Detroit Housing Discrimination

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Image credit: Bridge Magazine

Detroit is the largest and most populous city in the U.S. state of Michigan, the largest U.S. city on the United States–Canada border, and the seat of Wayne County. The municipality of Detroit had a 2019 estimated population of 670,031, making it the 24th-most populous city in the United States. The metropolitan area, known as Metro Detroit, is home to 4.3 million people, making it the second-largest in the Midwest after the Chicago metropolitan area, and 14th-largest in the United States. Regarded as a major cultural center, Detroit is known for its contributions to music and as a repository for art, architecture and design, along with its high crime rate.[1][2]

The city has the highest percentage of African American people (82.7% or 670,226) people in the United States according to US Cencus.[3] It entered the period of largest and most rapid growth in the early 20th century and through World War II, with the development of the auto industry and related heavy industry. Attracting hundreds of thousands of immigrants from Southern, Central, and Eastern Europe, the Near East, and black and white migrants from the South, the city became a boomtown.[4]

Racial Discrimination

Members and supporters of the NAACP picket outside of the Open Occupancy Hearing at Cobo Hall, Detroit, Michigan. August 1963. From the Detroit News Photograph Collection.

For people of color, Detroit’s housing crisis began in the early 1700s with the arrival of European colonizers. The French and later the British enslaved indigenous and Black people, exploiting their bodies, skills and knowledge to establish farms and build a thriving international fur trade. In the centuries since then, systemic racism has evolved constantly. It has become more subtle in modern times but always worked to maintain White exclusivity in control over land, access to quality housing and the opportunity to build generational wealth through homeownership.[5]

In 1930, The United States government, through the Federal Housing Administration and the Home-Owners Loan Corporation, discriminated against African Americans by granting low-interest loans and mortgages to white homeowners only.[6] Subsidized contractors were funded to build new subdivisions as long as they promised not to sell the homes they built to Black people and sometimes immigrants.[7]

Racial discrimination in housing was federally enforced by redlining and restrictive covenants in the mid 20th century. They played an important role in segregating Detroit and escalating racial tensions in the city. The Home Owners' Loan Corporation was in charge of assigning ratings of "A" (green) through "D" (red) to all of the neighborhoods in major U.S. cities based on the conditions of the buildings, the infrastructure, and most importantly, the racial composition of the area. Residents of a neighborhood with a "C" or "D" rating struggled to get loans, and almost all neighborhoods with any African American population were rated "D", effectively segregating the city by race.[8] This effectively limited options for African Americans to purchase houses outside of these areas, or acquire resources to repair their already damaged homes in these areas. In fact, only 0.8% of all new construction in the city was available to African Americans. Black Bottom and Paradise Valley located on Detroit's lower east side, south of Gratiot, were examples of African-American neighborhoods that formed as a result of these government restrictions.[2]

By the 1960s, at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, Black people were fed up with housing discrimination in addition to systemic police abuse, job discrimination and other forms of bias. In response, demonstrations, protests, and riots cropped up in Detroit and in other cities across America.[7] Following this civil disturbance, there was a large exodus of white Detroit residents to the suburbs, commonly called “white flight.” Even after white flight, African-American residents of Detroit had tremendous difficulty obtaining mortgages due to “redlining,” the practice of denying services based on the racial makeup of the neighborhood. Additionally, real estate agents continued to steer prospective African-American home buyers away from predominantly white neighborhoods into lower-priced, predominantly black areas of the city.[6]

References

  1. "Detroit, Michigan Population 2020 (Demographics, Maps, Graphs)". worldpopulationreview.com.
  2. 2.0 2.1 Detroit.wikipedia.org. Retrieved Jan 20, 2021.
  3. List of U.S. cities with large African-American populations. wikipedia.org. Retrieved Jan 20, 2021
  4. History of African Americans in Detroit. wikipedia.org. Retrieved Jan 20, 2021
  5. Cassidy, Julie.Detroit: The evolution of a housing crisis. May 7, 2019. mlpp.org. Retrieved Jan 20, 2021
  6. 6.0 6.1 History of Housing Discrimination Against African Americans in Detroit. naacpldf.org. PDF. Retrieved Jan 20, 2021
  7. 7.0 7.1 Gill, Kimberly. Housing discrimination in Detroit: An example of systemic racism. clickondetroit.com. Retrieved Jan 20, 2021
  8. Sugrue, Thomas (1996). Origins of the Urban Crisis. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. pp. 34–54. ISBN 9780691162553.