Why segregation is bad

Black neighborhood poverty is thus more multigenerational while white neighborhood poverty is more episodic; black children in low-income neighborhoods are more likely than others to have parents who also grew up in such neighborhoods. Using a survey that traces individuals and their offspring since , Sharkey shows that children who come from middle-class non-poor neighborhoods and whose mothers also grew up in middle-class neighborhoods score an average of on problem-solving tests.

Children from poor neighborhoods whose mothers also grew up in poor neighborhoods score lower, an average of But children who live in middle-class neighborhoods—yet whose mothers grew up in poor neighborhoods—score an average of only 98 Sharkey , p. Integrating disadvantaged black students into schools where more privileged students predominate can narrow the black-white achievement gap. Evidence is especially impressive for long term outcomes for adolescents and young adults who have attended integrated schools e.

Such schools are structurally selective on non-observables, at least, and frequently have high attrition rates Rothstein, , pp. In some small districts, or in areas of larger districts where ghetto and middle class neighborhoods adjoin, school integration can be accomplished by devices such as magnet schools, controlled choice, and attendance zone manipulations.

But for African American students living in the ghettos of large cities, far distant from middle class suburbs, the racial isolation of their schools cannot be remedied without undoing the racial isolation of the neighborhoods in which they are located.

In , the Supreme Court made integration even more difficult than it already was, when the Court prohibited the Louisville and Seattle school districts from making racial balance a factor in assigning students to schools, in situations where applicant numbers exceeded available seats Parents Involved in Community Schools v.

Seattle School District No. The plurality opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts decreed that student categorization by race for purposes of administering a choice program is unconstitutional unless it is designed to reverse effects of explicit rules that segregated students by race. 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 — at least not since the s; they are segregated because their neighborhoods are racially homogenous.

Bradley , In any meaningful sense, neighborhoods and in consequence, schools, have been segregated de jure. The notion of de facto segregation is a myth, although widely accepted in a national consensus that wants to avoid confronting our racial history.

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.

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. Gautreaux , ; Rothstein, 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. 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 Hirsch, , pp.

Although a 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 , to finance developers who constructed suburban developments that were closed to African-Americans Hirsch, , pp.

Although specific zoning rules assigning blacks to some neighborhoods and whites to others were banned by the Supreme Court in , explicit racial zoning in some cities was enforced until the s. Several large cities interpreted the ruling as inapplicable to their racial zoning laws because they 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 Mohl, ; Mohl, In other cities, following the 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 decision Power, ; Power, In the s, 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.

Churches were not alone in benefitting from unconstitutional tax exemptions. 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 to 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 Hirsch, , pp. 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.

They introduced amendments in the House and Senate requiring that public housing be operated in a non-segregated manner, knowing that if such amendments were adopted, public housing would lose its Southern Democratic support and the entire program would go down to defeat.

The Senate and House each then considered and defeated proposed amendments that would have prohibited segregation and racial discrimination in federally funded public housing programs, and the Housing Act, with its provisions for federal finance of public housing, was adopted Davies, , p.

It permitted local authorities in the North as well as the South to design separate public housing projects for blacks and whites, or to segregate blacks and whites within projects. And they did so.

Although there was an enormous national housing shortage at the time, one that denied millions of African Americans a decent place to live, it remains an open question whether it really was in their best interests to be herded into segregated projects, where their poverty was concentrated and isolated from the American mainstream. It was not, however, federal policy alone that segregated the metropolitan landscape. State policy contributed as well. 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.

This misuse of regulatory authority was, and is, de jure segregation. Local officials also played roles in violation of their constitutional obligations. 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 convicted later reversed a white seller for sedition after he sold his white-neighborhood home to a black family Braden, 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. Other forms abound of racially explicit state action to segregate the urban landscape, in violation of the Fifth, Thirteenth, and Fourteenth Amendments. 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. Seeing slum conditions invariably associated with African Americans, 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.

In the ghetto,. 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.

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. 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 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 King, The federal government recognized separate black and white government employee unions well into the second half of the twentieth century.

The paucity of evidence for other outcomes is in large part due to the absence of health outcomes as originally measured indicators in either study. Research that continues to pursue the effects of public housing policy interventions on population health is important. This option opens up opportunities to alter negative effects of segregation that could range from assisting in opening housing markets so that moves out of concentrated poverty are possible 45 , , to addressing characteristics of segregated neighborhoods that are unhealthy, as seen in the built-environment literature , One caution, however, is that researchers seeking to remedy the effects of segregation remain cognizant of the distinction between the process of segregation e.

It is most probable that any injurious attributes of segregation result from inequity in the process rather than the condition of close proximity to black families or distance from white families per se.

The weight of the available evidence is that the process of racial residential segregation is associated with generally deleterious health of African Americans, and particularly for poor pregnancy outcomes, but this evidence is limited in many regards. Although segregation and social outcomes have been studied for decades, analyzing segregation as a useful construct in epidemiologic research is still in its infancy. In , Acevedo-Garcia et al. Much progress has been made in response to these goals, but much work remains in order to understand how to best measure segregation, understand mechanisms by which distal social forces become proximal social and biologic outcomes, and test amenable paths to intervention.

Future research should consider several issues. First, continued development of methodological and conceptual tools to better understand residential segregation is necessary. While many recent studies use multilevel thinking in both conceptual and statistical approaches, clarity is still needed regarding the relevant scale of effect e.

The interesting findings of variable segregation effects across different dimensions such as clustering and isolation should encourage researchers to further investigate the multidimensional nature of residential patterns and health. Similarly, use of newer spatial indices of segregation as well as multigroup indices may provide more insight than repetitive use of the US Census—derived dissimilarity index.

Although this review focuses primarily on racial residential segregation, it is clear that poverty concentration and economic segregation are closely linked with racial settlement patterns. Research considering the interaction of economic and racial segregation is still needed. Second, the existing segregation-health literature can be decomposed into 2 broad categories: 1 segregation as an exposure in intercity studies and 2 segregation as a local exposure in intracity research.

This distinction is extremely important. The body of work using single cities to explore the health effects of segregation is an extension of the neighborhood-effects literature 46 ; it posits that the neighborhood context in mostly black neighborhoods is different from that in mixed-race or predominantly white neighborhoods and therefore impacts health.

This approach has the strength of finer spatial resolution of individuals nested within neighborhoods, but Oakes 63 has argued that counterfactual reasoning in research on neighborhood effects and health outcomes may suffer from unmeasured confounding by forces that select individuals into neighborhoods.

In other words, individuals are not randomly assigned to neighborhoods within a city; thus, groups may not be exchangeable. Intercity research, on the other hand, has tended to look at the average health of residents of metropolitan areas although typically controlling for individual-level covariates such as age, gender, and risk behaviors and uses the heterogeneity of segregation across metropolitan areas to make inferences about the impact of segregation net of individual characteristics.

This approach posits that living in a city with higher segregation e. While this approach offers a partial solution to the selection problem e. Further extending the multilevel framework to include individuals nested within neighborhoods nested within an ample number of heterogeneous metropolitan areas could offer promising new insight.

Finally, the segregation-health literature could be greatly enhanced by utilizing longitudinal in addition to cross-sectional study designs. Longitudinal designs could be applied to individuals, neighborhoods, or metropolitan areas, each with different implications.

Most of the pathways hypothesized between segregation and health act across the life course, but there is almost no literature that accounts for different levels of cumulative exposure across the life course and very little literature with prospective information on health outcomes.

For some poor and minority individuals, living in highly segregated environments may not be a time-varying exposure but rather a life-long constant However, there is evidence that intercity and intracity migration varies by race and economics and with regard to metropolitan segregation , suggesting that longitudinal comparisons could be meaningfully made between those living in high- versus low-segregated cities Alternatively, neighborhoods or metropolitan areas could be followed longitudinally to better understand the relation between residential patterning and health.

Such time-series approaches might be particularly fruitful in areas characterized by progressive gentrification or decay over time.

Similarly, time-series, cross-sectional analysis of health patterns in cities across the decades could document health changes associated with changing segregation. The vast majority of black Americans live in urban settings, many but not all of which are highly segregated. It is vitally important to understand how much of their health disparities are a result of specific dimensions of segregation and whether these disparities can be reduced either by policies that reduce segregation or interventions that reduce the impact of segregation.

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Sign In or Create an Account. Sign In. Advanced Search. Search Menu. Article Navigation. Close mobile search navigation Article Navigation. Volume Article Contents Abstract. Is Segregation Bad for Your Health? Kramer , Michael R. Oxford Academic. Carol R. Cite Cite Michael R. Select Format Select format. Permissions Icon Permissions. Abstract For decades, racial residential segregation has been observed to vary with health outcomes for African Americans, although only recently has interest increased in the public health literature.

Open in new tab Download slide. Table 1. Author, Year Reference No. Open in new tab. The relationship of fetal and infant mortality to residential segregation: an inquiry into social epidemiology. Google Scholar Crossref. Search ADS. Racial residential segregation: a fundamental cause of racial disparities in health.

Ten largest racial and ethnic health disparities in the United States based on Healthy People Objectives. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Accessed September 1, Origins of economic disparities: the historical role of housing segregation.

Accessed August A conceptual framework for measuring segregation and its association with population outcomes. Office of Management and Budget. Accessed December Invited commentary: residential segregation and health—the complexity of modeling separate social contexts. Ethnic and racial segregation in US metropolitan areas, ——the dimensions of segregation revisited.

Choosing area based socioeconomic measures to monitor social inequalities in low birth weight and childhood lead poisoning: the Public Health Disparities Geocoding Project US. On the wrong side of the tracts? Evaluating the accuracy of geocoding in public health research.

Comparing traditional and spatial segregation measures: a spatial scale perspective. Beyond the census tract: patterns and determinants of racial residential segregation at multiple scales. A spatially extended model for residential segregation [electronic article]. Accessed September Racial disparities in low birthweight and the contribution of residential segregation: a multilevel analysis. Segregation, nativity, and health: reproductive health inequalities for immigrant and native-born black women in New York City.

Inter-neighborhood migration and spatial assimilation in a multi-ethnic world: comparing Latinos, Blacks and Anglos. A new approach to measuring socio-spatial economic segregation. Future directions in residential segregation and health research: a multilevel approach. The effects of racial density and income incongruity on pregnancy outcomes.

Racial and ethnic inequality in the duration of children's exposure to neighborhood poverty and affluence. Race, racial concentration, and the dynamics of educational inequality across urban and suburban schools. The geography of opportunity and unemployment: an integrated model of residential segregation and spatial mismatch. Providing affordable family housing and reducing residential segregation by income. A systematic review. Black employment, segregation, and the social organization of metropolitan labor markets.

The influence of residential segregation and its correlates on ethnic enterprise in urban areas. Residential segregation influences on the likelihood of black and white self-employment. The decline of male employment in low-income black neighborhoods, — Race, segregation, and postal employment: new evidence on spatial mismatch. The relative importance of income and race in determining residential outcomes in U.

Does race matter in the search for housing? An exploratory study of search strategies, experiences, and locations. Use of black English and racial discrimination in urban housing markets—new methods and findings.

A case study of mortgage refinancing discrimination: African American intergenerational wealth. The effect of residential segregation on black social and economic well-being. Racial residential segregation and the concentration of low- and high-income households in the 45 largest U. Google Scholar PubMed. Diez Roux. Toward the next generation of research into small area effects on health: a synthesis of multilevel investigations published since July The mis estimation of neighborhood effects: causal inference for a practicable social epidemiology.

Structural inequality and homicide: an assessment of the black-white gap in killings. Ambler , finding that zoning ordinances were reasonable extensions of police power and potentially beneficial to public welfare. 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 , the U. Supreme Court reasoned that covenants were private contracts not subject to the Constitution. 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.

Supreme Court declared them unconstitutional in Shelley v. Of all of the homeownership loans approved by the government between and , whites received 98 percent of them. Supreme Court ultimately struck down racially restrictive covenants in Shelley v. Kramer , 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. Shortly after, several whites rented a unit next door to the family, hoisting up a Confederate flag and blaring music throughout the night.

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.

When the black family arrived, a mob of 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. Still, the Southern Poverty Law Center found that, in —86, only one-quarter of these incidents were prosecuted.

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 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. 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.

In March , the U. 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. 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.

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.

One study indicated that, since , more than half of all borrowers who were issued subprime loans could have qualified for lower-cost loans with more favorable terms. 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.

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.

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.

Moreover, some states actually allow landlords to reject Section 8 housing vouchers , as income unlike race is not a protected class. 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.

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. 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 to 21 percent in HUD also removed, without public comment, the Assessment of Fair Housing AFH tool, which aided communities in determining housing needs and segregation patterns.

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. 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. 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.

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. Of the tests conducted, thirty revealed one or both forms of discrimination. 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.

Gilkesson grew up hearing stories of family members like her grandfather, who tried to buy a home in Bowie, Maryland, in the s, but who could not find anyone willing to sell to a Black person. As an adult, Gilkesson was determined to not let history repeat itself. Besides, rents were rising in Washington, D. Through the Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America, which helps buyers who cannot afford large down payments and who lack ideal credit scores, Gilkesson was able to purchase a home in Baltimore.

She loves her place and loves being a homeowner, and she is proud that she was able to achieve the dream that so many of her ancestors were denied. Her new home is in a predominantly Black neighborhood—the white or mixed neighborhoods, she says, were way out of her price range. Contact us at letters time. By Alana Semuels. A home is boarded up Aug 10, , in the North Minneapolis, Minnesota, neighborhood, which saw some of the nation's highest foreclosure rates from A makeshift memorial to George Floyd, built by a nonprofit youth group, near the site where Floyd died in police custody in Minneapolis, Minnesota on June 17, Floyd's May 25 death ignited nationwide demonstrations against racism and police brutality.

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