Remembering the New Deal during Black History Month: Better housing

Above: The description for this 1936 photograph reads, "Maria Beans, over 80 years old who was a slave in her childhood, having no stove in her kitchen must use an old galvanized bucket for a cooking fire to prepare a meal for her little 3 year old great-great grand daughter at Montgomery, Alabama." Photo courtesy of the National Archives.

Above: A housing project for African Americans in Omaha, Nebraska, 1938, funded by the New Deal's Public Works Administration (PWA). Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress.

The false, self-exonerating narrative of American segregation: "The New Deal made me do it!!"

A popular narrative has formed over the last few decades, and especially over the last few years, that places the majority of the blame for segregation on New Deal housing programs (see, e.g., "How FDR Promoted Racial Segregation," The Future of Freedom Foundation, March 17, 2009; "The Racist Housing Policy That Made Your Neighborhood," The Atlantic, May 22, 2014; "A 'Forgotten History' Of How The U.S. Government Segregated America," NPR, May 3, 2017).

This new narrative is a convenient crutch.

By frequently following existing and deeply-ingrained attitudes on racial segregation, with respect to its housing and loan programs, the New Deal makes for an easy target - and a much more comfortable one than looking in the mirror and assessing our own past and continued roles, for example, investing in companies that ship good-paying jobs to third world labor markets (thus creating perpetual economic ghettos); failing to push for a new Civilian Conservation Corps for African American and other youth (instead, lazily relying on law enforcement and mass incarceration to keep the poor in line); consistently voting for politicians, both Democrat and Republican, who are owned by Wall Street (think Clinton and Trump); and allowing payday lenders to set up shop in low-income minority neighborhoods while, at the same time, restricting bankruptcy protections for individuals, thereby creating a mass of permanently insolvent citizens who don't (and probably never will) have access to good credit (i.e., home ownership).

What came first, the chicken or the egg?

It's been argued for decades that during and after the Roosevelt administration New Deal policies fortified or exacerbated segregation. Well, if the public didn't approve, why didn't it do something about it sooner? And why isn't more being done now? (Take a drive around Baltimore, for example... and I don't mean the tourist-friendly Inner Harbor.) And, for that matter, why didn't the public do something about it long before the New Deal? Yes, yes, yes, my oh my, everything was just an integrated utopia... and then along came the New Deal and made us stop singing Kumbaya! In this modern, popular narrative, it's not the public's lizard-brained racism, or its lack of empathy, or its lack of critical thinking skills, or its penchant for electing right-wing fanatics & neoliberal Democrats... it's that damn, dirty, rotten New Deal!! 

Please. 

Scholar Amy Hillier has highlighted the fallacy of this one-dimensional approach to explaining America's apartheid tendencies: "Even before the Depression, private lenders chose to avoid certain areas, particularly those home to African Americans, certain ethnic groups including new immigrants, and with older, cheaper housing... focusing on one agent of change, even if it is a large federal agency, is to assign relatively passive roles to the thousands of appraisers, realtors, and lenders who decided where to make loans" ("Redlining and the Homeowners' Loan Corporation," Journal of Urban History, Vol. 29, No. 4, May 2003, pp. 414-415).

In a Washington Post article on this topic, it is said: "The segregation that President Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration inherited reflected preexisting institutions, of which restrictive racial covenants may have been the most important. They were still relatively new, however. FDR might well have used his unprecedented leverage over housing finance to undo them." But even if FDR had unprecedented leverage, it doesn't mean he had unlimited leverage. As Gerald Horne of the University of Houston recently pointed out, FDR "was faced with a rock-solid granite wall of white supremacy within the ranks of his own party and that is a force that is very difficult to overcome" ("Undoing the New Deal: African-Americans, Racism and the FDR/Johnson Reforms," The Real News, December 18, 2017).

Does anyone seriously believe that dyed-in-the-wool, racist southern Democrats, on whom FDR was dependent upon, were suddenly going to say, "Sure, let's build integrated communities all across America; we're fine with that!"

FDR and the New Deal did create better housing for African Americans

Whether the Roosevelt Administration could have done more to curtail or limit segregation will be debated forever. What is not debatable, however, is that the New Deal improved housing conditions for tens of thousands of African Americans, as noted in the Official Program and Guidebook for the American Negro Exposition of 1940:

"... the USHA [United States Housing Authority, created by the New Deal] is meeting two of the most urgent problems of the Negro American - housing and employment. Survey after survey has indicated that great masses of Negroes are living in substandard dwellings for which they are compelled to pay high rents. They have not been able to get out of these slums and blighted areas, because decent, safe and sanitary homes have not been available to them at rentals within their reach... As of April, 1940, local housing authorities had obtained the approval of loans from the USHA amounting to nearly $631,000,000 [about $11 billion in today's dollars] to pay 90 percent of the development costs of 400 projects in 180 communities. These projects will rehouse 143,600 families. It is estimated that 47,000 of these will be Negro families. Of the 400 projects, at least 177 will be wholly or partially occupied by Negro families... In addition, 7,500 Negro families are living in public housing projects developed by the PWA Housing Division and now administered by the USHA" (pp. 21-23).

Let's confess: We dropped the ball

Now, today, public housing has become synonymous with poverty and crime. But again, that's not the fault of the New Deal. As with the rest of our infrastructure, FDR and his colleagues had no idea that the public was going to develop a case of the stupids, engage in an orgy of tax-cuts-for-the-rich, and let the nation's infrastructure fall to pieces. They expected both structural and intellectual improvement, not apathy, voodoo economics, and the rotting of the common good (which they were trying to cultivate). Former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich recently wrote:

"... the common good seems to have disappeared. The phrase is rarely uttered today, not even by commencement speakers and politicians... There's growing evidence of its loss - in CEOs who gouge their customers and loot their corporations; Wall Street bankers who defraud their investors... We see its loss in politicians who take donations from wealthy donors and corporations and then enact laws their patrons want, or shutter the government when they don't get the partisan results they seek... This unbridled selfishness, this contempt for the public, this win-at-any-cost mentality, is eroding America... This is not a society. It's not even a civilization because there's no civility at its core."

So, if we want to blame somebody, or some thing, for America's long tradition of race & income-based apartheid (not only in housing, but also in education, voting, job opportunities, etc.), perhaps we should collectively look in the mirror, and stop saying, "Um... well... uh... the New Deal made me do it. Yeah, yeah, that's it! The New Deal made me do it! Whew, what a relief... I'm exonerated now, right??"

Of course, none of the above is meant to imply that there were no problems with the New Deal. Of course there were problems. There are problems with everything in this world. But the next time someone makes a blanket statement, like, "the New Deal was bad for blacks" or "the New Deal was racist," ask them to stop picking cherries for the libertarian cause, and also suggest that they might spend less time binge-watching Netflix and more time doing their homework.