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HOUSING & SYSTEMIC RACISM
The Fair Housing Act, as amended in 1988, prohibits discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, disability, family status, and national origin. The original Fair Housing Act of 1968 prohibited discrimination concerning the sale, rental, and financing of housing based on race, religion, national origin, or sex. It was intended as a follow-up to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The video links and information below highlight the systemic racism that is present in our housing policies.
Homeownership is one of the most valuable ways to generate familial intergenerational wealth, as well as generate credit. Based upon the Bell’s analysis of Colorado-specific American Community Survey data and controlling for a variety of factors, Colorado’s black families are 62 percent less likely to own a home than the state’s non-Hispanic white families. Latino families are 43 percent less likely to own a home than white families, Native American families are 38 percent less likely, and Asian families are 36 percent less likely (The Bell Policy Center).
HOUSING & SYSTEMIC RACISM RESOURCES
GOLDEN RESOURCES
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A History of Golden Zoning from Don Cameron, Co-Chair of the GUHTF
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Mapping Racism in Jefferson County
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Check out this interactive map to see how racial restrictions affected zoning in JeffCo. You'll see notes including "Caucasians Only" and "No Negros or Mongolian Race."
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Credit: Christopher Thiry at Colorado School of Mines
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VIDEOS
NowThis: How Housing Redlining Contributed to the Racial Wealth Gap and Segregation (3-min video)
NPR: Housing Segregation and Redlining in America: A Short History (6.5-min video)
For a DEEP dive… Racism in Urban Housing Policy (1 hr 15 min video)
Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics: Panel discussion of the history and continuing challenges of racism in urban housing policy with Professor Lizabeth Cohen, Howard Mumford Jones Professor of American Studies, Harvard University; Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Princeton University Department of African American Studies; and David Williams, Policy Director, Opportunity Insights. The conversation is moderated by Professor Khalil Gibran Muhammad, Professor of History, Race, and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. (Streamed live on Feb 25, 2020)
The Lessons and Missed Opportunities of the Kerner Report (45-min video)
ARTICLES
Forbes: History and Housing Discrimination: Why Neighborhoods in the United States are Still So Segregated
Denverite: Exhibit highlights the explicitly racist policies of the past that still shape today’s Denver
CPR: The Durability Of Redlining In Denver’s Past Is Shaping Coronavirus Hot Spots Now, Researchers Say
The Conversation: Is your neighborhood raising your coronavirus risk? Redlining decades ago set communities up for greater danger
The Conversation: Housing discrimination thrives 50 years after Fair Housing Act tried to end it
Denver Post: Denver built its neighborhoods around racist housing policies. But “neighborhood defenders” refuse change
The Colorado Trust: The Thread That Ties Segregation to Gentrification
The Bell Policy Center: Colorado’s Racial Wealth Gap: Homeownership and Credit
Colorado Black Health Collaborative: Reflections on the Intersection of Housing, Health and Inequity Symposium by Dr. Terri Richardson
REPORTS
Cityscape: Excluding Blacks and Others from Housing: The Foundation of White Racism
HUD: Housing Discrimination Against Racial and Ethnic Minorities 2012
For much of the twentieth century, discrimination by private real estate agents and rental property owners helped establish and sustain stark patterns of housing and neighborhood inequality. Beginning in the late 1970s, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has rigorously monitored trends in racial and ethnic discrimination in both rental and sales markets approximately once each decade through a series of nationwide paired-testing studies. This summary report presents findings from the fourth such study, which applied paired-testing methodology in 28 metropolitan areas to measure the incidence and forms of discrimination experienced by black, Hispanic, and Asian renters and homebuyers.
Massey, Douglas S., 2015, The Legacy of the 1968 Fair Housing Act, Sociological Forum, v. 30, No. S1, June 2015, p. 571-588.
1968 Kerner Commission Report findings related to housing:
Two points are fundamental to the Commission’s recommendations:
First: Federal housing programs must be given a new thrust aimed at overcoming the prevailing patterns of racial segregation. If this is not done, those programs will continue to concentrate the most impoverished and dependent segments of the population into the central-city ghettos where there is already a critical gap between the needs of the population and the public resources to deal with them.
Second: The private sector must be brought into the production and financing of low and moderate rental housing to supply the capabilities and capital necessary to meet the housing needs of the nation.
The Commission recommends that the federal government:
Enact a comprehensive and enforceable federal open housing law to cover the sale or rental of all housing, including single-family homes.
Reorient federal housing programs to place more low and moderate-income housing outside of ghetto areas.
Bring within the reach of low and moderate-income families within the next five years six million new and existing units of decent housing, beginning with 600,000 units in the next year.