The Color of Law

The Color of Law is an examination of the explicit policies and laws that lead to segregation in American housing. Often times, the policy failures were as much about the actions not taken, such as a failure to

• Withholding of permits for developers unwilling to enforce segregating policies

• Sometime the author attributes motivation where it cannot be determined, I think this actually weakens the case because Rothestein has many strong examples and didn’t require these types of

• Starts with examination of explicit laws that segregated liberal SF immediatley post WW-II (Richmond)

• Public housing is not high-rise “crack dens”, its primarily low-rise walk ups and single family homes (SFHs), designed to provide housing where housing was scarce, not necessarily as a “hand out” to poor people who could not afford it.

• FHA refused to insure mortgages for whites where African Americans were present.

• Concept of economic zoning: wherein a given region (suburb) was zoned only single family homes, guaranteeing that the only occupants of a given area were of a certain economic level

  • Often economic zoning and racial zoning was hard to unwind

• Withholding of subsidizes for builders who would not incorporate racially segregating contracts

• Buchanan v. Warley 1917 supreme court decision to prevent cities from imposing segregation in housing policies.

• “During the 1930s the Roosevelt administration created maps of every metropolitan area, divided into zones of foreclosure risk based in part on the race of their occupants. The administration then insured white homeowners’ mortgages if they lived in all-white neighborhoods into which there was little danger of African Americans moving”

• Some of the examples were weaker, such as the IRS not imposing restrictions on institutions with restrictive covenants.

• “In an unusual 1942 decision, the federal appeals court for the District of Columbia refused to uphold a restrictive covenant because the clause undermined its own purpose, which was to protect property values. Enforcement, the court said, would depress property values by excluding African Americans who were willing to pay higher prices than whites.”

• “blockbusting was a scheme in which speculators bought properties in borderline black-white areas; rented or sold them to African American families at above-market prices; persuaded white families residing in these areas that their neighborhoods were turning into African American slums and that values would soon fall precipitously; and then purchased the panicked whites’ homes for less than their worth.”

• The full cycle went like this: when a neighborhood first integrated, property values increased because of African Americans’ need to pay higher prices for homes than whites. But then property values fell once speculators had panicked enough white homeowners into selling at deep discounts. Falling sale prices in neighborhoods where blockbusters created white panic was deemed as proof by the FHA that property values would decline if African Americans moved in. But if the agency had not adopted a discriminatory and unconstitutional racial policy, African Americans would have been able, like whites, to locate throughout metropolitan areas rather than attempting to establish presence in only a few blockbusted communities, and speculators would not have been able to prey on white fears that their neighborhoods would soon turn from all white to all black.

• “Known as contract sales, these agreements usually provided that ownership would transfer to purchasers after fifteen or twenty years, but if a single monthly payment was late, the speculator could evict the would-be owner, who had accumulated no equity. The inflated sale prices made it all the more likely that payment would not be on time. ”

• The use of highway development to remove “blighted”, read non-white, areas. Essentially wielding eminent domain to displace “slums”.

• Achieving relatively segregated schools was possible through segregating housing policies

• Over assessment of African American houses led to higher taxes, and depressed after expenses income -> Generational wealth impacts