3.9: Housing

Housing

Historically, ethnic groups tended to live near one another in spatially contiguous areas. Many cities have Chinatowns or Little Italy. These are known as ethnic enclaves. There are many reasons why groups cluster; some reasons are voluntary and some are not. In the United States, it was not uncommon for cities to restrict where African American citizens could live. These restrictions were either through the force of law, or through unwritten behavioral norms that resisted renting or selling houses to African American families outside of certain areas. This residential, spatial segregation was accompanied with educational, social, and economic segregation. African American communities were often known as ghettos, places where a certain population is forced to live. The word ghetto is older than the United States itself. Ghetto was an Italian name for the area that Jews were forced to live in. Although the word is Italian, the idea of forcing minority populations to live in designated areas has unfortunately had wide historical appeal. Legal housing segregation ended in the United States in 1968, but behaviors change more slowly than laws.

Many ethnic communities have arisen from less coercive means. There are numerous reasons that an ethnic community would choose to live close together. Mutual support networks, the ability to develop schools and businesses catering to their own needs, a sense of safety, and the ability to retain their own cultural connections are examples of positive reasons. Institutionalized poverty, marginalized political representation, and active discrimination are negative reasons.

"California-06338 - Chinatown" by archer10 (Dennis) is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Ghettoization

Ethnic ghettoization is a more organized effort by multiple parties to enforce the maintenance of established ethnic identities and structures of power that benefit one group over others. Historically, the term ghetto has been used to identify areas of a city where specific minority groups were forced to live. In recent years, the term has been largely used by Americans in reference= only to poor African-American neighborhoods. It is important to recognize that ghettos have a very long history, can be found in almost every country on earth, and any minority group may be ghettoized. Certainly, the Chinatown districts in many US cities qualified as ghettos during much of the 19th and 20th centuries, before legal changes made housing discrimination unlawful. The Nazis confined Jewish people to ghettos during their reign of terror across Europe. Today, the less value-laden term, ethnic enclave is used by social scientists to describe neighborhoods dominated by a single ethnicity. Some more well-off ethnic enclaves are called ethno-burbs. The large concentration of Asians in Los Angeles’ San Gabriel Valley is a good example of an ethno-burb.

Figure : Altgeld Gardens: Chicago, IL. This public housing project built after World War II to house black veterans after the war was built on an abandoned landfill. It remains a black neighborhood and numerous toxic hazards remain in the vicinity.

It is reasonably easy to understand why a group of people invested in racist/bigoted ideologies and/or sheer ignorance would seek to isolate people who are different from themselves. Keeping groups geographically separate makes it easier for groups in power to maintain the status quo. Residential integration of various ethnic groups invites children from different groups to become friends, maybe fall in love, make babies or just learn from one another. Perhaps the most important thing ghettoization discourages is marriages between people of different ethnicities or races. Bigots fear any dilution of the “purity” of identity, whatever that identity is based upon (race, religion, nationality, language, etc.), and residential proximity threatens that. More importantly, allowing people from different groups to live together makes it difficult for people from a dominant group to exercise and maintain political and economic power over the subjugated group(s). Isolating subjugated groups is the best way to perpetuate the ignorance that is the ultimate source of racial and ethnic prejudices the spatial concentration of minorities creates situations that affected groups have leveraged to their advantage.

First, diversity is preserved via ghettoization, just as those who engineered these elements of cities hoped. By undermining the prospects of intermarriage and assimilation, excluded groups remain somewhat distinct from the host culture. If every minority group melted perfectly into the host culture, then everyone would be robbed of many of the magnificent cultural aspects of a diverse society. Large cities are exciting and enriching precisely because they have diversity. Certainly, lots of people enjoy the wide variety of ethnic foods in cities where ethnic identities remain strong, but there’s far more at risk should the distinctiveness of ethnic populations erode. Minority religious traditions, languages, philosophies, arts, and economic practices would all suffer if complete assimilation were to occur.

Other benefits may accrue to ethnic groups who remain near each other. Mutual support, in a variety of forms (economic, political, recreational, etc.) is easier when members of an ethnic cluster together. A reduction in some types of conflict may occur if people of like values and traditions are neighbors. Opinions regarding how late a party should go, or what a proper lawn should look like may vary less in neighborhoods where residents come from a common background. Recent immigrants, even those seeking to shed their ethnic heritage, often find ethnic enclaves easier places to begin the acculturation and assimilation process than a neighborhood dominated by the host culture group.

Ethnic minorities seeking to preserve their traditions and identities also stand a greater chance of exercising political power if they live together; concentrating voting power in specific areas. Many voting districts are gerrymandered to help promote (or deny) the interests of specific ethnicities. Even simple pleasures, like finding someone who also likes to play games, like dominoes or cricket; or finding a bakery that makes an ethnic-specialty food (e.g., pan de muerto, king cakes, laffa bread or knishes) is easier when people who share an ethnic identity clusterin space.

Positives

While many of the effects of ghettoization undermine the quality of life of minority groups, it must be noted that there are positive outcomes from ghettoization as well. This is not to justify the official and unofficial discriminatory practices (see the section below), but to argue instead that the spatial concentration of minorities creates situations that affected groups have leveraged to their advantage.

First, diversity is preserved via ghettoization, just as those who engineered these elements of cities hoped. By undermining the prospects of intermarriage and assimilation, excluded groups remain somewhat distinct from the host culture. If every minority group melted perfectly into the host culture, then everyone would be robbed of many of the magnificent cultural aspects of a diverse society. Large cities are exciting and enriching precisely because they have diversity. Certainly, lots of people enjoy the wide variety of ethnic foods in cities where ethnic identities remain strong, but there’s far more at risk should the distinctiveness of ethnic populations erode. Minority religious traditions, languages, philosophies, arts, and economic practices would all suffer if complete assimilation were to occur.

Other benefits may accrue to ethnic groups who remain near each other. Mutual support, in a variety of forms (economic, political, recreational, etc.) is easier when members of an ethnic cluster together. A reduction in some types of conflict may occur if people of like values and traditions are neighbors. Opinions regarding how late a party should go, or what a proper lawn should look like may vary less in neighborhoods where residents come from a common background. Recent immigrants, even those seeking to shed their ethnic heritage, often find ethnic enclaves easier places to begin the acculturation and assimilation process than a neighborhood dominated by the host culture group.

Ethnic minorities seeking to preserve their traditions and identities also stand a greater chance of exercising political power if they live together; concentrating voting power in specific areas. Many voting districts are gerrymandered to help promote (or deny) the interests of specific ethnicities. Even simple pleasures, like finding someone who also likes to play games, like dominoes or cricket; or finding a bakery that makes an ethnic-specialty food (e.g., pan de muerto, king cakes, laffa bread or knishes) is easier when people who share an ethnic identity clusterin space.

Restrictive Covenants

Following the Civil War, a wide variety of strategies were developed to limit the geographic distribution of African Americans in the United States. Early on, very simple legal measures were enacted that restricted African Americans to certain locations, especially in the Jim Crow South. Such laws were declared unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court in 1917 (Buchanan v Warley). As a result, more sophisticated segregation methods quickly emerged. Restrictive or exclusionary covenants were written into the deeds of sale for many homes sold during the next 50 years. Deed restrictions typically prohibited owners from doing mundane things like building garages, fences, or porches, but they sometimes also forbade the sale of the house to specific ethnicities. Black people were frequently the target of these discriminatory deeds, but Jews, Catholics, Chinese, and other ethnic groups also found themselves the target of restrictive covenants. It was once illegal to sell or rent property to Jewish people in Beverly Hills.

Figure : A homeowner's deed containing restrictive and exclusionary covenants, sold in Ohio for housing in Florida.

One of the most controversial practices, known as blockbusting was used to some effect, especially in cities in the Industrial Midwest. Realtors engaged in blockbusting would convince white homeowners in a majority white neighborhood that the arrival of a black family into the neighborhood had eroded the value of all the houses in the neighborhood. If the realtor could convince the white owners of this argument, the realtor would buy the property at below actual market value from the white home owner ̧ and often seek to sell it to a prospective black homeowner at above market value. Real estate speculators, land developers, and lenders all made substantial profits from the scam. White and black homeowners alike lost money. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 outlawed blockbusting, but only after most of the damage was done. Blockbusting no doubt accelerated the most common, legal, process of ethnic segregation, known as white flight, in which white people moved from heterogeneous inner-city locations to homogenous, largely white suburbs and exurbs. Court-ordered desegregation busing of students during the 1970s may have accelerated white flight and invited even greater residential segregation in many U.S. Cities.

9-22: This sign was erected in 1942 near a proposed housing project in Detroit. Rioting followed. Note the use of the American flag, during World War II. Eventually the National Guard arrived to protect the black residents.

Steering

More benign, perhaps even subconscious, actions also create and maintain ethnic neighborhoods. One realtor behavior called steering may be still widespread today. Steering happens when a realtor, trying to sell a prospective buyer a house, focuses the buyer’s attention on houses in neighborhoods predominated by persons of the prospective buyer’s ethnicity. Whether this is always a purposeful, discriminatory act, or simply a logic geared to help find people homes in neighborhoods where they “feel at home” is less clear.

Public Housing

Even some of the actions taken by national and local governments seem to have contributed to the ghettoization of minority groups. There is some debate about the intentionality of the government and the overall long-term effects of American public housing policy, but it does seem clear that public housing projects designed to offer affordable housing to inner-city residents did, at the very least, contribute to the maintenance of ethnically segregated neighborhoods in many cities where “projects'' were built. Public housing projects were by the 1970s emblematic of the ghettoization of African-Americansin the United States. Other government policies, including the Interstate Highway Act, redlining and Federal Housing Authority policies are discussed later.

Black Ghetto Typology

Because ghettos develop in different places and at different times, they are not all the same. Geographers Larry Ford and Ernst Griffin developed a typology of black ghettos in the United States based on their morphological evolution. By mapping the patterns of black ghettoization, one can gain valuable insight into the different methods of discrimination in the United States, and the peculiar differences in black-white relations across the US.

Larry Ford and Ernst Griffin. “The Ghettoization of Paradise.” Geographical Review, Vol. 69, No. 2 (Apr.1979), pp. 140-158 Article DOI:10.2307/214961 http://www.jstor.org/stable/214961

Early Southern

Before the Civil War, most African Americans lived in the Lowland South. Most were slaves. Most enslaved blacks lived on farms, but a substantial number of slaves lived in cities, like Charleston, New Orleans, and Atlanta. Urban slaves living in the South during this period were largely domestic servants and because most were enslaved, they were required to live with the white slaveholders. Enslaved blacks and the “Free People of Color'' were typically quartered on the property of white employers/slavers, generally in a small house, or stable facility at the rear of the main house, along the alley, or as they say down South, “in the lanes.”

The close physical proximity combined with the exceptional differences in economic and social status produced a peculiar type of ghetto where blacks and whites lived together, but very much apart at the same time. Intense day-to-day sharing of space inevitably leads to cultural exchange and even fondness, but in a system that demanded at least the appearance of separation, and maintained the potential for horrific consequences for the enslaved.

Figure : Early Southern Ghetto. Black people lived on the same property as whites, often in small houses along alleyways before the Civil War.

Classic Southern

During the Civil War, slavery was abolished, but most freed black slaves continued to live on farms or plantations for years afterward, often share-croppers. As the industrial revolution unfolded in the late 1800s, blacks (and poor whites) moved in ever-increasing numbers to cities in both the North and the South. In southern cities, where blacks were sometimes in the majority, Jim Crow segregation laws forced black people to live in specific areas of the city, thus creating the second type of American black ghetto known as the Classic Southern ghetto. In the Lowland South, where black people often outnumbered whites, as much as half a city or town was set aside for African-Americans. Often, the dividing line between Whites and Blacks was a rail line giving rise to the expression “other side of the tracks”. Many cities around the South fit this model still today.

Figure : Classic Southern Ghetto. Black folks following the Civil War were required to live on "the other side of the tracks"

Early Northern, Classic Northern

Outside of the slaveholding regions of the South, the pattern of black ghettoization evolved quite differently. In the 19th Century, African-Americans were often a very small minority in northern cities. Like others, they competed for precious housing space near downtown with other minority populations, most of whom were recent immigrants to America. In the figure below, you can see African-Americans, along with Anglo- Americans and two other minority groups represented by the blue and peach colors (Irish and Greeks?). This pattern represents the Early Northern ghetto. Over the years, European immigrants, less restricted by law and custom from moving to newly built neighborhoods, moved from inner-city regions of northern cities. African-Americans, restricted from moving out of the inner city more than other groups eventually came to dominate the entire inner-city, especially when migration from the Lowland South accelerated during the late 19th and early 20th century. By the 1980s, African Americans were outsized majorities in the inner cities of many places in the Industrial Midwest and Northeast. The intensity of black ghettoization is extreme in cities with Classic Northern style ghettos. Cities like Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, and Milwaukee have much higher segregation index scores than counterparts in the west or the southern United States.

Figure Chicago, IL. Vast crowds, dressed in green, line streets for the Saint Patrick's Day parade, a jubilant celebration of an Irish heritage that was once ghettoized in the United States, in places like Chicago.

Figure Housing Projects in St. Louis (left) and Chicago's Robert Taylor Homes in the mid-1990s. These well-intentioned public housing efforts concentrated poor blacks into small areas of the inner city, reinforcing the “Classic Northern” style ghetto. Crime and other social dysfunction afflicted these projects and their host neighborhoods. Large-scale housing projects are far less common today, and the racial segregation created by these projects has diminished since the 1990s.

Figure 9-27: Early Northern (left) and Classic Northern (right) Black Ghettos. Typical of the pattern of black ghettoization in cities in the Industrial Midwest and Northeast, blacks occupy an ever-increasing portion of the inner city. Note that other minority groups occupy parts of the inner city in the Early Northern model and farless in the Classic Northern model.

New City

In the western United States and parts of the Sunbelt, a different type of black ghetto evolved during the age of the automobile. The morphology of these black ghettos reflects the importance of the highway and interstate system that evolved with the car and the city itself. These new cities grew rapidly after 1920 but had intense growth during and immediately following World War II. Los Angeles is a classic example. Good jobs in defense industries attracted large numbers of African Americans from the South, Midwest, and East during the war and black neighborhoods grew rapidly along major highway corridors.

In cities new cities like Los Angeles, Dallas, and Phoenix that built without efficient public transportation systems, dense inner-city cores never developed. Therefore, most families bought single-family homes. Multi-family apartment complexes that attracted inmigrants of all ethnicities were built near highways, where accessibility was greatest. As a result, ghettos in automobile friendly locations are known as New City Ghettos. These ghettos tend to be linear, stretching along a highway outward from downtown. In some cities, several distinct “black corridors” developed. In some cities, Latin American and Asian groups are large enough to create additional linear “ghettos” also along important highway corridors extending outward from the central business district (CBD).

Figure New City Black Ghetto: In this model ethnic ghettos evolve along corridors established by major streets or highways. The blue areas may represent a Mexican- American neighborhood.

---

Kay J. Anderson. 1987. Annals of the Association of American Geographers. The Idea of Chinatown: The Power of Place and Institutional Practice in the Making of a Racial Category. Vol. 77, No. 4, pp. 580-598