Just a Small Town Girl Living in Privileged Ignorance: Homeownership in the Twin Cities

Photo Credit: Benji Mellish

As a 7-year-old in the basement of my best friend’s house, I remember fangirling over our future lives together. We obsessed over the fact that one day we’d each go to college, meet the love of our lives, buy a house in the suburbs, and have kids. That was the dream… and the only narrative we ever knew. It’s the story we heard from our parents, what we always saw on television and in movies, and the perpetual goal when playing LIFE. As a 7-year-old (up until I was 19), I thought where you lived and what your home looked like was a choice. I also grew up in a small town of 2,500 people in south central Wisconsin that was 98% white. Because I grew up in a house and my friends did too, I thought that everyone did.

After taking a Geography class about the creation of race in the United States through public policy my sophomore year of college, my worldview was shattered. In this course, we learned about racially restrictive covenants, suburbanization and “white flight”, and the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and redlining. These were some of my main takeaways:

1. Racist restrictions were written into leases that prohibited people of color from ever living in the premises. In the same geography class, we learned about the Mapping Prejudice Project in Minneapolis. Through this citizen science, we got to read these leases and mark whether or not they contained racially restrictive covenants. After collecting data on whether or not a racially restrictive covenant was present, they use the addresses to create a map of where these covenants exist.
2. “White flight” is a term used to describe how white families moved out to the suburbs between these homeownership subsidies and highway legislation. Where people live is less about preference and more about privilege. The suburbs were only accessible for those who could buy a house and a car.
3. The FHA was created after the Great Depression to help the economy through increased homeownership. Neighborhoods were “redlined” through a rating system by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) from Type A, or affluent and white neighborhoods, to Type D, or risky neighborhoods. People who resided in these risky neighborhoods were not able to get loans. These ratings were exclusively determined by race, so people of color were not able to get loans. Racially restrictive covenants were bits written into leases that prohibited people of color from inhabiting the premises at any point.
4. While these practices were outlawed with the Fair Housing Act of 1968, segregation remains an issue in the Twin Cities.

Not only have I learned about these phenomena in class, but I’ve seen them in real life. Since the end of June this year, I’ve been working at a canvasser for the Minnesota DFL. I’ve gotten to travel a bit around the state of Minnesota and all around the Twin Cities metro area. From knocking over 2,000 doors (more houses than in my entire hometown) the last few months, I’ve seen the legacy of segregation these policies have left on the Twin Cities. From Blaine, to Maple Grove, to Apple Valley, to Cottage Grove, I’ve been to almost every Twin Cities suburb. While I wasn’t collecting data on this in my work, it was something that I couldn’t help but notice. In the suburbs, certain groups of people and types of families live in big houses with big yards, while others live in townhouses. Not to mention, the suburbs are significantly whiter than the actual cities. This isn’t just something that I’ve observed; data provided by Minnesota Compass provides information about race for each county in the Metro Area, showing that a much higher percentage of people of color live within the cities than in the suburbs.

Photo Credit: Dhyamis Kleber

I had it so wrong. My 7-year-old dream to own a home because that’s what everyone does, and the thoughts that I had about it through adolescence, were completely missing this enormous chunk of history. Preference is a myth when it comes to homeownership and where to live. Even though these federal policies are no longer law, they still affect homeownership and segregation in the metro area today. Structural barriers stopped many people who were not white from buying property and building wealth. Owning a home being “just another part of life” might have been my perception as a middle-class, white, child in a small town in Wisconsin, but for many it has never been and won’t ever be.