth over twice as much, or $138,627 more, than the median home in a Black-majority neighborhood.

In Houston, homes in Black-minority neighborhoods are valued at median prices almost three times the median prices of homes in Black-majority neighborhoods, with a difference in value of $182,092. Here, the median home value in Black-majority neighborhoods is under $100,000, while the median home value in Black-minority neighborhoods approaches $300,000.

In California cities included in this analysis, the gap in the median values of homes is extreme, partially due to exorbitant housing prices. The median value of homes in Black-minority neighborhoods in both Oakland and Los Angeles is about 1.5 times as high as the median value of homes in Black-majority neighborhoods. In Oakland, this amounts to a difference in median values of $242,212. In Los Angeles, homes in Black-minority neighborhoods are worth about $272,933 more than those in Black-majority neighborhoods.

Atlanta, the most segregated city in our sample, also exhibits the biggest racial disparity in median home values. Homes in Black-minority neighborhoods are worth almost four times, or $350,521 more than homes in Black-majority neighborhoods.

The devaluation of homes in majority-Black neighborhoods has a range of consequences. For instance, a Black man and his Japanese American wife purchased a home in 2004 in College Park, a majority-Black area outside of Atlanta, because they wanted their children to grow up in a Black community. However, low home values meant that the schools were underfunded. When they had a second child, they moved to a neighborhood with better-funded schools — this neighborhood, Candler Park, was majority-white. They sold their home in College Park in 2014 and received $144,000 less than they initially paid for it, with no tax breaks for their losses. Thus, owning a home in College Park was not an efficient method of building wealth. Their new home in majority-white Candler Park is accruing value, and one day, they will be able to sell it at a higher value, without paying taxes on up to a $500,000 gain. [22]

Even beyond the cities in this report, the devaluing of houses in predominately Black neighborhoods, or even at times, homes owned by Black people in predominately white neighborhoods, is a systemic problem.

Even beyond the cities in this report, the devaluing of houses in predominately Black neighborhoods, or even at times, homes owned by Black people in predominately white neighborhoods, is a systemic problem. In Jacksonville, Florida, Abena (who is Black) and Alex (who is White) Horton had their home appraised. They believe that the appraisal was too low. During the second appraisal, Alex was present instead of Abena and the couple removed all signs of Abena and their biracial son. The second appraisal yielded a 40% higher value than the appraisal where Abena was present. In Hartford, Connecticut, Stephen Richmond’s home value substantially increased after he removed family photos and had a white neighbor stand in for the second appraisal. Even Black celebrities fall victim to racial discrimination in housing. Comedian and actor D.L. Hughley purchased a home in southern California for $500,000. He renovated the home and added a pool. During an appraisal three years later, Hughley’s home was appraised for a similar price to what he originally purchased it for. The bank flagged it as a mistake and ordered another appraisal. The second appraisal came in $160,000 higher. Hughley went on to sell the home for $770,000. [23]

Unequal access to lending stymies efforts to build lasting wealth.

Racial economic inequality in the U.S. is primarily the result of unequal investments among communities. Estimates published by ProsperityNow showing the percentage of unbanked or underbanked populations in the United States for different racial and ethnic groups often highlight inequalities in the financial health of their neighborhoods. The percentage of Blacks (46%) who are unbanked or underbanked alone is over three times the percentage of whites (14%) who experience the same struggle. Thirty-two percent of Hispanics are also either un- or under- banked. 

Bank accounts are useful tools for building emergency savings and banks themselves provide a connection to mainstream financial systems and programs that provide financial assistance and community investments. The combined 24% of Black and Hispanic populations who are completely unbanked are shut out of these basic tools though which to save and accrue earnings. Only 3% of whites are completely unbanked.

Fifty-four percent of minority populations are underbanked, meaning that while they may have access to bank accounts, these communities also experience a prevalence of alternative financial services like money orders, check cashers, and same day lenders, to manage finances .

Fifty-four percent of minority populations are underbanked, meaning that while they may have access to bank accounts, these communities also experience a prevalence of alternative financial services like money orders, check cashers, and same-day lenders, to manage finances.[24] These high-cost, low-quality financial services tend to trap borrowers in cycles of debt, increasing the financial vulnerability especially among communities of color and blocking efforts to build lasting wealth. Research by McKinsey & Co. reaches a similar conclusion that access to mainstream financial services is an important factor in accumulating savings that many Black Americans, unfortunately, lack—increasing access to basic banking services could save individual Black Americans up to $40,000 over their lifetime. [25]

Black people are more likely to encounter discriminatory lending practices that impact credit scores.

Unequal access to lending is not the only thing that hampers efforts by Blacks to establish financial security and accrue lasting wealth. The legacies of redlining, underinvestment, and a prevalence of alternative banking within these communities that make Black people more likely to encounter discriminatory lending practices also impact credit scores.

People pay attention to credit because loans and credit can provide opportunities to start businesses, increase human and physical capital, and build wealth. These all provide paths out of historical inequality in wealth accumulation. Unfortunately, Blacks must make extraordinary efforts to overcome the discrimination that is often hidden in financial policies or products that are supposed to be bias-free. While the 1974 Equal Credit Opportunity Act barred credit-score systems from using protected information, including race, the decades of discrimination in employment, lending policies, debt collection, and criminal prosecution that have left Black families vulnerable to financial insecurity also disadvantage credit scores. [26]

Without bank accounts, families often cannot generate the data that helps establish credit worthiness. As previously explained, the lack of banking institutions also leaves communities exposed to more predatory lending practices that encourage cyclical debt and impinge on credit worthiness.

Without bank accounts, families often cannot generate the data that helps establish creditworthiness. As previously explained, the lack of banking institutions also leaves communities exposed to more predatory lending practices that encourage cyclical debt and impinge on creditworthiness. While the ability to get a mortgage and pay it on time can have a positive impact on credit scoring, families without access to these financial vehicles can’t build robust credit histories. Unfortunately, the history of redlining that designated Black neighborhoods as too risky for mortgage lending is still evident in the structure of U.S. cities. [27]

Places like Atlanta and Minneapolis highlight stark differences between the average credit scores in white and majority-minority neighborhoods. In these cities, the average credit score for predominantly white neighborhoods sits above 725. By contrast, the average credit score for non-white zip codes is 560 and 570 for Atlanta and Minneapolis, respectively. The demographic composition of these two cities is quite different — Atlanta is majority Black (50.1% Black) and Minneapolis is majority white (19.2% Black). However, the predominant spatial segregation along racial and ethnic lines bears markers of systemic discrimination. While these two cities have the largest gaps between credit scores and showcase the interaction of race and social status in geographic areas, nine of the cities examined have non-white communities at an over 100-point disadvantage in credit scores.

Another interesting city to examine is Detroit, which has the lowest credit scores for both white and majority minority communities across all of these cities. In comparison to other cities, Detroit has the largest percentage of Black residents in the sample at 78.3%. It has maintained a majority Black population since the 1980s. However, Detroit remains among the most segregated cities in the nation today, precisely because of redlining practices that largely blocked Black families from federally-backed mortgages and drove them into neighborhoods with sub-par amenities (e.g., health, education, banking, green spaces, safety) and sectioned “good” neighborhoods as being predominantly white. [28] This combination of subpar investments and difficulty in acquiring mortgages makes the funding for wealth-creating activities such as investing in education or entrepreneurial ventures less accessible.

In the short term, for those with low and unstable income, lack of credit can make it impossible to pay for an unexpected immediate expense. In the long term, without access to the credit needed to fund wealth-creating activities such as educational, workforce, and small business investments, communities of color continue to be harmed by the historical legacies of intentionally discriminatory financial practices.

Higher costs for education result in Black students taking on higher levels of debt.

We used educational attainment data from the 2019 ACS estimates measuring the ratio of people with higher education degrees to the population age 25 or older to highlight differences in educational investments. More than 30% of Blacks in the cities examined have a higher education degree. Albuquerque, the city reporting the highest level of Black educational attainment, still only had 44% of Blacks over the age of 25 achieve an associate degree or higher.

Given the lack of mainstream banking in Black communities, it is no surprise that Blacks are more likely than whites to receive unsubsidized loans for education. Unsubsidized loans increase the amount of debt that Black college graduates have to take on in order to pursue higher education and make higher education less attainable. [29] Black college graduates also experience more difficulty in accumulating wealth than white college graduates since they accrue more student loan debt, and graduates from historically Black colleges are more likely to receive subprime loans with higher interest rates. [30]

There are two cities, San Antonio (with 35% Black and 33% white educational attainment) and El Paso (43% Black and 35% white), in which Blacks have higher levels of post-high school degrees than whites. When examining homeownership rates with educational attainment, it is clear that education does little to mute the racial gap in homeownership, even in cities where Blacks have higher educational attainment than whites.

When examining homeownership rates with educational attainment, it is clear that education does little to mute the racial gap in homeownership, even in cities where Blacks have higher educational attainment than whites.

Detroit and Cleveland have the lowest levels of Black educational attainment out of all cities (21% and 20%, respectively). Both cities are also in the bottom half of educational attainment across all racial groups. As mentioned, inequitable access to financial resources continues to exacerbate underinvestment in factors like education, which also contribute to the lack of ability to obtain wealth. Given that these cities have a majority minority population, it is no surprise that systemic barriers to wealth creation in the form of both financial and educational resources continue to manifest across the country in twenty-first century America. [31]

Policy recommendations

Closing the racial wealth gap will not be trivial. The gap has its roots in racist policies which trace back through the decades and centuries to even before the founding of the country. The vestiges of slavery, which prevented Black Americans from building any wealth for generations, as well as Jim Crow and New Deal-era policies, which sacrificed Black wealth-building opportunities to consolidate a white middle class, means the domino effects of this stolen possibility reach far and wide in American society. Therefore, solving this disparity will require a collection of policies and initiatives to tackle the most heinous examples of racial inequity that persist today, and which continue to rob Black America of the prosperity it is due. Because housing has been the primary mechanism by which Americans have built and passed along generational wealth in the last century, correcting injustices in housing is a prime area to begin attacking the harmful influence of systemic racism.

To bolster Black homeownership nationwide, we recommend a holistic approach to the home-buying process which will create a more equitable system before, during, and after securing a mortgage:

• Increase support for small dollar mortgage loan programs. It is a pervasive myth that homes of lower value are riskier investments for mortgages, but recent analysis from the Urban Institute shows that these buyers have comparable credit scores and their mortgages have similar loan-to-value ratios to more valuable properties. [32] As homes in Black neighborhoods are already devalued, this barrier to entry to homeownership disproportionately affects Black buyers, especially those who are first-time buyers.
• Reduce uneven costs of mortgages for Black homeowners. Homeownership while Black is expensive. Creating a rate-and-term refinancing option would help more households reduce monthly mortgage costs and lower the barrier to homeownership.
• Extend credit and down payment assistance to borrowers impacted by discriminatory housing and lending practices. Historical and ongoing policies such as redlining, restrictive covenants, “steering,” and more have extracted wealth from Black neighborhoods for generations. While it is not enough to simply extend credit based on redlining maps drawn in the New Deal Era, past injustices must be redressed by helping to develop areas left behind by racist policies.
• Adopt credit scoring practices with less discriminatory impacts. Current metrics of credit scoring do not account for regular payments from rent and utilities, instead they prioritize loan and credit card payments. Expanding notions of credit-building can dispel the myth that Black homeowners are risky investments.
• Increase diversity in the appraisal profession. Nearly 9 in 10 property appraisers are white, while 2% are Black, according to Urban Institute analysis of 2019 Census data. [33] With the numerous instances of appraiser bias making headlines on a consistent basis, better representation in the profession which holds sway over much of the valuation process could go a long way to mitigating the effects of societal bias against Black neighborhoods.
• Continue stimulus and relief efforts for homeowners and buyers in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Black Americans are joining the ranks of homeowners at a steady rate, but the disparate impacts of the pandemic and associated recession mean that preexisting Black homeowners faced disproportionate difficulty with mortgage payments. Foreclosure moratoriums allowed many to hold onto their homes, but now they face repayment of deferred mortgages, and a bifurcated economy has not yet returned Black employment to pre-pandemic levels.

Through this report, we have provided a comprehensive overview of the role of segregation, discrimination, and racism in the housing market, as well as policy opportunities and recommendations to reduce these racial disparities. Implementing these evidence-based solutions will improve opportunities for potential Black homebuyers and reduce the racial wealth gap.

Acknowledgements

The Brookings Institution is a nonprofit organization devoted to independent research and policy solutions. Its mission is to conduct high-quality, independent research and, based on that research, to provide innovative, practical recommendations for policymakers and the public. The conclusions and recommendations of any Brookings publication are solely those of its authors, and do not reflect the views of the Institution, its management, or its other scholars. Support for this publication was generously provided by The Change Company, LLC. Brookings recognizes that the value it provides is in its absolute commitment to quality, independence, and impact. Activities supported by its donors reflect this commitment.

[1] “Quarterly Residential Vacancies and Homeownership, First Quarter 2021.” U.S. Census Bureau, April 27, 2021. https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/files/currenthvspress.pdf .

[2] Perry, Andre. 2020. Know Your Price: Valuing Black Lives and Property in America’s Black Cities . Brookings Press: Washington DC.

[3] Dettling, Lisa J., Joanne W. Hsu, Lindsay Jacobs, Kevin B. Moore, and Jeffrey P. Thompson. Recent Trends in Wealth-Holding by Race and Ethnicity: Evidence from the Survey of Consumer Finances. The Federal Reserve, September 27, 2017. https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/recent-trends-in-wealth-holding-by-race-and-ethnicity-evidence-from-the-survey-of-consumer-finances-20170927.htm.

[4] Edbuild, “$23 Billion Report.” 2019. Accessed on 28 June 2021. https://edbuild.org/content/23-billion .

[5] Ray, Rashawn, and Andre M. Perry. “Why We Need Reparations for Black Americans.” The Brookings Institution, March 4, 2021. http://www.brookings.edu/policy2020/bigideas/why-we-need-reparations-for-black-americans/ .

[6] McManus, Michael. “Minority Business Ownership: Data from the 2012 Survey of Business Owners.” U.S. Small Business Administration Office of Advocacy, September 14, 2016. https://cdn.advocacy.sba.gov/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/07141514/Minority-Owned-Businesses-in-the-US.pdf .

[7] Grotto, Jason, Zachary R. Mider, and Cedric Sam. “White America Got a Head Start on Small-Business Virus Relief.” Bloomberg, June 30, 2020. https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2020-ppp-racial-disparity/ .

[8] Fairlie, Robert. “The Impact of Covid-19 on Small Business Owners: Evidence of Early-Stage Losses from the April 2020 Current Population Survey.” Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, May 2020. https://siepr.stanford.edu/research/publications/impact-covid-19-small-business-owners-evidence-early-stage-losses-april-2020 .

[9] Ray, Rashawn, Jane Fran Morgan, Lydia Wileden, Samantha Elizondo, and Destiny Wiley-Yancy, “Examining and Addressing COVID-19 Racial Disparities in Detroit.” The Brookings Institution, March 2, 2021. http://www.brookings.edu/research/examining-and-addressing-covid-19-racial-disparities-in-detroit/ .

[10] U.S. Census Bureau. American Community Survey 2019 (5-Year Estimates). Retrieved from Social Explorer.

[11] Massey, Douglas, and Nancy Denton. American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.

[12] Saporito, Salvatore, and Daniel Casey. “Are There Relationships Among Racial Segregation, Economic Isolation, and Proximity to Green Space?” Human Ecology Review 21, no. 2 (2015): 113-32. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24875135 .

[13] Perry, Andre M. “A Revolution of Values for Black American Families.” The Brookings Institution, May 22, 2020. http://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2020/05/22/a-revolution-of-values-for-black-american-families/ .

[14] Analysis of 2019 5-Year ACS Estimates.

[15] McCargo, Alanna, and Jung Hyun Choi. “Closing the Gaps: Building Black Wealth through Homeownership.” Urban Institute, December 9, 2020. https://www.urban.org/research/publication/closing-gaps-building-black-wealth-through-homeownership .

[16] Dettling, Lisa J, Joanne W Hsu, Lindsay Jacobs, Kevin B Moore, and Jeffrey P Thompson. “Recent Trends in Wealth-Holding by Race and Ethnicity: Evidence from the Survey of Consumer Finances.” Federal Reserve, September 27, 2017. https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/recent-trends-in-wealth-holding-by-race-and-ethnicity-evidence-from-the-survey-of-consumer-finances-20170927.htm .

[17] Henry-Nickie, Makada, Tim Lucas, Radha Seshagiri, and Samantha Elizondo. “Low to Moderate-Income Families Are Losing Ground: How to Save Their Homeownership Dreams.” The Brookings Institution, June 24, 2021. http://www.brookings.edu/blog/how-we-rise/2021/06/24/working-class-families-are-losing-ground-how-to-save-their-homeownership-dreams/ .

[18] Analysis of 2019 5-Year ACS Estimates.

[19] Sheridan, Jill. “A Black Woman Says She Had To Hide Her Race To Get A Fair Home Appraisal.” NPR, May 21, 2021. https://www.npr.org/2021/05/21/998536881/a-black-woman-says-she-had-to-hide-her-race-to-get-a-fair-home-appraisal . 

[20] Haythorn, Russell. “An Unconscious Bias? Biracial Denver Couple Says They Faced Discrimination on Home Appraisal.” The Denver Channel, November 19, 2020. https://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/local-news/an-unconscious-bias-biracial-denver-couple-says-they-faced-discrimination-on-home-appraisal .

[21] Perry, Andre M., Jonathan Rothwell, and David Harshbarger. “The Devaluation of Assets in Black Neighborhoods.” The Brookings Institution, February 17, 2021. http://www.brookings.edu/research/devaluation-of-assets-in-black-neighborhoods/ .

[22] Brown, Dorothy A. “Your Home’s Value Is Based on Racism.” The New York Times. The New York Times , March 20, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/20/opinion/home-value-race-taxes.html .

[23] Kamin, Debra. 2020. ”Black Homeowners Face Discrimination in Appraisals.” The New York Times , August 27, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/25/realestate/blacks-minorities-appraisals-discrimination.html .

[24] Williams, Claire. “’It’s What We Call Reverse Redlining’: Measuring the Proximity of Payday Lenders, Pawn Shops to Black Adults.” Morning Consult, July 24, 2020. https://morningconsult.com/2020/07/23/black-consumers-payday-loan-banking-services/ .

[25] Noel, Nick, Duwain Pinder, Shelley Stewart Ill, and Jason Wright. “The Economic Impact of Closing the Racial Wealth Gap.” McKinsey & Company, August 2019. https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/industries/public%20and%20social%20sector/our%20insights/the%20economic%20impact%20of%20closing%20the%20racial%20wealth%20gap/the-economic-impact-of-closing-the-racial-wealth-gap-final.pdf .

[26] Klein, Aaron. “Credit Denial in the Age of AI.” The Brookings Institution, October 25, 2019. http://www.brookings.edu/research/credit-denial-in-the-age-of-ai .

[27] Mitchell, Bruce, and Juan Franco. “HOLC ‘Redlining’ Maps: The Persistent Structure of Segregation and Economic Inequality.” National Community Reinvestment Coalition, December 18, 2018. https://ncrc.org/holc/ .

[28] Ray, Rashawn. “Why are Blacks Dying at Higher Rates of COVID-19?” The Brookings Institution. April 56, 2020. http://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2020/04/09/why-are-blacks-dying-at-higher-rates-from-covid-19/ .

[29] Weller, C., & Roberts, L. (2021, March 19). Eliminating the Black-White Wealth Gap Is a Generational Challenge . Center for American Progress. March 19, 2021. Accessed July 13, 2021. https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/economy/reports/2021/03/19/497377/eliminating-black-white-wealth-gap-generational-challenge/

[30] Ray, Rashawn, and Perry, Andre. “Why we need reparations for Black Americans.” The Brookings Institution. March 4, 2021. http://www.brookings.edu/research/black-white-disparity-in-student-loan-debt-more-than-triples-after-graduation/ .

[31] Analysis of 2019 5-Year ACS Estimates.

[32] McCargo, Alanna, Bing Bai, and Sarah Strochak. “Small-Dollar Mortgages: A Loan Performance Analysis.” Urban Institute, March 6, 2019. https://www.urban.org/research/publication/small-dollar-mortgages-loan-performance-analysis.

[33] Neal, Michael, and Peter J. Mattingly. “Increasing Diversity in the Appraisal Profession Combined with Short-Term Solutions Can Help Address Valuation Bias for Homeowners of Color.” Urban Institute, July 1, 2021. https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/increasing-diversity-appraisal-profession-combined-short-term-solutions-can-help-address-valuation-bias-homeowners-color.

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Multimedia | Education

Modern Segregation

Multimedia • By Richard Rothstein • March 6, 2014

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A presentation to the Atlantic Live Conference, Reinventing the War on Poverty, March 6, 2014, Washington, D.C.

Education Policy is Housing Policy

We cannot substantially improve the performance of the poorest African American students – the “truly disadvantaged,” in William Julius Wilson’s phrase – by school reform alone. It must be addressed primarily by improving the social and economic conditions that bring too many children to school unprepared to take advantage of what schools have to offer.

The conclusion rests on two distinct analyses:

– First, social and economic disadvantage – not only poverty, but a host of associated conditions – depresses student performance, and

– Second, concentrating students with these disadvantages in racially and economically homogenous schools depresses it further.

The schools that the most disadvantaged black children attend today are segregated because they are located in segregated neighborhoods far distant from truly middle class neighborhoods. We cannot desegregate schools without desegregating these neighborhoods, and our ability to desegregate the neighborhoods in which segregated schools are located is hobbled by historical ignorance. Too quickly forgetting twentieth century history, we’ve persuaded ourselves that the residential isolation of low-income black children is only “ de facto ,” the accident of economic circumstance, personal preference, and private discrimination. But unless we re-learn how residential segregation is “ de jure ,” resulting from racially-motivated public policy, we have little hope of remedying school segregation that flows from this neighborhood racial isolation.

The individual predictors of low achievement are well documented:

• With less access to routine and preventive health care, disadvantaged children have greater absenteeism, and they can’t benefit from good schools if they are not present.
• With less literate parents, they are read to less frequently when young, and are exposed to less complex language at home.
• With less adequate housing, they rarely have quiet places to study and may move more frequently, changing schools and teachers.
• With fewer opportunities for enriching after-school and summer activities, their background knowledge and organizational skills are less developed.
• With fewer family resources, their college ambitions are constrained.

As these and many other disadvantages accumulate, lower social class children inevitably have lower average achievement than middle class children, even with the highest quality instruction.

When a school’s proportion of students at risk of failure grows, the consequences of disadvantage are exacerbated.

In schools with high proportions of disadvantaged children,

• Remediation becomes the norm, and teachers have little time to challenge those exceptional students who can overcome personal, family, and community hardships that typically interfere with learning.
• In schools with high student mobility, teachers spend more time repeating lessons for newcomers, and have fewer opportunities to adapt instruction to students’ individual strengths and weaknesses.
• When classrooms fill with students who come to school less ready to learn, teachers must focus more on discipline and less on learning.
• Children in impoverished neighborhoods are surrounded by more crime and violence and suffer from greater stress that interferes with learning.
• Children with less exposure to mainstream society are less familiar with the standard English that’s necessary for their future success.
• When few parents have strong educations themselves, schools cannot benefit from parental pressure for higher quality curriculum,
• Children have few college-educated role models to emulate, and
• They have few classroom peers whose own families set higher academic standards.

Nationwide, low-income black children’s isolation has increased. It’s a problem not only of poverty but of race.

• The share of black students attending schools that are more than 90 percent minority has grown in the last twenty years from about 34 percent to about 40 percent.
• Twenty years ago, black students typically attended schools in which about 40 percent of their fellow students were low-income; it is now about 60 percent.
• In cities with the most struggling students, the isolation is even more extreme. The most recent data show, for example, that in Detroit, the typical black student attends a school where 2 percent of students are white, and 85 percent are low income.

It is inconceivable that significant gains can be made in the achievement of black children who are so severely isolated.

As I mentioned, this school segregation mostly reflects neighborhood segregation. In urban areas, low-income white students are more likely to be integrated into middle-class neighborhoods and less likely to attend school predominantly with other disadvantaged students. Although immigrant low-income Hispanic students are also concentrated in schools, by the third generation their families are more likely to settle in more middle-class neighborhoods.

The racial segregation of schools has been intensifying because the segregation of neighborhoods has been intensifying. Analysis of Census data by Rutgers University Professor Paul Jargowsky has found that in 2011, 7 percent of poor whites lived in high poverty neighborhoods, where more than 40 percent of the residents are poor, up from 4 percent in 2000; 15 percent of poor Hispanics lived in such high poverty neighborhoods in 2011, up from 14 percent in 2000; and a breathtaking 23 percent of poor blacks lived in high poverty neighborhoods in 2011, up from 19 percent in 2000.

In his 2013 book, Stuck in Place, the New York University sociologist Patrick Sharkey defines a poor neighborhood as one where 20 percent of the residents are poor, not 40 percent as in Paul Jargowsky’s work. A 20-percent-poor neighborhood is still severely disadvantaged. In such a neighborhood, many, if not most other residents are likely to have very low incomes, although not so low as to be below the official poverty line.

Sharkey finds that young African Americans (from 13 to 28 years old) are now ten times as likely to live in poor neighborhoods, defined in this way, as young whites—66 percent of African Americans, compared to 6 percent of whites. What’s more, for black families, mobility out of such neighborhoods is much more limited than for whites. Sharkey shows that 67 percent of African American families hailing from the poorest quarter of neighborhoods a generation ago continue to live in such neighborhoods today. But only 40 percent of white families who lived in the poorest quarter of neighborhoods a generation ago still do so.

Considering all black families, 48 percent have lived in poor neighborhoods over at least two generations, compared to 7 percent of white families. If a child grows up in a poor neighborhood, moving up and out to a middle-class area is typical for whites but an aberration for blacks. Black neighborhood poverty is thus more multigenerational, while white neighborhood poverty is more episodic.

From the perspective of children, think of it this way: black children in low-income neighborhoods are more likely to have parents who also grew up in low-income neighborhoods than white or Hispanic children in low-income neighborhoods. The implications for children’s chances of success are dramatic: Sharkey calculates that “living in poor neighborhoods over two consecutive generations reduces children’s cognitive skills by roughly eight or nine points … roughly equivalent to missing two to four years of schooling.”

And Sharkey has a final finding in this regard that is most startling of all: Children in poor neighborhoods whose mothers grew up in middle-class neighborhoods score only slightly below, on average, the average scores of children whose families lived in middle-class neighborhoods for two generations. But children who live in middle-class neighborhoods yet whose mothers grew up in poor neighborhoods score much lower. Sharkey concludes that “the parent’s environment during [her own] childhood may be more important than the child’s own environment.”

Integrating disadvantaged black students into schools where more privileged students predominate can narrow the black-white achievement gap. But the conventional wisdom of contemporary education policy notwithstanding, segregated schools with poorly performing students cannot be “turned around” while remaining racially isolated. And the racial isolation of schools cannot be remedied without undoing the racial isolation of the neighborhoods in which they are located.

The Myth of De Facto Segregation

In 2007, the Supreme Court made integration more difficult when it prohibited the Louisville and Seattle school districts from making racial balance a factor in assigning students to schools, in cases where applicant numbers exceeded available seats.

The plurality opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts called student categorization by race unconstitutional unless designed to reverse effects of explicit rules that segregated students by race. Desegregation efforts, he ruled, are impermissible if students are racially isolated, not as the result of government policy but because of societal discrimination, economic characteristics, or what Justice Clarence Thomas, in his concurring opinion, termed “any number of innocent private decisions, including voluntary housing choices.”

In Roberts’ terminology, commonly accepted by policymakers from across the political spectrum, constitutionally forbidden segregation established by federal, state or local government action is de jure , while racial isolation independent of state action, as, in Roberts’ view, like that in Louisville and Seattle, is de facto .

It is generally accepted today, even by sophisticated policymakers, that black students’ racial isolation is now de facto , not only in Louisville and Seattle, but in all metropolitan areas, North and South.

Even the liberal dissenters in the Louisville-Seattle case, led by Justice Stephen Breyer, agreed with this characterization. Breyer argued that school districts should be permitted voluntarily to address de facto racial homogeneity, even if not constitutionally required to do so. But he accepted that for the most part, Louisville and Seattle schools were not segregated by state action and thus not constitutionally required to desegregate.

This is a dubious proposition. Certainly, Northern schools have not been segregated by policies assigning blacks to some schools and whites to others; they are segregated because their neighborhoods are racially homogenous.

But neighborhoods did not get that way from “innocent private decisions” or, as the late Justice Potter Stewart once put it, from “unknown and perhaps unknowable factors such as in-migration, birth rates, economic changes, or cumulative acts of private racial fears.”

In truth, residential segregation’s causes are both knowable and known – twentieth century federal, state and local policies explicitly designed to separate the races and whose effects endure today. In any meaningful sense, neighborhoods and in consequence, schools, have been segregated de jure .

Massey and Denton’s American Apartheid is the title of one book describing only a few of these many public policies. The title is no exaggeration. The notion of de facto segregation is a myth, although widely accepted in a national consensus that wants to avoid confronting our racial history.

De Jure Residential Segregation by Federal, State, and Local Government

The federal government led in the establishment and maintenance of residential segregation in metropolitan areas.

• From its New Deal inception and especially during and after World War II, federally funded public housing was explicitly racially segregated, both by federal and local governments. Not only in the South, but in the Northeast, Midwest, and West, projects were officially and publicly designated either for whites or for blacks. Some projects were “integrated” with separate buildings designated for whites or for blacks. Later, as white families left the projects for the suburbs, public housing became overwhelmingly black and in most cities was placed only in black neighborhoods, explicitly so. This policy continued one originating in the New Deal, when Harold Ickes, President Roosevelt’s first public housing director, established the “neighborhood composition rule” that public housing should not disturb the pre-existing racial composition of neighborhoods where it was placed.

This was de jure segregation .

• Once the housing shortage eased and material was freed for post-World War II civilian purposes, the federal government subsidized relocation of whites to suburbs and prohibited similar relocation of blacks. Again, this was not implicit, not mere “disparate impact,” but racially explicit policy. The Federal Housing and Veterans Administrations recruited a nationwide cadre of mass-production builders who constructed developments on the East Coast like the Levittowns in Long Island, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware; on the West Coast like Lakeview and Panorama City in the Los Angeles area, Westlake (Daly City) in the San Francisco Bay Area, and several Seattle suburbs developed by William and Bertha Boeing; and in numerous other metropolises in between. These builders received federal loan guarantees on explicit condition that no sales be made to blacks and that each individual deed include a prohibition on re-sales to blacks, or to what the FHA described as an “incompatible racial element.”
• In addition to guaranteeing construction loans taken out by mass production suburban developers, the FHA, as a matter of explicit policy, also refused to insure individual mortgages for African Americans in white neighborhoods, or even to whites in neighborhoods that the FHA considered subject to possible integration in the future.
• Although a 1948 Supreme Court ruling barred courts from enforcing racial deed restrictions, the restrictions themselves were deemed lawful for another 30 years and the FHA knowingly continued, until the Fair Housing Act was passed in 1968, to finance developers who constructed suburban developments that were closed to African-Americans.
• Bank regulators from the Federal Reserve, Comptroller of the Currency, Office of Thrift Supervision, and other agencies knowingly approved “redlining” policies by which banks and savings institutions refused loans to black families in white suburbs and even, in most cases, to black families in black neighborhoods – leading to the deterioration and ghettoization of those neighborhoods.
• Although specific zoning rules assigning blacks to some neighborhoods and whites to others were banned by the Supreme Court in 1917, racial zoning in some cities was enforced until the 1960s. The Court’s 1917 decision was not based on equal protection but on the property rights of white owners to sell to whomever they pleased. Several large cities interpreted the ruling as inapplicable to their zoning laws because their laws prohibited only residence of blacks in white neighborhoods, not ownership. Some cities, Miami the most conspicuous example, continued to include racial zones in their master plans and issued development permits accordingly, even though neighborhoods themselves were not explicitly zoned for racial groups.
• In other cities, following the 1917 Supreme Court decision, mayors and other public officials took the lead in organizing homeowners associations for the purpose of enacting racial deed restrictions. Baltimore is one example where the mayor organized a municipal Committee on Segregation to maintain racial zones without an explicit ordinance that would violate the 1917 decision.
• You may recall that in the 1980s, the Internal Revenue Service revoked the tax-exemption of Bob Jones University because it prohibited interracial dating. The IRS believed it was constitutionally required to refuse a tax subsidy to a university with racist practices. Yet the IRS never challenged the pervasive use of tax-favoritism by universities, churches, and other non-profit organizations and institutions to enforce racial segregation. The IRS extended tax exemptions not only to churches where such associations were frequently based and whose clergy were their officers, but to the associations themselves, although their racial purposes were explicit and well-known.

This was de jure segregation

• Churches were not alone in benefitting from unconstitutional tax exemptions. Consider this example: Robert Hutchins, known to educators for reforms elevating the liberal arts in higher education, was president and chancellor of the tax-exempt University of Chicago from 1929 to 1951. He directed the University to sponsor neighborhood associations to enforce racially restrictive deeds in its nearby Hyde Park and Kenwood neighborhoods, and employed the University’s legal department to evict black families who moved nearby in defiance of his policy, all while the University was subsidized by the federal government by means of its tax-deductible and tax-exempt status.
• Urban renewal programs of the mid-twentieth century often had similarly undisguised purposes: to force low-income black residents away from universities, hospital complexes, or business districts and into new ghettos. Relocation to stable and integrated neighborhoods was not provided; in most cases, housing quality for those whose homes were razed was diminished by making public housing high-rises or overcrowded ghettos the only relocation option.

This was de jure segregation.

• Where integrated or mostly-black neighborhoods were too close to white communities or central business districts, interstate highways were routed by federal and local officials to raze those neighborhoods for the explicit purpose of relocating black populations to more distant ghettos or of creating barriers between white and black neighborhoods. Euphemisms were thought less necessary then than today: according to the director of the American Association of State Highway Officials whose lobbying heavily influenced the interstate program, “some city officials expressed the view in the mid-1950’s that the urban Interstates would give them a good opportunity to get rid of the local ‘niggertown.’”

State policy contributed in other ways.

• Real estate is a highly regulated industry. State governments require brokers to take courses in ethics and exams to keep their licenses. State commissions suspend or even lift licenses for professional and personal infractions – from mishandling escrow accounts to failing to pay personal child support. But although real estate agents openly enforced segregation, state authorities did not punish brokers for racial discrimination, and rarely do so even today when racial steering and discriminatory practices remain.

This misuse of regulatory authority was, and is, de jure segregation .

Local officials have played roles as well.

• Public police and prosecutorial power was used nationwide to enforce racial boundaries. Illustrations are legion. In the Chicago area, police forcibly evicted blacks who moved into an apartment in a white neighborhood; in Louisville, the locus of Parents Involved , the state prosecuted and jailed a white seller for sedition after he sold his home in his white neighborhood to a black family. Everywhere, North, South, East, and West, police stood by while thousands (not an exaggeration) of mobs set fire to and stoned homes purchased by blacks in white neighborhoods, and prosecutors almost never (if ever) charged well-known and easily identifiable mob leaders.

This officially sanctioned abuse of the police power also constituted de jure segregation .

• An example from Culver City, a suburb of Los Angeles, illustrates how purposeful state action to promote racial segregation could be. During World War II, the local state’s attorney instructed the municipality’s air raid wardens, when they went door-to-door advising residents to turn off their lights to avoid providing guidance to Japanese bombers, also to solicit homeowners to sign restrictive covenants barring blacks from residence in the community.

Other forms abound of racially explicit state action to segregate the urban landscape, in violation of the Fifth, Thirteenth, and Fourteenth Amendments. Yet the term “ de facto segregation,” describing a never-existent reality, persists among otherwise well-informed advocates and scholars. The term, and its implied theory of private causation, hobbles our motivation to address de jure segregation as explicitly as Jim Crow was addressed in the South or apartheid was addressed in South Africa.

Private prejudice certainly played a very large role. But even here, unconstitutional government action not only reflected but helped to create and sustain private prejudice. In part, white homeowners’ resistance to black neighbors was fed by deteriorating ghetto conditions, so that white homeowners had a reasonable fear that if African Americans moved into their neighborhoods, these refugees from urban slums would bring the slum conditions with them.

Yet these slum conditions were supported by state action, by overcrowding caused almost entirely by the refusal of the federal government to permit African Americans to expand their housing supply by moving to the suburbs, and by municipalities’ discriminatory denial of adequate public services. In the ghetto,

• garbage was collected less frequently,
• predominantly African American neighborhoods were re-zoned for mixed (i.e., industrial, or even toxic) use,
• streets remained unpaved,
• even water, power, and sewer services were less often provided.

This was de jure segregation , but white homeowners came to see these conditions as characteristics of black residents themselves, not as the results of racially motivated municipal policy.

The Continuing Effects of State Sponsored Residential Segregation

Even those who understand this dramatic history of de jure segregation may think that because these policies are those of the past there is no longer a public policy bar that prevents African Americans from moving to white neighborhoods. Thus, they say, although these policies were unfortunate, we no longer have de jure segregation. Rather, they believe, the reason we don’t have integration today is not because of government policy but because most African Americans cannot afford to live in middle class neighborhoods.

This unaffordability was also created by federal, state, and local policy that prevented African Americans in the mid-twentieth century from accumulating the capital needed to invest in home ownership in middle-class neighborhoods, and then from benefiting from the equity appreciation that followed in the ensuing decades.

Federal labor market and income policies were racially discriminatory until only a few decades ago. In consequence, most black families, who in the mid-twentieth century could have joined their white peers in the suburbs, can no longer afford to do so.

• The federal civil service was first segregated in the twentieth century, by the administration of President Woodrow Wilson. Under the rules then adopted, no black civil servant could be in a position of authority over white civil servants, and in consequence, African Americans were restricted and demoted to the most poorly paid jobs.
• The federal government recognized separate black and white government employee unions well into the second half of the twentieth century. For example, black letter carriers were not admitted to membership in the white postal service union. Black letter carriers had their own union, but the Postal Service would only hear grievances from the white organization.
• At the behest of Southern segregationist Senators and Congressmen, New Deal labor standards laws, like the National Labor Relations Act and the minimum wage law, excluded from coverage, for undisguised racial purposes, occupations in which black workers predominated.
• The National Labor Relations Board certified segregated private sector unions, and unions that entirely excluded African Americans from their trades, into the 1970s.
• State and local governments maintained separate, and lower, salary schedules for black public employees through the 1960s.

In these and other ways, government played an important and direct role in depressing the income levels of African American workers below the income levels of comparable white workers. This, too, contributed to the inability of black workers to accumulate the wealth needed to move to equity-appreciating white suburbs.

Segregation is now locked in place by exclusionary zoning laws in suburbs where black families once could have afforded to move in the absence of official segregation, but can afford to do so no longer with property values appreciated.

Mid-twentieth century policies of de jure racial segregation continue to have impact in other ways, as well. A history of state-sponsored violence to keep African Americans in their ghettos cannot help but influence the present-day reluctance of many black families to integrate.

Today, when facially race-neutral housing or redevelopment policies have a disparate impact on African Americans, that impact is inextricably intertwined with the state-sponsored system of residential segregation that we established.

Miseducating Our Youth

Reacquainting ourselves with that history is a step towards confronting it. When knowledge of that history becomes commonplace, we will conclude that Louisville, Seattle and other racially segregated metropolitan areas not only have permission, but a constitutional obligation to integrate.

But this obligation cannot be fulfilled by school districts alone. In some small cities, and in some racial border areas, some racial school integration can be accomplished by adjusting attendance zones, establishing magnet schools, or offering more parent-student choice. This is especially true – but only temporarily – where neighborhoods are in transition, either from gradual urban gentrification, or in first-ring suburbs to which urban ghetto populations are being displaced. These school integration policies are worth pursuing, but generally, our most distressed ghettos are too far distant from truly middle-class communities for school integration to occur without racially explicit policies of residential desegregation. Many ghettos are now so geographically isolated from white suburbs that voluntary choice, magnet schools, or fiddling with school attendance zones can no longer enable many low-income black children to attend predominantly middle class schools.

Instead, narrowing the achievement gap will also require housing desegregation, which history also shows is not a voluntary matter but constitutional necessity – involving policies like voiding exclusionary zoning, placing scattered low and moderate income housing in predominantly white suburbs, prohibiting landlord discrimination against housing voucher holders, and ending federal subsidies for communities that fail to reverse policies that led to racial exclusion.

We will never develop the support needed to enact such policies if policymakers and the public are unaware of the history of state-sponsored residential segregation. And we are not doing the job of telling young people this story, so that they will support more integration-friendly policies in the future. Elementary and secondary school curricula typically ignore, or worse, mis-state this story. For example, in over 1,200 pages of McDougal Littell’s widely used high school textbook, The Americans , a single paragraph is devoted to 20th century “Discrimination in the North.” It devotes one passive-voice sentence to residential segregation, stating that “African Americans found themselves forced into segregated neighborhoods,” with no further explanation of how public policy was responsible. Another widely used textbook, Prentice Hall’s United States History , also attributes segregation to mysterious forces: “In the North, too, African Americans faced segregation and discrimination. Even where there were no explicit laws, de facto segregation, or segregation by unwritten custom or tradition, was a fact of life. African Americans in the North were denied housing in many neighborhoods.” History Alive! , a popular textbook published by the Teachers Curriculum Institute, teaches that segregation was only a Southern problem: “Even New Deal agencies practiced racial segregation, especially in the South,” failing to make any reference to what Ira Katznelson, in his 2013 Fear Itself , describes as FDR’s embrace of residential segregation nationwide in return for Southern support of his economic policies.

Avoidance of our racial history is pervasive and we are ensuring the persistence of that avoidance for subsequent generations. For the public and policymakers, re-learning our racial history is a necessary step because remembering this history is the foundation for an understanding that aggressive policies to desegregate metropolitan areas are not only desirable, but a constitutional obligation.

Documentation

In published work, I have documented much of what I have described, citing many previous historians who have recounted this story. Full citations for the evidence I have described and to other scholars who have recounted it, can be found, for example, at http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/may13/vol70/num08/Why-Our-Schools-Are-Segregated.aspx , or at http://prrac.org/newsletters/novdec2012.pdf , or at http://www.epi.org/files/2012/Different_Kind_Of_Choice.pdf . For source citations regarding the pathways by which social and economic disadvantages affect student performance, see Class and Schools ( http://www.epi.org/publication/books_class_and_schools/ ). Or, if you e-mail me at [email protected] , I’d be glad to send you documentation of any of the claims I make here today. The segregation history I have described to you was once well known, but has now been dropped from policymakers’ and the public’s consciousness.

About the author

Richard Rothstein ( [email protected] ) is a Research Associate of the Economic Policy Institute and a Senior Fellow at the Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Law and Social Policy, University of California (Berkeley) School of Law.

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Residential segregation essay.

Residential segregation most often refers to the separation of people into different neighborhoods based on their race and/or ethnicity, though neighborhood-level segregation can be computed using other characteristics of people, households, or neighborhoods, for example, social class, single-parent families, or home ownership. The association between the term residential segregation and race/ethnicity reflects the fact that segregation by race/ethnicity is far higher than segregation by other characteristics. Segregation is a social problem because where people live determines other aspects of their lives: what schools their children attend, access to transportation, availability of municipal services, job opportunities, and so on.

Since residential segregation is based on neighborhoods, it is important to understand how neighborhood is defined. Neighborhoods are usually approximated by census tracts, non-overlapping areas that cover an entire city or metropolitan area and contain approximately 4,000 persons. With the exception of subdivisions to accommodate population growth, tracts have the advantage of changing relatively little over time, making comparisons across time easier. Researchers who argue tracts are too large to capture what most people mean by a neighborhood instead use block groups, areas of about 1,500 people, as proxies for a neighborhood, though these get redefined at each census. The larger the unit used to define the neighborhood, the lower segregation will be, because the probability of finding two different people, say a black and a white, increases as the total number of people examined increases.

In its simplest form, residential segregation is measured by the Index of Dissimilarity. This compares the population of each neighborhood to the overall racial composition of the city or metropolitan area in which it is located. Neighborhoods whose population more closely matches the overall racial composition contribute less to the index, those that do not contribute more. The index ranges from 0 to 100, where zero indicates no segregation and 100 indicates total segregation, with no groups sharing any neighborhoods at all. Values below 30 are considered low, those between 30 and 60 moderate, and above 60 high. The value of the index can be interpreted as the percentage of either group that would need to change their neighborhood so that each neighborhood would reflect the race/ethnic distribution of the city as a whole. The advantages of this index are that it is easy to compute and understand, takes the city’s overall racial composition into account and does not impose an artificial definition of integration, is unaffected by the relative sizes of the groups, and has a long history of use. The main disadvantage of the index is that it compares only two groups at a time, a feature that is becoming more problematic as U.S. society becomes increasingly diverse.

Using the Index of Dissimilarity as the measure allows description of patterns of segregation for different groups in the United States in recent decades. First, African Americans are almost always the most segregated group, followed by Hispanics, and then Asians. In 2000, on average, African American segregation from non-Hispanic whites was 65.2, Hispanic segregation was 51.6, and Asian segregation 42.2. Second, the segregation of African Americans has been declining in recent decades, but that of Hispanics and Asians has been increasing, in part because of continued immigration of those groups; new immigrants tend to live near others of their group, thus replacing those who have moved out. On average, while black-white segregation declined 4.6 points between 1980 and 1990, Hispanic-white segregation increased 4.9 points, and Asian-white increased 2.1 points. Third, segregation tends to be highest in older, formerly industrial cities, in the Northeast and Midwest, with large black populations. For example, in 2000 the segregation of African Americans from whites in Detroit was 84.7, compared to segregation of 45.7 for Hispanics and 45.9 for Asians. Conversely, it is lower in newer cities in the South and West whose populations are growing. For example, in 2000 the segregation of African Americans in Phoenix-Mesa was 43.7, compared to 52.5 for Hispanics and 28.1 for Asians. Metropolitan areas that attract more immigrants also tend to have somewhat lower black segregation than those that do not. Fourth, the largest declines in black segregation are in smaller metropolitan areas with small black populations. Between 1980 and 2000, African American segregation declined by nearly 20 points in Dallas and Phoenix-Mesa, while it declined by less than 5 in Detroit and Newark, and increased by 0.2 points in New York City. Thus, in the larger metropolitan areas where more than half of metropolitan blacks live, segregation declines have been modest.

Social scientists also increasingly realize that the simple description of residential segregation as a matter of even distribution across neighborhoods is inadequate to fully describe the phenomena. Issues such as how much your group’s percent of representation in different neighborhoods differs from your group’s percent of representation in the city’s overall population (uneven distribution), who shares your neighborhood with you (isolation), how the neighborhoods your group occupies are themselves distributed across space (clustering), whether you live close to the center city (centralization), and whether your neighborhoods are densely crowded (concentration) all refer to other important aspects of segregation. Each of these has a specific measure attached to it. Places that are highly segregated on four or all five of these measures are known as hypersegregated places. Until 2000, the only group in the United States that lived in hypersegregated areas was African Americans. In 2000, Hispanics in New York and Los Angeles were also found to be hypersegregated. African Americans were hypersegregated in 29 places in 2000, including Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee, Newark, and Philadelphia, where they had scores above 60 on all five measures.

While people choose different neighborhoods for a variety of reasons, residential segregation is not simply the aggregate result of individual choices, but the result of actions on the part of government, realtors, bankers, and insurance agents to influence where specific groups live. At the extreme, apartheid, there are laws dictating where specific groups can live. Historical research on segregation has shown that the process of limiting where African Americans could live in northern cities moved from individual acts of violence and deed restriction to restrictive covenants that applied to whole neighborhoods, to a brief attempt by some places to pass apartheid laws that the Supreme Court promptly declared illegal, to the practice of redlining of certain neighborhoods that was developed by the Home Owner’s Loan Corporation (HOLC) and carried out on an extensive scale under the Federal Housing Authority (FHA) with the cooperation of bankers and realtors. The final act of the civil rights legislation of the 1960s was the 1968 Fair Housing Act, which forbade discrimination in the sale or rental of housing. Studies have found that discrimination since then has become more subtle and is now often the purview of loan officers and insurance agents, as denial of mortgages and insurance results in the same loss of access as discrimination by a realtor.

The importance of segregation lies in its consequences: living in highly segregated neighborhoods limits the opportunities a person and his or her family have in a myriad of different ways. One important limitation is financial: houses in segregated neighborhoods tend to be worth less and appreciate far more slowly than comparable houses in white neighborhoods, directly contributing to the wealth differential between whites and blacks as well as restricting money available to pay for college or help with the down payment on a house for a child. Other consequences of segregation include job and transportation access, safety issues, exposure to crime and higher rates of poverty, and receipt of poorer municipal services. The effects on both adults and children of living in segregated neighborhoods have been extensively studied, and while there is some inconsistency among the findings, it is clear that there is spatial differentiation of neighborhoods and many behaviors, and that these are interrelated and vary systematically. Residential segregation by race/ethnicity, especially for African Americans, is not benign in its effects.

Bibliography:

• Logan, John R., Brian J. Stults, and Reynolds Farley. 2004. “Segregation of Minorities in the Metropolis: Two Decades of Change.” Demography 41(1):1—22.
• Massey, Douglas S. and Nancy A. Denton. 1993. American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Sampson, Robert J., Jeffrey D. Morenoff, and Thomas Gannon-Rowley. 2002. “Assessing Neighborhood Effects: Social Processes and New Directions in Research.” Annual Review of Sociology 28:443—78.
• Squires, Gregory D. and Charis E. Kubrin. 2006. Privileged Places: Race, Residence and the Structure of Opportunity. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.
• White, Michael. 1988. American Neighborhoods and Residential Differentiation. New York: Russell Sage.
• Wilkes, Rima and John Iceland. 2004. “Hypersegregation in the Twenty-first Century.” Demography 41(1):23—36.

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The Legacy of the Little Rock Nine: Names that Changed History

This essay is about the Little Rock Nine the nine African American students who integrated Little Rock Central High School in 1957. It highlights the bravery and resilience of Melba Pattillo Beals Minnijean Brown Elizabeth Eckford Ernest Green Gloria Ray Karlmark Carlotta Walls LaNier Thelma Mothershed Terrence Roberts and Jefferson Thomas. Each student’s story is explored showcasing their individual and collective impact on the civil rights movement. The essay emphasizes their significant role in challenging segregation the personal sacrifices they made and their ongoing contributions to social justice and equality underscoring their enduring legacy in American history.

How it works

The Little Rock Nine is like a beacon in the fight for civil rights especially in breaking down racial segregation in American schools. Back in September 1957 nine brave African American students took a bold step into Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas. They weren’t just going to class—they were standing up to a whole system that kept black and white students apart. It was tough. They faced fierce opposition and downright hostility. But their courage and strength didn’t just make history—they changed it.

Let’s remember their names: Melba Pattillo Beals Minnijean Brown Elizabeth Eckford Ernest Green Gloria Ray Karlmark Carlotta Walls LaNier Thelma Mothershed Terrence Roberts and Jefferson Thomas. Each of them played a crucial role in the fight for equal rights.

Melba Pattillo Beals a strong voice among them wrote about her experiences in “Warriors Don’t Cry.” She didn’t hold back—her stories show just how hard it was for them dealing with threats and harassment every day. But Beals never gave up. She made sure people knew that their struggle wasn’t just about school—it was about fairness and justice for everyone.

Minnijean Brown faced some of the worst of it. She got suspended for standing up to all the bullying and eventually they kicked her out of Central High. But Brown didn’t stop fighting. She kept pushing for civil rights and later spent her time helping young people get involved in making things fair for everyone.

Elizabeth Eckford’s first day at Central High is famous. You’ve probably seen the picture: her walking alone through a crowd that was mad as fire. That image says it all about how brave she was. It shows the kind of courage it takes to stand against hate. Eckford showed the world that no matter how tough things get standing up for what’s right is worth it.

Ernest Green made history by being the first African American to graduate from Central High. That was a huge deal. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. himself was there to celebrate with him. Green’s graduation wasn’t just a win for him—it showed everyone that change was possible even when things seemed impossible.

Gloria Ray Karlmark didn’t let the challenges stop her. She kept going and her hard work paid off big time. She went on to achieve a lot in her studies and career. Her story proves that fighting for better education opens doors to so much more.

Carlotta Walls LaNier the youngest of the Nine wrote about her journey in “A Mighty Long Way.” Her book tells us about all the tough times she and the others went through. But LaNier didn’t back down. She kept pushing for education and equal rights showing us all that one person’s courage can change things for many.

Thelma Mothershed faced health issues but showed incredible strength. She finished her last year of school through mail courses and later became a teacher. Her story reminds us that nothing should stop us from learning and teaching others.

Terrence Roberts became a psychologist and used his experiences to help others understand the impact of racism. His work helps us see how the fight for civil rights affects us all even today.

Jefferson Thomas was quiet but determined. After school he served in the military and worked for the government. His life shows how the bravery he and the others showed as kids led to a lifetime of leadership and service.

The Little Rock Nine’s bravery didn’t end when school did. Their courage shook up the old rules and opened doors for new ones. Their fight showed us all that standing together against unfairness can change everything.

Their stories teach us that each of us can make a big difference. By remembering them and honoring what they did we keep pushing for fairness and equality. The Little Rock Nine’s legacy reminds us that being brave staying strong and fighting for justice are things that never go out of style.

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