Black Americans And The Racist Architecture Of Homeownership
This story is part of an NPR series, We Hold These Truths, on American democracy.
Last summer, DonnaLee Norrington had a dream about owning a home. Not the figurative kind, but a literal dream, as she slept in the rental studio apartment in South Los Angeles that she was sharing with a friend.
At around 2 a.m., Norrington remembers, "God said to me, 'Why don't you get a mortgage that doesn't move?' And in my head I knew that meant a fixed mortgage."
The very next morning — she made an appointment with Mark Alston, a local mortgage broker well known in the South LA Black community, to inquire about purchasing her very own home for the first time.
She was 59 at the time.
Alston has built his lending practice on the hope of expanding access to homeownership for Black Americans. He says they have been systematically discriminated against by the real estate industry and government policy. Unlike most loan officers, Alston works with his clients for months — even years — to disentangle a convoluted loan application process, pay off bills and boost credit scores so they can ultimately qualify for a home loan.
Today, Norrington and her younger sister MaryJosephine Norrington own a three-bedroom house in Compton, where three generations of her family currently live.
Owning a home is an undeniable part of the American dream — and of American citizenship. It is also the key to building intergenerational wealth. But Norrington's homeownership success story is an increasingly rare one for Black Americans.
Over the last 15 years, Black homeownership has declined more dramatically than for any other racial or ethnic group in the United States. In 2019, the Black homeownership rate was about as low as in the 1960s, when private race-based discrimination was legal.
The story of housing discrimination is rooted in a long history of racist government policies perpetuated by the real estate industry and private attitudes that began with slavery. The federal government began to push and expand homeownership in the New Deal era through innovations like the 30-year mortgage.
But one way Black people and other minority groups were left out systematically was through a process known as "redlining" which labeled certain areas as "risky" for a home loan. African Americans and immigrants were relegated to areas, marked in red on government-sponsored maps, where poverty was most concentrated and housing was deteriorating.
The Fair Housing Act of 1968 recognized segregationist practices like redlining to be unconstitutional. But the law only prohibited future, formalized discrimination rather than undoing the foundationally racist landscape on which homeownership in America was built.
The vicious cycle and legacy of redlining has persisted: Residents of redlined communities struggled to receive loans to buy or renovate their homes, which led to disrepair and a decline of a community's housing stock. That in turn forced businesses to close and depressed tax revenue, diminishing school funding.
Today, many of the same neighborhoods that were redlined continue not only to have the highest poverty rates, but also worse health outcomes that lead to shorter lifespans. And Black Americans are nearly five times more likely to own a home in a formerly redlined neighborhood than in a greenlined, or "desirable," neighborhood, resulting in less home equity than white Americans have.
The West Coast has often held hope as a cultural and political promised land for marginalized groups. During the first and second Great Migrations, millions of Black Americans moved west to escape the Jim Crow South in search of more equal treatment and opportunities — in part, because legal, racist policies and practices were so widespread all across the country at that time.
But while Los Angeles, one of California's major metropolises, would become the battleground for hard-fought civil rights victories for Black Americans, it was also a place where housing segregation, predatory real estate practices and exploitative lending thrived.
Our story begins with one Los Angeles neighborhood, known as Sugar Hill, where the Black community successfully fought racially restrictive covenants only to later face another threat — from the freeway.
Beneath the Santa Monica Freeway, lies the erasure of Sugar Hill
The tree-lined boulevards of the West Adams neighborhood are studded with stately homes.
"That was Marvin Gaye's place right there," says Rha Nickerson, who grew up in the area, as she points to one such two-story house on Gramercy Place.
It's easy to tell from the ornate architecture of the houses, the antique street lights and the wide roads that the neighborhood bore witness to a lot of history. But it's hard to miss the loud hum of the Santa Monica I-10 freeway coming from behind a large concrete wall at the end of Marvin Gaye's street.
Siblings Rha and Van Nickerson are now 73 and 72, respectively. They spent formative years of their childhoods in this neighborhood, which was once called Sugar Hill — a nod to the thriving Black Harlem Renaissance neighborhood of the same name. Doctors, entrepreneurs and oil barons lived in Sugar Hill — even legendary stars like jazz singer Ethel Waters and Gone with the Wind actress Hattie McDaniel.
But Sugar Hill's thriving Black community was an exception: It managed to exist despite systemic efforts to prevent Black people from buying homes in much of Los Angeles.
One of the most prevalent tools white residents used to maintain the segregation — across America and in Sugar Hill — was the racially restrictive covenant. These agreements, embedded in property deeds, made homeowners promise never to sell to African Americans or other minority groups. In 1940, 80% of properties in Los Angeles had these restrictions attached to them.
Rha Nickerson remembers her father teaching her about these covenants when she was a young girl, and says that it was only because people like Hattie McDaniel fought these restrictions that her family was able to live there.
Racially restrictive covenants were ubiquitous in Sugar Hill at the time, like many places in America. But some white homeowners willingly violated them to sell to Black buyers, in part because Black people were willing to pay more since there was far less property available to them. The willingness to violate covenants was especially the case around the Great Depression, when many homeowners were desperate to sell.
The first African American known to purchase a home in Sugar Hill was entrepreneur Norman Houston, who bought property in 1938. In the years following, a wave of Black families moved into the area.
But one white homeowners association did not like the way its neighborhood was changing. So members of the West Adams Heights Improvement Association sued their Black neighbors for violating racially restrictive covenants in hopes of having them evicted — even though white sellers had violated the covenants.
McDaniel, Houston and their neighbors fought back with their own Black homeowners association called the West Adams Heights Protective Association. Two of Houston's grandchildren, Ivan Houston and Kathi Houston-Berryman, say they remember their grandfather as a leader in the movement for housing justice for Black Angelenos.
"He always did have a vision and I think he was what is known as a pacesetter ... because he was always moving ahead," Houston-Berryman says. Ivan still has his grandfather's notebook that documented the West Adams Heights Protective Association meeting minutes, including the discussions the group had about fighting racially restrictive covenants.
The white plaintiffs claimed Black homeowners in Sugar Hill would lead to declining property values in the neighborhood, even though their Black neighbors had well-maintained properties with increasing home values. Such racist thinking was in line with the dominant logic of the real estate industry at the time — the logic underlying redlining.
In his retort, civil rights attorney Loren Miller, who represented the Black homeowners, used an argument that had never worked in any U.S. court before — that restrictive covenants violated the California Constitution and the 14th Amendment, which mandates equal protection under the law.
Taking the packed courtroom by surprise, Judge Thurmond Clarke ruled in favor of Miller. "Certainly there was no discrimination against the Negro race when it came to calling upon its members to die on the battlefields in defense of this country in the war just ended," Clarke said.
This victory did not just mean the Black residents of Sugar Hill got to stay in their homes — it set a precedent for the 1948 U.S. Supreme Court Case Shelley v. Kraemer, also argued by Miller, that would deem racially restrictive covenants unenforceable.
Read the full article here: https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2021/05/08/991535564/black-americans-and-the-racist-architecture-of-homeownershiphttps://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2021/05/08/991535564/black-americans-and-the-racist-architecture-of-homeownership