Segregation and the Trouble with Integration

Abstract

Abstract This history of U.S. housing, land-use policy, and the U.S. housing market has been a long-running demonstration of how the moral and social equality of Americans, subjected to class, racial, ethnic, and religious discrimination, has precisely not been respected, and how the federal government, in league with local governments, housing industry groups, and neighborhood associations purposely thwarted distributive justice and positively pursued the opposite. The exemplar of this injustice in social-spatial arrangements is the history of U.S. residential segregation, which primarily targeted African Americans and is the subject of Chapter 5, “Segregation and the Trouble with Integration.” The chapter concentrates on state-sponsored housing segregation and discrimination in post–World War II housing policy, partly because of its direct link with the United States’ postwar economic boom and its immediate connection with the enduring wealth gap between black and white Americans.