Little Pink Houses for You and Me
Suburbs. When we hear the word we think of the aerial view of perfect, timeless, cookie-cutter houses grouped around cul-de-sacs. We imagine kids running around outside and learning to ride bikes, fathers returning from work to a wife, who suspiciously looks like Carol Brady, as she perfectly times the removal of the meatloaf from the oven.
The suburbs bring about feelings of comfort and relaxation, as if nothing could disturb the peaceful family’s reality. What we rarely consider is how these suburbs came to be and the effects this process had and continues to have on our communities. The suburbanization begins after the Second World War, and along with the movement came a de facto system of racial segregation. This system would inevitably lead to consequences that are still observable today.
There is a common and often accepted explanation for the rise of the suburbs. In 1945, the war ended and thousands of American soldiers began the long process of acclimating again to daily life. Kenneth Jackson describes the general trends leading to suburbanization in Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States. As men returned from overseas they quickly married and created what would come to be known as the baby boomer generation. With these new families came the increased need for consumer goods, especially homes and automobiles.
With this movement from the cities, many people relied on transportation in order to get them from their homes to work every day and technology was quickly updated. Cars became a necessity. In fact, many homes were outfitted with garages for homeowners to park their automobiles. With demobilization, factories were able to lessen their output for war materials and the production of cars increased while families were able to purchase them.
Soon, the country experienced a huge housing shortage. In order for needs to be met, the government made home buying much more affordable and builders soon began creating houses similar to Levittowns, or the communities built by the two Levitt brothers who capitalized on the idea of mass-producing homes. Jackson claims the Levitt house was “as basic to post World War II suburban development as the Model T had been to the automobile.” The Federal Housing Administration (FHA) altered policies in order to incorporate mortgages that could be paid off over thirty years and only ten percent of the house would need to be paid at the time of closing, so these houses were more affordable.
All of that sounds great; the government was making the American dream a reality for thousands of families. However, there is usually a harsher actuality present. In fact, suburbanization during this time is often synonymous with “white flight.” This movement of mostly whites towards the suburbs can be explained by racial fears, education, and socio-economic conditions. They all played a role in this massive white movement from the cities.
As Jackson explains, many fled to suburban neighborhoods because they were looking for good schools and safety, a dream that did not include minorities. But why was it so essential for neighborhoods to be racially segregated? After schools were forced to integrate following the Brown v. Board of Education decision, whites were hesitant and often did many things to prevent their children from going to school with black children. Jackson explains how zoning laws attempted to keep schools segregated, contributing to whites moving to the suburbs. There were many means of protecting this way of life, as the FHA and VA were very hesitant to give loans and mortgages to black families. The organizations made the suburbs very accessible to whites, so the urban centers were deprived of higher income families, Jackson claims. Homeowners would also convince their neighbors that minorities should not be allowed to live in neighborhoods, as the value of all of the surrounding homes would greatly decrease.
In Crabgrass Frontier, Jackson outlines five commonalities that were present in the new subdivisions: they were removed from central cities; they were low in regards to concentration of people; they were architecturally similar; they were more affordable for a greater number of people; and in each one existed economic, racial, and age homogeneity. As whites moved into the suburbs, blacks were moving as well to create racially homogenous neighborhoods. Many regions of the United States developed these kind of environments, but in this article I am going to focus on the effects of these communities in the South, as racism has always been a typical issue in this region. I mean, when you Google, “Is the south,” the two first suggestions are about racism. Moreover, the demographics of the United States today influence what regions are more affected by racism, as high black populations are very prevalent in the south. More specifically, I will look at Virginia as a lot of great research has come from the state regarding demographics and public housing.
So where did black families go? In a striking and almost prophetic 1966 op-ed from a newspaper based in Norfolk, Virginia, Gordon Hancock addresses his concerns of suburbanization in “Suburbia Dooms Both Negroes and the Cities.” Hancock worries that suburbanization could lead to the reversal of urbanization and result in a step backwards for his race. Hancock explains how ghettos and slums are being created as black citizens move into the cities at the same time as whites leave it. He claims, “suburbanization is the handmaid of segregation.” As Hancock suggests, suburbanization in fact completes the same objectives as segregation once did. One can see the social isolation between races develop throughout the decades, beginning with suburbanization.
Hancock’s article from 1966 is a sobering reminder of the systematic treatment of African Americans in our country. “In the long run,” he says, “treating the Negro as a citizen would be far cheaper economically, safer socially and more righteous morally.” However, the effects of this suburbanization and the treatment of black Americans as second-class citizens can still be seen in urban spaces throughout the South. The discriminatory practices of suburbanization led to the formation of ghettos and later to the creation of violence-prone public housing areas in many urban centers, including Norfolk, Virginia. After black Americans were driven to urban centers, their lower income and experiences of segregation led to the creation of ghettos, as Hancock claims.
The idea of a “ghetto” had many historical conditions and systematic causes stemming from suburbanization. Brittany Lyons has looked to public housing policies to explain the social and racial history of the “ghetto.” According to Lyons, city officials believed that public housing would solve the problem of poverty that was created through the black migration to urban areas. Liberal urban planners tried to move new public housing a distance away from economically destitute areas in cities, but the ultimate decision-makers insisted instead that public housing remain in the same location as the ghettos, thus only perpetuating the isolation of low-income families who wanted to escape destitute areas.
Emily Badger has also documented the racial stereotypes of living in public housing in a recent article in The Washington Post. Badger insists these stereotypes were integral to the creation of public housing. Since the beginning of public housing in 1937, the system has been flawed. Rent was intended to cover the cost of upkeep, but housing administrators never had enough money to cover maintenance once lower income families were pushed into city centers. The building conditions began to decline, so in the 1970s the government capped rent for public-housing residents (today the cap is thirty percent of income). The maintenance of the facilities thus became even harder to maintain, so families with a higher income chose to leave, further forcing the remaining families into abject poverty.
This problem has been especially pronounced in the South. For example, William Harris and Nancy Olmsted have analyzed Charlottesville, Virginia for its public housing policy in the late 1980s and 1990s. The results are shocking. In 1980, Charlottesville was 80.4% white; however, by 1989, 70.1% of heads of house and 84% of children in public housing were black. Overall, Harris and Olmsted claim that racial discrimination limited the opportunity for fair housing and the discrimination existed in spatial and site-specific biases. For example, in 1980 the Charlottesville Redevelopment and Housing Authority (CRHA) passed a policy, ruling that whenever more than sixty-five percent of the residents in a development were black, white applicants are given priority for admission. This led to black applicants waiting longer for available units than white applicants, as whites were pushed to the front of the line during the application process because blacks made up more than sixty-five percent of residents in a lot of developments.
If white flight has reconfigured Southern urban spaces, there have also been vast and growing inequalities in income based on race. In another Virginian town, the home of Gordon Hancock, we can see the effects this de facto segregation has had on economic inequality today as the writer predicted. Norfolk’s net income broken down by race is a case in point.
In 2013, the median white household income for the city was $54,588, while the median black household income was $31,010. Along with these numbers is the percentage of people living in renter-occupied housing in 2010. In Norfolk, 54.6% of housing is renter-occupied compared to 36.9% in the Metropolitan Statistical Areas of Virginia.
There is another set of troubling trends that correlate with these racial disparities in property ownership and income: the rate of violence. The crime index in Norfolk in 2014 was over 345. As a comparison, the national average is 287.5.
There is some evidence that public housing influences rates of violence. Elizabeth Griffiths and George Tita have analyzed homicide in and around public housing. While Griffiths’s and Tita’s close case study only focuses on Los Angeles, California, their conclusions pertain to the broader trends surrounding public housing. Griffiths and Tita found the increased level of homicides in public housing to have distinct characteristics. Homicides were often committed in the same area as the perpetrator, meaning that he or she would not be mobile. So, if a violent crime were committed by someone living in public housing, it would often be at the expense of another member of the public housing community. In their conclusion, Griffiths and Tita attributed the increased violence present in public housing to the all-encompassing social isolation and poverty that many in the area face. Inflaming these sentiments are unemployment, racial segregation, and the exacerbating effects of daily interactions with one another. Important to note is in their conclusion, Griffiths and Tita claim that public housing is not a magnet or a generator of violence in surrounding areas. They describe the public housing areas almost as if they are bubbles. The social isolation that inhabitants experience causes violence to escalate amongst residents, but violence is also contained within their public housing area. This could be a direct influence of suburbanization, as black families were forced to remain in the urban centers.
This research is suggestive of the trends in Norfolk and other southern cities like it. The increased violence in public housing can be attributable to the environment, and public housing was created on the ruins of the ghettos, and the ghettos were made through the racial discrimination of suburbanization. So can all of this violence be traced back to the de facto segregation that was suburbanization almost a half of a century ago? Without white flight, black families would not have been forced into ghettos and certainly not been forced into a social isolation that breeds violence. The root of the demographics of public housing can be seen in suburbanization, but that should not be an excuse for the daily existence of residents of public housing today. Initial suburbanization and this continued isolation stems from a systematic racism that has been prevalent in our country since its birth. While the days of Carol Brady have long since passed, our opportunity for change is as real as ever.
