Forbidden Neighbors: A Study of Prejudice in Housing

by Charles Abrams

Hardcover

Published January 1, 1955

Reviews

[Andrea · Rating 4 out of 5]

An impressive book, fairly foundational in looking at segregation in the U.S. Published in 1955, it seems to me that almost every book following it is responding to it, or deepening some of its claims through more in depth case studies. Everything that comes later is here really, though in a more summarised form.
His greatest worry is actually the rise of the welfare state, fascinating reading this almost 60 years later after the rise of neoliberalism and groups like the tea party, when what little welfare state the US ever had has come and long gone. He writes:

In the transition from a private to a welfare economy, private housing operations were now being implemented by public power, public credit, and public subsidy. And there was the danger that the prejudices of the private market would not only be adopted and supported by the government but be backed by its coercive power. From 1935 to 1950, in fact, prejudice and public power were already well advanced toward an alliance which was challenging the fundamental values of the American system.

Just how deep this public-private relationship went to racially structure the property market has been explored much more in depth by Freund in Colored Property, but the core of it is all here, and even for a die hard supporter of social housing like myself, this gives pause. It’s not as though government has been separate from business interests, able to be hijacked – it has been business interests in so many ways, and in real estate and housing this is so clear. So I shouldn’t be shocked when someone back in 1955 writes

In the name of such public purposes as defense contracts, housing betterment, encouragement of infant as well as senile industries, economic pump-priming during depressions, slums, protection of savings, home-ownership encouragement, and a growing list of other high-sounding goals, we are stumbling blindly in several directions, one of which is a subsidies-to-business economy. In the name of social reform the government is called upon also to loan to business at low rates, to socialize business losses when necessary, to remove risk from private enterprise by federal insurance. In the process, these protected enterprises insist, of course, upon the same immunity from regulation they enjoyed before they drew upon the government purse and the government's powers. [258]

And yet I am. I could post this in relation to today’s crisis and no one would guess how long ago it had been written.
I think the primary point of disagreement between Abrams and authors writing since, would be the degree to which racism’s demands for segregation were something ‘new’, something that arose with the first great migrations of African-Americans around WWI. He writes:

Thus, resting on the premise that the right to property and to equality were no longer parallel natural rights but conflicting rights to be resolved in favor of property, race antagonism had begun to recruit the crucial and powerful instruments of political control. Administrators and legislatures were sanctioning encroachments upon the human being's right to live where he chose. The closed city had begun to loom on the American horizon… Would private biases now be incorporated into the public ethic of America, causing the first major break in the American democratic structure and the first official reduction of the great American ideal?

Work like that of Racial Faultlines by Thomas Almaguer explore the complexities of how land and property rights have always been structured along racial lines, the relationship between constructions of race and property, and the ways that private biases had been both constructed and wielded to the benefit of white Americans from their stripping of land from Native Americans and the Spanish. At the same time, most of the text shows some understanding of these dynamics, and so I am inclined to think that some of these phrasings are intended to awaken the conscience of his audience into action, and an attempt to reclaim a mythologised American ethos of fairness and equality that never existed, but could serve as an ideal.
I appreciate that such efforts in framing doesn’t keep him from what I hardly expected to find in a book written before the 1960s’ critical approach

Thus, in the case of the migrant Mexican, and to some extent other migrants, we have a unique kind of internal colonialism. The native laborer works hard for pitiful wages, suffers the social inferiority of a native in the eyes of his master and the community, and lives under the subhuman conditions so often characteristic of native colonial life. The difference between the traditional and the new colonialism is that our colonial natives are kept with us within distance when we want them--and then driven out of the community when no longer needed. They go back to .the "colony" at the season's end, often under armed guard. In this novel system, a dual standard of capitalist morality has been constructed. We have on the one hand a minimum wage, a 40-hour week, social security, and a living standard that rates among the highest in the world. On the other hand we tolerate conditions as primitive as any that existed under feudalism. [55]

I need to go back to my Rudy Acuna, did he draw from this? This idea of internal colonialism is an important one I think, one I’d like to come back to when this never-ending thesis is done.
So on to the forbidding of neighbors. First, that segregation is worsening, as is the plight of people of colour being exploited in overcrowded slum conditions – he has some important vignettes on the plight of African Americans, Puerto Ricans, and other people of colour, a number of stories I hadn’t heard before of the moving around and exploitation of labour. In summary though:

Overcrowding of land and within buildings is greater. Although 5 per cent of white families were extremely overcrowded in 1950, the figure for nonwhites was 18 per cent.11 (In Chicago Negroes lived 90,000 to the square mile, while whites in neighboring apartments were only 20,000 to the square mile.) While the proportion of overcrowding decreased for whites between 1940 and 1950, it increased by more than 11 per cent for nonwhites. [75]

In understanding the dynamics behind this, his outline can’t really be beaten:

With the new nonwhite in-migrations, however, an element of compulsion began to characterize the slum-ghetto. The element of choice narrowed and five kinds of compulsions now kept minorities in their place-physical, structural, social, economic, and legal.
Physical compulsion implied the use of force--bombs, arson, threats, or mobs.
Structural controls meant walls, fences, dead-end streets, closed cities.
Social controls included the snub at the grocery, refusal to accept the family in the community or club, and segregation in the schools and public facilities.
Economic compulsions represented the use of pressures by private owners to keep the minority in its place-racial covenants, refusal to make mortgage loans, and "codes of ethics" among realtors to keep the minority out.
Legalized compulsions involved the use of the powers of government to control movements of minorities-condemnation powers, pressures by officials of the FHA, removal of tenants through urban redevelopment, slum clearance, and the use of various administrative devices summarized later. [77]

And then in this book, in 1955, he writes this phrase: ‘the never-ending housing famine’ and I realised with sudden clarity that never ever in the whole history of America has capitalism been able to provide enough housing for workers or the poor. Never. Ever. It has just ensured that the housing crisis has always been suffered by African-Americans, Mexican-Americans, Asian-Americans, Native-Americans, immigrants, and a few of the poorest whites – all of those people considered less than American somehow by a dominant white Anglo-Saxon culture and it just makes you sick to your stomach, which is weird because I have been sick to my stomach for such a very long time. ‘Real Americans’ stuck together

One of the common threads that bound the suburbanites together was not culture or tradition, or civic pride or national welfare. It was neighborhood dignity. The magazines told them so repeatedly and so did the realtors, the neighborhood associations, and even the government housing officials. Suburban groups had a sanctuary to protect. They knew that blight of any kind has an eroding quality that engulfs whole neighborhoods and might affect their investments. Neighborhood dignity became synonymous with neighborhood homogeneity, while neighborhood homogeneity gave rise to a concerted effort to keep out the "wrong people" and the "foreign element."

And so you end up with misery, rat-bites, lead poisoning, lack of adequate schools and hospitals and all public services on one side, and on the other:

Millions of homes in thousands of neighborhoods were now all patterned upon the placement into isolated areas of people of a common stamp. It led to a division of these neighborhoods into those of the elite and the unwanted. It created sensitive communities that in the long run were economically and socially unworkable. It subordinated intelligence to race, religion, income, color, or social status. It enjoined the children of one section from mixing with those of another. It created thousands of homogeneous islands which were homogeneous only in their fears and were more foreign to the American tradition than the outsiders they sought to exclude. Finally, it won a place in the national political scene by developing a large bloc of voters who saw their interest threatened by the espousal of democratic precepts of equality of opportunity and of equal right to shelter. [149]

The futility of strategies like those of Booker T. Washington or the homeowners I’ve been studying who formed their own neighbourhood associations to show they were worthy of homeownership, that they cared about the quality and appearance of their neighborhoods, is tragically obvious when the National real Estate Board is publishing pamphlets like this in 1943:

The prospective buyer might be a bootlegger who would cause considerable annoyance to his neighbors, a madame who had a number of Call Girls on her string, a gangster, who wants a screen for his activities by living in a better neighborhood, a colored man of means who was giving his children a college education and thought they were entitled to live among whites .... No matter what the motive or character of the would-be purchaser, if the deal would instigate a form of blight, then certainly the well-meaning broker must work against its consummation.16

It’s jaw-dropping, irrational, making argument or reason clearly ineffective. Abrams focuses on how this kind of sentiment was moved forward by the Real Estate Industry in partnership with the Building Industry, on the intellectual front by academics and appraisers, and then made public policy

The FHA underwriting manuals not only adopted the phraseology of "inharmonious races and classes," but advocated racial restrictions, physical barriers, racial covenants, and racial zoning as methods of excluding certain racial and national groups. Pigpens and unwelcome races were classed as equally objectionable. 29
What began as private prejudice was thus converted into public policy, approved by public agencies, enforced by the full panoply of public power and backed by public credit.

Then there's the finances of building, so even if a builder decides he wants to build for people of color in the face of intense local white opposition and the disapproval of his peers, he still faces the following list of problems

1. Absence of Mortgage Money - These mortgage-lenders were conditioned by the same attitudes on the racial issue as were the realtors and home-builders. Their mortgage officers read the same texts, swallowed the same myths.
2. Demands for Exorbitant Profits - The fact that mortgages cannot be had through regular channels even when insured by FHA has had a depressing effect on the minority housing market.
3. Land Acquisition Problems - The difficulty is not land shortage as such but land shortage for minority housing. [177]
4. Inability to Obtain Fire Insurance - When the Negro builds in an “approved area,” he usually gets insurance. When he ventures where he is not wanted, his house may be burned before he is even enclosed. … [178] With arson and vandalism rampant, some insurance companies have learned not to venture, for they have been burned too often. [hahahahahahahaha]
5. Imposition of Sanctions (ie for violating covenants or restrictions)
6. The Club - Builders continue to exhibit an interest in refining exclusion practices, for they have found it a paying device. One of the most popular forms is the "neighborhood club." Prospects not acceptable in the club are not eligible as home-buyers.

An impressive list all together.

But oh wait, there's more ways white people protected neighborhoods from 'invasion'. The formation of Neighborhood Associations to keep covenants, and take more militant action in face of any buyers of color. Police action -- or inaction. When they weren't telling people to leave their property, they were standing by as mobs milled around in front of people's homes.

In total this meant that approximately 80% of cities like L.A. and Chicago were off limits to people of colour. Abrams writes 'As of 1952, only about 50,000 out of almost three million dwellings insured by FHA were available to nonwhites. Of the nine million new homes built between 1935 and 1950, less than 1 per cent were open to them. There has been no appreciable gain in such housing since. [243]'

This book has everything really. It focuses on public policy and institutions because it is clearly written in an effort to change such policies and institutions, so it acknowledges the deep racism within communities that led to arson and bombings and mobs, but fails to examine them in any real way. Definitely a key absence, but a necessary one I think, given what he is trying to do. Mayer's As Long as they Don't Move Next Door is a good place to go for that. All in all quite a remarkable book though.

[J. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Review soon forthcoming on jimbotimes.com!