How Housing Discrimination Works

Owning a home in the US is a way to pass wealth down from one generation to the next and lift families into a comfortable life down the road. But there have been barriers to buying homes that Black Americans have faced from the time of slavery to today.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
and there's Charles W Chuck Bryan over there, and this
is stuff you should know. Um the man oh man addition,

(00:25):
do you know what I love about this topic is
that it's not just a bunch of like ranting about
how we think things are and how people think things are.
It's like so studied and statistic heavy that you can
talk about how things are and then say, and here's

(00:45):
the proof exactly, here's a lot of data to back
it up. It's really great. I love it when they
dovetail like this. Yeah. I get the impression, though, UM
that you when you're talking about the studying race and
especially in America like you are, you have to back
it up with data like people are like, oh, yeah,
I don't I don't know about that. But um, I
want to give a shout out to actually to um

(01:08):
uh scholars both sell sociologists of race. UM Professor Villnabashi
Treatler from UC Santa Barbara and Professor Tricia Rose of
Brown University both are experts on this stuff and they
helped me out big time with this and some other
research on on racism I've done, um and they Dr

(01:28):
Bashi Treatler said, hey, make sure you mentioned this hashtag
we have going called site hashtag. Sorry, and I'm making
the hashtag symbol like justin Timberlake hashtag site black women
ce I t e black women. UM, and that leads
you to all sorts of good often overlooked research by
black scholars. Um, who are women that don't always get

(01:51):
a lot of credit. So I'm glad you told me
about that one. I wanted to tell everybody else. So
when you, uh, that was a stutter when he said
so so sociologists, you didn't mean they were just mediocre sociologists. No,
I was. I was sociologist. I could see how that
would be confusing. I was doing my impression of Phil
Collins saying sociologist so so studio. Yeah, well that's the

(02:16):
last joke we're gonna tell you. Oh yeah, probably. I
was warned by Dr Bashi Treatler not to do our
usual stick when we're talking about race stuff, and I
was like, well, I mean, we we can handle ourselves.
She said. I I listened to your stuff. I listened
to the Braws episode just trust me on this. It's like,
all right, So then that means the housing discrimination episode

(02:38):
officially starts. Now, that's right. So that's what we're talking about, dude.
Housing discrimination and um uh in the United States, and
there is a very long history of housing discrimination. And
you might say, like, well, that really sucks. That sucks
that people have trouble buying a home or maybe they
get less favorable terms on their loans just because of

(02:59):
their race, and that does suck. That's absolutely true. But
it's even worse than that because in the United States,
one of the biggest ways of growing wealth intergenerationally, like
over the course of generations within a single family is
through a house. Yeah, I mean it's sometimes people don't

(03:19):
have a ton of money to invest in the stock market.
Some people think the stock market is not something to trust.
But one thing that has always been fairly reliable in
this country, you know, say, for a few moments in history,
is real estate and the idea that if you scrap
up and save enough money for a down payment for
a home, that house will eventually be worth quite a

(03:42):
bit more years later, and you can sell it and
use that extra windfall of cash to invest in the
stock market or to pass down to your kids so
they can then get in the housing market sooner than
they might have and then it just becomes a cycle
where it just builds wealth. Yeah, Like the average family

(04:02):
in America has most of their net worth tied up
in their house, and then you know, when it comes
time to sell it and the house is paid off,
that's a lot of money. And then when you kick
the bucket, your kids get that money and maybe they
get a better house, and it just keeps growing and growing.
So if you put up barriers to housing, you're actually
putting up barriers to passing along intergenerational wealth. And as

(04:24):
a big, big problem in America. UM Still today, I
saw a study from I think Brookings that found that,
um the median. Yeah, brooking study said that the median
net worth of a white family in America is a
hundred and seventy one thousand dollars. The median net worth

(04:48):
of a black family in America is seventeen thousand, one
hundred and fifty dollars, about a ten of what the
median is for white people. And that is largely because
of housing discriminate in the history of housing discrimination in
this country. Yeah, and as far as history goes, you know,
it started with literal racist laws where they said, if

(05:10):
you're a black person or a black family, you cannot
live here. Um. That went on for a while, and
then those laws were sort of altered to the Jim
Crows Separate but Equal era, where they said, you know what, Um,
we'll say things are better, but it's really the same
effect in the end. And then they got rid of

(05:30):
those laws and said, all right, now we've really passed
the meaningful legislation, and now we can just racially discriminate
on the down low and very creative ways. Yeah, that's
basically the pattern that it's followed. Um. And what kind
of stuck out to meet Chuck is is that before
about nine hundred, before like the rise of like industrialization

(05:53):
to a really legitimate degree in the United States, like,
there wasn't not nearly as much segregation as we saw
starting around nineteen especially in the North, because if you
had a trade or a craft in the North and
you were an African American, there's a really good chance
that you were going to be serving white people as
well as black people, right and because you usually were

(06:16):
very closely your home was tied close to your shop,
you often lived above it if you were like a
cobbler or something like that. Um, you made live next
door to a white baker or something like that. So
the there wasn't a lot of segregation until industrialization came
along and there was a big call for labor, which
drew a lot of African Americans, a lot of Black

(06:38):
Americans out of the South up to the north. And
all of a sudden, all of those people who were
living in integrated neighborhoods, all those white people I should say,
had had a problem with this influx of black migration
from the South to the north, and they responded with
a lot of really disgusting violence. Yeah. I mean, we've
talked about some of these, um race incidents and race

(07:01):
riots and race almost race wars really uh here and
there on the show, and they're always hard to talk about.
But that was just sort of the reality of things
at the time. Um. In the nineteen thirties, the New
Deal comes along, and this is when legislation starts to
kind of kick in. When the government stepped in and said,
you know what, we think we should make it easier

(07:23):
for people to own homes. We really want to boost
home ownership because that's a boon for the economy of
the country. And we're going to create the home Owners
Loan Corporation, which is going to help people refinance their mortgages.
But we need some criteria here to sort of establish
a uniform way of like how to how to dole

(07:45):
out this assistance. And they reckoned, let's let's look at
every population of forty or more and let's create a
color coded map that's based on riskiness of these loans.
And they said, you know, they talked to real estate brokers,
they talk to bankers, and they said, help us out,
help us draw these boundaries, and they came up with
a one, two, three, four color graded system. Right, yeah,

(08:07):
that's right. Because again this was like long before credit
scores were developed, so you couldn't really look at you know,
if somebody came into your bank to ask for a loan,
you couldn't be like, well, you're your your credit scores this,
So I'm not gonna look at that start. I don't
know we should do an episode on if we haven't already.
I don't think for sure. Um, but yeah, so the
four color codes they had were also um delineated by

(08:29):
grades Grade A, B, C, and D. Grade A was
the most desirable neighborhood. They were usually homogeneous, meaning white. Um,
there were um lots of professionals living in there. Grade
B was maybe a step down, but still largely homogeneous,
if not totally homogeneous, and they were considered still desirable.
And then it started to get into the lower grades

(08:50):
grades C and D, and C was um, I think
colored yellow on the map, right, Yeah, the first two
were green and blue, and then Grade C was rated
as declining and colored yellow and that sort of. In fact,
I think it even said infiltration of a lower grade
population in the document, which you don't have to be

(09:13):
a genius to figure out what they were saying there.
It means people of color were moving in. And then
finally you end up with the color red Grade D,
which is least desirable. Um, very densely populated areas almost
always communities of color. Right. So um, the h O
l C created these maps, and then um, along came

(09:36):
the Federal Housing Authority and they said, well, we need
similar maps because we're not we're not here to help
stem the tide of foreclosures. We're actually here to generate
new home ownership among Americans. Um, but we still have
the same issue. We got to figure out who's credit
worthy and who's not. So we're going to base it
on where the people live. And they basically made identical
maps to the h O l C maps, and so

(09:58):
they probably used them. Right, there's a lot of debate.
I don't think anyone's found the smoking gun yet. But
if you take an h O l C map in
an f h A map and you put them over
one another, they're basically the same thing. And I I
it's kind of all. It's up for the debate still.
But the the the upshot was that because of these maps, Um,

(10:22):
if you lived in one of these red and often
yellow communities, they wouldn't lend to you, for um, for
a new mortgage or even a second mortgage to say,
remodel your home. And they also wouldn't assist you with
refinancing your existing mortgage, which means you're subject to foreclosure.
And if you were in a red or yellow community,

(10:43):
you were probably um black or a person of color
or some other ethnic minority. And UM, that means that
they were shut out of this enormous housing boom that
generated a tremendous amount of prosperity immediately after the New
Deal in World War Two. As we'll see, so African
Americans were left out of or on the fringes of

(11:04):
the New Deal anyway. And this is where we get
to shout out Francis Perkins. Perkins again, which is it's
fun to now that we know so much about her,
to continually shout her out. But she did a lot
of work arguing in favor of inclusion for black people
in the New Deal. Um, I guess you know, sometimes successfully,
sometimes not. But at the end of the day, the

(11:25):
f h A imposed these rules through the New Deal. Uh.
Their maps were just like the UH the h O
l C. And the process of excluding these groups because
they were colored red was called redlining. That is that
like the where that whole term comes from. That's exactly
where it comes from. So now today, any any time
you're discriminated against, whether it's buying insurance or anything like that, um,

(11:49):
based on your race or say your community. Um, it's
called redlining now. But that's where it grew out of
those h O l C maps and f A J maps. UM.
And I mean they would use terms and like their
their handbooks that like these communities had quote undesirable racial
or nationality groups in them, so you couldn't you couldn't
lend them any money or whatever. Um. And it was

(12:11):
I mean like this is still like a really big
problem today. Yeah, I mean back then basically and still today.
In many cases, that leaves you with a couple of
options as a person of color. You can rent uh
forever um often times back then and still now from
a white landlord who doesn't live anywhere near that community,

(12:31):
not always, but usually, or just pay for the home
in cash, which is a stretch for anybody. Uh, it's
it's tough to do unless you're like wealthy. And there
were there were, I have to say there were black
owned banks. But there was nine black own banks in
the entire United States in the thirties. So that is
a place where you could turn to if you're lucky
enough to have one in your area. But that that

(12:53):
was not a solution to the general population for Black Americans. Yeah,
and like you said, also affected their ability to get
second mortgages, to do home improvements or to like expand
on their house and upgrade it, remodel it. So that
means that the properties are gonna deteriorate and decline over

(13:13):
the years, and it's just it's part of that systemic
racist cycle that is just prevalent. Yeah, because still today, eventually,
over time people from the outside looking in say, look,
black people can't even take care of their communities. Look
at look at how their houses are. Um, just as
a result of this. That is definitely like the definition

(13:33):
of systemic racism for sure. It's just by the way
into the structures. If you hear dogs barking, My dogs
are upstairs and they're just very excited about this topic. Yeah,
and I don't know what's going on there, but they're
not going to shut up. So let's say we press on.
We'll press on. Should we take a break, then press on.
We're going to press on like some lee nails right

(13:53):
after a break. How about that? All right, it sounds good.

(14:19):
All right, we're back and look, these things look amazing
on me. Yeah, they're very nice. There's a little bit
of cuticle showing. I didn't put them right up against it,
but it's still it's passable. Well, I think if you
paint them just right, that's not so noticeable. Right, fill ins,
that's what I need. I need to get some fill ins.
So back to the topic at hand, joking is over. Um,

(14:43):
so here's the deal. There's, like you said, a lot
of debate whether or not or I don't think we
said this part, whether or not the lenders actually use
these maps because these were government maps from government programs.
It's not like they said, here, banks have these and
use these. Uh. If you look at the statistics, it
seems like they probably got their hands on some of

(15:03):
these maps. It does. And also, don't forget the government
figured out, you know, how to draw these maps for
every city over forty people from the lenders, from the banks,
from the Yeah, so they knew this anyway, but now
the government has basically said it is okay to do this, um.
And so so yeah, if you if you look at
the outcome of this redlining, these red line maps, um,

(15:28):
it's it's really hard to say, no, this didn't happen
like this definitely didn't make it out of government hands
like forts here just great, let's trade off. Between ninety
four and nineteen sixty two, over of all the federally
backed mortgages that were issued in the United States went

(15:49):
to white buyers. Between four and nineteen sixty two, that's right,
because of this black ownership since then and can tinuing
today is lagged behind white homeownership in America, and seventeen
just a few short years ago, of black Americans own
their homes versus seventy of white Americans. And then the

(16:13):
other problem with redlining a community is you basically put
a pox on it. It's cursed, because that means that
those houses are not going to get any kind of
attention UM, and so they're going to continue to deteriorate.
And if you live in this community, as far as
a banker is concerned, you are a huge credit risk. Right,
And so still today UM sev of the neighborhoods that

(16:35):
were originally redlined in those maps are our redline UM
low income communities today, And which is I mean, that's
pretty surprising. And I also saw that UM study found
that homes and red line neighborhoods we're still worth less
than half of those in green neighborhoods. Yeah, and here's

(16:57):
the one. I marked these as stats with an exclamation point,
just that's how excited I get. But the ones that
I'm really floored by, I don't even write anything except
for three exclamation points. I've got three exclamation points by
that of back federally back mortgages. For sure, that is
definitely one. Um here's mine. If if you might say, well,

(17:18):
what about variables man and education level and income level
and stuff like that, Like you gotta factor all that in.
That's a whole other side conversation as far as systemic
racism and being able to go to good schools and
afford a good education and get a good job and
all that. So just park that to the side. But
if you control for all those variables, college educated black

(17:40):
Americans are still less likely to own their home than
white Americans without a high school diploma. Yeah, That's That's
what really gets you is when they they're like, well,
let us just control for all these factors and only
variable that remains is the race of the people applying
for a owner owning a home, and it's still the case.

(18:02):
That's when it's like, well this is indisputable. Actually yeah,
and you know you can put a price on this.
Red Fen did a study um just last year in
twenty that black American families missed out on the opportunity
to accumulate an average of two hundred and twelve thousand
dollars of you know what, we're talking about that intergenerational

(18:22):
wealth per household over the last forty years, just over
the last forty years. I mean we're talking about stuff
that started, I mean back in the days of slavery,
but really started to take off in the nineteen thirties
with the New Deal. And this is just since nineteen
eighty they've lost out on that amount of money per household.
That's nuts and still today, Chuck, here's another one that
gets me. Black American is five times likelier to own

(18:45):
a home in a red line neighborhood than a white
American is. So this is still an issue today. Um.
So redlining these maps just set off this enormous amount
of um discrimination and I guess is all you can say.
And then all of the horrible effects that come out
of that that level of discrimination. But they weren't the

(19:06):
only things that set it off. Um. The g I
Bill really kind of came in and said, well, hold on,
hold my beer, I want to mess things up to
what does hold my beer mean? It means that like
there's some dude just kind of sitting there with like
his shirt, um just barely covering his gut drinking a beer,
watching somebody do something stupid and he says, hold my beer,

(19:26):
and then he doesn't stupid. That's right. Yeah, I thought
that's what it meant. But you know me, I'm a
I'm an old man with a shirt barely covering his gut.
So I wasn't quite short. You should spend more time
on Urban Dictionary. It should. I don't drink much beer anymore, though,
although I do love it. What's your favorite? I mean,
you know I love Tropicalia here out of Athens, Georgia.

(19:49):
The creature comfort. I still never had one. Well, you
should come over. I have a cagorator now on my deck.
Oh my god, I'm serving it up. But I don't
know why I got it. I got it for friends
because I don't drink. It's on a beer. And then
the pandemic happened, and now I've just got a half
keg of beer sitting ship. All right. So yeah, the

(20:09):
g I Bill um this, you know, in theory, the
g I Bill is a great thing, and it has
done a lot of good. But in this case, it
did block access to home ownership among black Americans because,
uh they would come home from World War Two. The
g I Bill was passed. Banks are handing out mortgages
to veterans and they were actually allowed to discriminate based

(20:31):
on race. Yes, it's shocking. Yeah, well it's like whenever
you see that kind of thing, you're like, this doesn't
jibe with what I understand. Just look to the Dixiecrats,
the segregationists of the South, who were a very powerful
voting block and during the Jim Crow era, and they
were like to appease them and get them to vote

(20:52):
for something like a New Deal program or to not
do everything they could to block it. You had to say, okay,
well we'll make sure that that blacks are excluded them
this that that that Black Americans won't have access to
this amazing program. And they'd be like, okay, cool, let's
let's do it. That's that's that's where a lot of
that came from. And I mean, it's easy to blame
the Dixie Krats, but you can also be like, well,

(21:14):
you know, how hard did you try to go around
the Dixie Kratz too. I mean it was allowed to happen, yes, yeah,
by everybody, despite Francis perkins best efforts. Yeah, here's the
stat For instance, in Mississippi in Uh, they build out
told out more than three thousand v A backed home
loans that year. Uh, and two of them were two

(21:37):
black veterans. Uh. Pretty startling. I don't even know the
percentage on that point nine eight. Oh yeah, there's got
to be a repeating something in there somewhere. Uh. And
you know this is a big deal because when World
War Two ended, they wanted a housing boom. There was
a lot of the supplies that would have gone to
home construction during the war went to the war effort.

(21:58):
So the f h A said, you know what, we
we need a housing boom here. We're going to guarantee
construction loans to you like big construction companies out there.
And that's when the suburbs popped up for the first time,
and that changed everything forever. Yeah. I mean, like they
they the birth of the suburbs were like a deliberate

(22:18):
program created by the federal government to to basically get
more people buying houses, to start that intergenerational wealth and
to create a middle class or to expand the middle
class dramatically. And they were able to do that partially
through just like when the f h came along and said, hey,
you know, we're going to back these people's loans as

(22:39):
long as they're not in a red line neighborhood. That
says to the lenders, well, then you know that means
even if this person defaults, the government will buy the
loan from me. I'm gonna get paid back no matter what.
They did the same thing to these construction companies to
which created this huge housing boom. But there's a caveat
to it. Just like with the v A loans that
said you can discriminate based on race for loans, even

(23:01):
though this is really important, Chuck. Even though the government
the v A would back the loan of a black
veteran just like they would back the loan of a
white veteran and you would be repaid no matter what,
you were still allowed to discriminate based on race. The
f h A, supposedly with the birth of the suburbs,
said we're going to guarantee your construction loans, so you

(23:22):
can build suburbs, but you can't sell two black Americans.
That's another one that I don't think there's a smoking
gun that I saw, so I don't know if that means,
like get the word out, like you can't sell the
black people or else we're not going to back these loans,
or if it was stated policy, that haven't been able
to turn up. But it's pretty well understood that the

(23:43):
f h A discriminated against black people basically moving to
the suburbs by not backing construction loans like that. Well. Yeah,
and there were neighborhood covenants in place that said that
black people cannot own homes in these neighborhoods they were
there were clauses that said you cannot resell your home
if you go to move, you can't sell it to

(24:04):
a black family. Yeah, dude, if you want to be startled,
go search that um on Google Images. There's like pictures
of these clauses and deeds that say you can't sell
to anybody who's not white, or even specifically, you can't
sell anybody who's black. It's really jarring. Yeah, and it's um,
I mean, it was sort of expressly understood that the
suburbs were being created for a reason, and that's to

(24:26):
get white people out of the city to a place
where they could live among themselves. And it's it's something
that's still going on. I mean, during the uh most
recent presidential election campaign, Donald Trump started playing praying on
these fears again. He was saying things like, literally, suburban
housewives of America, Biden will destroy your neighborhood and your

(24:49):
American dream. People living their suburban lifestyle dream will no
longer be bothered of fine or financially hurt by having
low income housing built in your neighborhood. And the these
are literal quotes, and it's just he's trying to to
garner a certain kind of vote, to be sure. But
you know, we'll get to other stuff. I mean, Trump

(25:09):
has a long history and his and his family with
he and his father of housing discrimination. But the end
result of all this is white people. You know, people
call it white flight. They left the cities, moved to
the suburbs. People that were in the city still, these
African American families in these yellow and red line communities,
we're sort of stuck there. So the government steps in

(25:32):
to build affordable housing, which at first were racially integrated.
There were black people and white people, but then even
the lower income white people, uh fled for the suburbs. Yeah,
because wages rose. Yeah, and they left cities in an
urban communities almost entirely black. Um. Yeah. So proportionately speaking,
there was a tremendous drain of white people from the cities.

(25:57):
I'm sure it was different on a city to city based.
As a matter of fact, I know it was. There's
not a you can't put a whole blanket of history
over every square inch of the United States, so different
cities had different experiences. But proportionately speaking, black people have
always made up a smaller amount of the American population overall.

(26:17):
But then if you look at the you know, percentage
of black people, say in a city in nine I
think is when it peaked. For Atlanta in particular, Um,
it's like say black or something that's a way larger
proportion or disproportionate amount of black people living in the
city than say, um, in the suburbs. And then conversely, Chuck,

(26:38):
when you look at the suburbs and the statistics about
race or demography in the suburbs, then it really kind
of all comes home. Yeah, and you know they're living
in the suburbs. They decide, you know, we still need
to go into the city sometimes, so we need interstates
to get us there because we like going to concerts
occasionally or seeing a professional sports team play, right, and

(27:01):
so they built these interstates, Uh, they kind of barreled
through black neighborhoods built them there they often became a
dividing line. UH. And you know, these communities were set
up to fail. They had less frequent garbage pickup, they
had inadequate funding to keep up this public housing that
they built, UM, lower access to basic utilities, and they

(27:22):
were just in no position to to succeed basically. Now.
And I'm trying to remember what episode we talked about
prow I Go Housing UM project in in St. Louis.
I think it was the Environmental Psychology episode, if I'm
not mistaken, But that was a really good example of
this of how people pointed to that people from the
outside and we're like, look, you can't like black people

(27:43):
can't take care of anything. Look at the degraded state
that this housing project is in. And it's, like you said,
like they were set up to fail through all through
like a lack of attention, a lack of funding, UM,
just a lack of basically everything UM. And it's it's
that kind of seem to keep perpetuating these um uh biases.

(28:07):
For example, and this is a big one that we'll
talk about later, that white people think if black people
move into an area, their housing values are going to
go down because of stuff like that. Yeah, I mean,
that's sort of the I guess you'd call it the
dog whistle that everyone leans on there like, hey, we
you know, we don't mind. Uh, we're not bigoted at all.

(28:27):
We just want to keep our housing values up. That's right.
That that so that one and then the the um
the myth that black people are just inherently um uncredit
worthy or not credit worthy are the two things that
seem to be used the most as cover for, like
you said, post civil rights are segregation in the United States,

(28:51):
the dog whistle, like you said, yeah, I mean, and
now is when we can talk a little bit about
um gentrification, because I mean, the way housing has worked
in this country is really fascinating and really gross in
a lot of ways, but just interesting to look at
from a bird's eye point of view. The way people
move around and what eventually happened with the cities is that, uh,

(29:16):
you know, call them what you want, yuppies or dinks.
There's a lot of name for upwardly mobile white people.
They're like, Hey, I want to move into the city,
I want to be closer to to the concerts. Although
this is going to be controversial, I'm gonna get a
lot of cred for this, but one of the most
annoying trends of the last like fifteen years is building

(29:37):
all these concert venues out in the suburbs. It's so annoying.
And I know they want their concert venues out there
so they don't have to come into the city, but
I hate it when I one of my bands plays,
you know, thirty miles out into the suburbs. I won't go. Yeah,
it's kind of a pain. Although we did go out.
It's a huge Motley Crewe thanks to that was Nita Strauss. No,

(30:02):
that's true, So that was that was worth the trip
because it was Miley Crue and Alice Cooper. I just think,
I don't know, I think all sports stadiums and all
concerts and you should be in the city. I'm with you.
That's definitely traditional into the city for a big day out.
You know, when they start moving museums way out in
the exurbs and I'm done. Um. But the same thing.

(30:23):
You could make the same case. When they built the
highways and everything, they just kind of built them through
black communities. That's what they did with with the stadiums
and all that as well too. Well, no, that's true.
You know, think about Braves. They just plunked Braves Stadium
ted Turner out just right in the middle of Mechanicsville,
which is a historically black community, and said, everybody moves

(30:45):
move aside, and don't harass all the white people who
come down to see the game on you know, same day.
We should do I mean, I love sports, but we
should do a There's such a problematic side to pro
sports from that too. Um, these billionaire owners is using
city money to build new stadiums when their other stadium
is just like ten years old or whatever. That is

(31:06):
definitely problematic. It's crazy, what a crazy amount of waste
that produces a loan just that alone. Yeah, um, alright,
so where was I? All right? Uh, white dinks are
moving into the neighborhoods again in the city because they
want good Thai food, and uh, these neighborhoods become a

(31:28):
little more attractive the more white people move into, other
white people to move in, and they start moving in
and increasing numbers, and the houses are generally renovated or
improved over time or sometimes they might bulldoze you know,
a pretty decent house with good bones just to build
you know, the biggest house possible on their postage stamp

(31:48):
of a lot. It's crazy how close they build these
mammoth houses together. I'm sure it happens everywhere. Atlanta's got
a real problem with it. But what happens is, you know,
home user going to increase, that's gonna raise taxes on
the other homes around them. A lot of time, those
other homes are owned by UM, longtime lower income residents,

(32:10):
most times people of color, it becomes unsustainable. UM. We
have a great, great program here in my neighborhood and
east like called Neighbor in Need. That is UH Emily
and I have four main charities that we work with
and give to every year, and Neighbor in Need is
one of them because we like to stay really locally focused.
But Neighbor in Need basically addresses this head on and

(32:33):
they you know, raise a lot of money and they
use that money to take care of these people. UM,
if they hear about a neighbor that's like, you know,
in need, like an older African American couple who's been
here for forty years, they're having to pay way too
much in property taxes so they can't afford a roof
on their house. They'll go put a roof on their house,
or they'll pay their power bill, um whatever. I mean.

(32:56):
It's a really really great grassroots organization, so UM very
happy to be working with them and uh, you know,
trying to fight the sort of ills of gentrification overall. Yeah,
that's neat because it also draws the community together to
help the longest term residents of that community rather than
that whole everybody's on their own kind of thing, which

(33:17):
I'm sure most people who move into a community like
you know that is gentrifying probably would want to do.
They just don't know how to do it, or they
don't know how to contact anybody. People don't just usually
go over to their neighbor's house and knock on the
door and introduce themselves anymore. So that's cool. Yeah, and
you know this is uh sometimes they are able to
sell their house for a pretty good you know, the

(33:39):
housing value does increase, so they're able to get more
money than they might have before, which can be a
nice windfall. But I've also seen firsthand, literally with my neighbors, UM,
these sort of predatory home builders that come in there,
and while they think it's probably decent money compared to
what they thought they could get, it's still a lower

(34:00):
than what they would offer a white family. But even
if they were treated fairly and they walked away with
the big windfall from the sale, um and you know,
had a lot of money to retire on, that community
was still fractured. You know, the people who are having
to move and their neighbors who already had to move
may have lived there for generations or even you know,

(34:22):
just their whole lives and they formed a community. And
it's not like that whole community just moves elsewhere together.
They all go to different communities, often towards the end
of their life, and it leads to alienation, isolation. Um.
It's a that I mean, that's a real problem. Even
even if they are being paid well for the the
houses they're they're being bought out of because they don't

(34:43):
necessarily want to move, but they just can't afford the
taxes anymore. Um. So there's there's that's a big issue
with gentrification. It's tough to get around sounds like that
neighborhood group that you're talking about what's the name again
that they that they've they've figured out a way or
round it. Do you know what there needs to be
dude is uh and this is chuck twenty two stuff. Okay.

(35:08):
I think if you live in a house long enough,
you shouldn't have to pay property tax anymore. Yeah, I
think there are I mean, I have to be a lot.
Maybe it's like twenty years or something, but that would
solve a lot of this problem. There is zero reason
why some elderly African American couple that's been in a
home for forty years needs to be paying taxes at

(35:28):
all on that house, much less these jacked up rates. Yeah. No,
I think that's that's totally true. Um. Yeah, I think
there's a if it's not law, there's a proposal in
Georgia to do that once you're sixty five or something
like that. Maybe. I mean, I'm ad about property tax anyway,
just because it's I don't know, we pay so much
in taxes. Then you finally scrape up enough to buy

(35:50):
a place that's your own, and the government's then like, well,
if you're going to have to pay tax on that,
do right? You know, I know, it's seems unfair. Also,
you shouldn't have to pay full price for coffee anywhere
once you reach sixty five or old agreed, especially after
three pm. Uh, All right, well, should we take a
break and then talk about the Fair Housing Act, which

(36:11):
solved everything. It totally did. It's all great now, alright,
we'll be right back up to this. Alright, spoiler, So

(36:41):
we ruined things. They passed the Fair Housing Act, and
racism has been solved in America. That's right. Ninety eight
And we talked about the Fair Housing Act a little bit, UM,
and you know, it's a good thing they passed it.
It did banned discrimination in housing practices officially, but it
just led to a little trickier way to get around

(37:03):
stuff by UM doing it on the download. Yeah, and
that is that is for if you're studying systemic racisicism
in the United States. The passing of like the Voting
Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act UH,
and some other legislation UM during the sixties really changed
things in that no longer was the government in the

(37:27):
business of enforcing discrimination and segregation UM. And also now
you had recourse in the courts if you were discriminated
against UM. But it didn't just a race racism in
the United States that that task of enforcing basically white
supremacy and racial discrimination and segregation and all the stuff

(37:48):
that comes along with it fell to um lesser institutions
in everyday people who carried out. And when you're talking
about something like housing discrimination, UM, the people who now
are best able to continue enforcing segregation and discrimination in
the United States are people like lenders and real estate

(38:10):
agents and even people who are deciding where to buy
a house. Um. Everyday americans buying the house UM often
make choices that they don't necessarily think our racist, and
they might they probably don't think that they're racist, but
they're still they're housing choices often reflect um inadvertent or

(38:32):
otherwise racial choices or choices along racial lines. Yeah, and
this you know this next bit, we're we're sort of
busting on real estate professionals a little bit. I have
very good friends that are real estate agents. They're great
people for the most part. We don't mean to just
paint everything with the big broadbrush, but the industry does

(38:54):
have a history of it, for sure. Yeah, and we
have to talk about it. So there was one in
the in the eighties, there was one practice called block
busting god um not having anything to do with video stores,
I know it was the eighties, but um literally busting
up a block. When a real estate agent would work
or sort of act as a speculator and say, either, hey,

(39:19):
you know what you know, there are some black families
that are moving into the area. You may want to
think about selling just to protect your home values before
they fall. Or they might sell to a black family
and introduce them to the area so they could then
turn around, um, buy these houses from the white residents
and then sell them to the black residents or you know,

(39:41):
hopefully black residents, but at a big mark up. Yeah,
which has insult to injury, Like they created a basically
white flight from an area just from the rumor of
black people moving in, and then they move black people
in and sell them sell to them at wildly inflated rates,
which is crazy. And I read one story to Chuck
of one of these real estate agents that was doing blockbusting.

(40:03):
They would have a black dad with the stroller walk
around the neighborhood, um like he had moved in or
was thinking of moving in or whatever, and apparently just
that was enough to get people to start to sell.
And again you're like, you know, this is this is
terrible that real estate agents are doing it. But the
fact that it was effective really says a lot about
every day you know, white homeowners too. And also again

(40:27):
like it it doesn't mean like that these white homeowners
hate black people like they were worried about their property values,
because it's such an embedded myth in America that when
a black family moves into a neighborhood, they're so bad
at taking care of their their house and their home
values that it's going to drag the home values down
in throughout the entire neighborhood. And so everybody needed to

(40:49):
get out before that happened. That's that's again, that's the
definition of systemic racism. Yeah, and you know this has
been busted up to a large degree officially, but up
until nineteen fifty, the official policy of the National Association
of Real Estate Boards UM said a realtor should never
be instrumental and introducing into a neighborhood members of any

(41:13):
race or nationality whose presence will clearly be detrimental to
property values in that neighborhood. That was like literal policy
up until nineteen fifty, and then there was a study
in two thousand six by the National Fair Housing Alliance
that said, and this is something else called steering, which
is not blockbusting, but it's like, hey, like we want

(41:34):
to show you houses over here in this neighborhood because
we think it's a better fit for you. Uh. And
you know here the financial instruments available to get mortgages
for you and maybe not just for everybody. And black
people historically have not given the full picture. They're maybe
not shown white neighborhoods. Uh. And the study found that
steering occurred sent of the time when researchers posed as

(41:58):
buyers and we're shown homes like these sort of undercover operations. Yeah,
and steering occurs, um not just you know, if you're
if you're a black home buyer, you're not just going
to be shown a black neighborhoods. If you're a white
home buyer, they're probably not going to take you to
black neighborhoods either. So through this process of racial steering,
this is basically enforcing patterns of segregation still in the

(42:22):
United States. Yeah, there was another study by Brookings. They
found that black owned homes are undervalued by an average
of forty thou dollars. And this is one that's controlled
by all the factors like home quality and amenities and everything. Exclamation, Yeah,
it's forty eight grand literally because it is a home

(42:43):
owned by a black individual. When they control for amenities
where the home is the size of the house, everything
else about the house. If you compare apples to apples,
and it's the same house owned by a white person
and the other house that's exactly the same home by
a black person, the black person's house is going to
be forty thousand dollars less in value just because it's

(43:05):
owned by a black person. And that's that's just basically
that whole idea of um that black people drag home
values down becoming a self fulfilling prophecy, and um that
those same home values are all of that undervaluing that
same Brooking study found amounts to a loss of about

(43:27):
a hundred and fifty six billion dollars for Black Americans. Yeah,
for wealth they were not able to achieve. And uh,
you know, we talked a lot about the Great Recession
in the mortgage crisis kind of when it was going
on and shortly thereafter, Um, Black Americans back then were
likelier to receive subprime mortgages. These were the loans that

(43:47):
were really expensive to repay. They had higher fees, they
had higher interest rates, um they also had mechanisms built
in if you were a black loan owner that made
it easier for the lender to seize their collateral with
usually meant their house and so like, it makes sense
that if you are taking a greater risk lending to
somebody as the bank, you should be able to get

(44:10):
more money for it, right, But the problem is is
like subprime mortgages were doled out to black homeowners or
black home buyers at way higher rates than they were
to white home buyers. And that's a problem in and
of itself if the if the rates are less favorable
and it's easier for the bank to repossess the house.
But especially it proved to be a big problem during

(44:32):
the mortgage crisis when that bubble bursts, because if you
were a low income Black American, you were probably denied
a mortgage of any kind. But even if you were
a middle to high income black home buyer, you probably
got a subprime mortgage compared to say, a white buyer

(44:52):
with the same criteria that you had to offer. UM.
So that meant that when those foreclosures happened because the
bubble bursts, Black Americans, especially UM, wealthier Black Americans, were
disproportionately impacted, so that that subprime mortgage debacle erased way
more Black intergenerational wealth than it did for white people. Yeah,

(45:15):
I have my last three exclamation points. Stat during the
subprime mortgage crisis, there was a study that found black
and Latino families, because you know we've mentioned people of
color a few times, is not just solely African American
families affected? Um, And the study found that black and
Latino families making two hundred thousand dollars a year or more,

(45:39):
we're still more likely to receive a subprime loan than
white families making less than thirty thousand dollars a year.
That nuts, and six point two percent of white people
with a credit score of six sixty or higher received
a subprime mortgage compared to twenty one point four percent
of black borrowers with that same credit score. So, Chuck, UM,

(46:00):
there's a big problem with all this. And it's kind
of like you said at the beginning, like when you're
talking about race and especially discrimination by race. Um, people
tend to be like, especially white people tend to be like, well,
I don't know about that. I mean, there's a lot
of other factors involved, Like it could be anything. So
you really have to kind of prove that this is
a thing. And ever since the federal government got out

(46:22):
of discriminating on paper, um, it's gotten a lot harder
to track. So back in the seventies, the Department of
Housing and Urban Development, they have an office of Research
and Policy. They came up with the way of testing
this to control for as many variables as possible and
just see if it's just race that is being discriminated against.

(46:43):
And it's called paired testing. It's actually pretty clever from
what I understand. Yeah, that's when you get to equally
qualified candidates to apply for homeown or to go to
a real estate agent and like look at apartments or
houses or whatever. Uh. They are trained to basically be
as identical as they can be to one another, to

(47:04):
respond to the questions in the same way, have the
same credit history, same job status, same income level, and
basically sort of be duplicates of one another except for
their skin color. Uh, they're not working together so they
don't even know, um, like there's no bias there even
because they're not like paired together, right, They're not like,
oh they got too, I'm gonna try this with them.
Like they don't. They don't meet one another, they don't

(47:26):
interact with one another. They're just doing their thing and
they're just trained to do it exactly the same way.
The only distinction between them is their their race. Right.
And so the Urban Institute, which is a think tank,
UM study this and they came up with kind of
four big points from this paired testing UH exercise, which

(47:47):
is UH. They found about discrimination and housing vouchers that
are intended to let low income renters choose from a
bigger pool a rental housing uh than the realtors even showed. UM,
there were fewer homes and apartments available to minorities like
we were, like I kind of mentioned earlier, like just
a smaller like no, you know, we'll just look here. Yeah,

(48:09):
the racial steering usually results in fewer, fewer places being shown. Um.
They were steered again to primarily um, you know, neighborhoods
of their own ethnicity, and then given less information overall.
Like I mentioned about mortgage products, UM, different kinds of loans,
different kinds of ways of structuring a loan, just not

(48:31):
given that information at all. Right, Um, so the they
also found this paired testing turns up very frequently that um,
it's not just even people of colors, not just black Americans,
but it's people of color in general. But um, it's
not even just down to to racial discrimination. There's also
a lot of discrimination against people who are differently abled.

(48:53):
They actually sometimes fair worse than minorities when it comes
to housing discrimination. Paired testing is has turned that up
as well. So it's still the upshot of all this
is that it's still a problem and there is like
some silver lining to it. Um the I think. Uh.
That same think tank, the Urban Institute, also turned up

(49:14):
that there's been a general decline overall. It's not huge,
but it's it's noteworthy. It's remarkable. Um of preference in
favoritism toward white white buyers over buyers of of like
minority buyers by about five percent between and two thousand.
It went from about so And there does seem to

(49:38):
be a general decline in racism or discrimination, I should say, uh,
in the United States. So that's the good news, is
that America seems to be getting less racist. The bad
news is that America is still racist. Like, we still
have a long way to go. It's, as the study
put the studies findings confirm a hard truth that America's

(49:58):
long journey to end housing discrimination remains unfinished. Um. And
so there's still a long way to go. And I
think it's really important for everybody to realize that there's
a long history of discriminating against people of color, but
also very specifically Black Americans, and that it's still going
on today. And even though it's in a slightly lesser form,
it's very important if it's going on at all, that

(50:21):
we we erase it. That's right, agreed, You got anything else?
Nothing else? All right, Chuck, Well then that's housing discrimination.
And since I said all right, Chuck, it's time for
a listener mail. Well instead of reading a specific listener mail.
And because this episode is a little heavy, we thought
we'd have a little fun. Um. We got maybe more

(50:45):
emails than we have for any other episode in our
history down literally about Neco wavers Um. A lot of
support for the Neco for people, and a lot of
condemnation for yucking yums without giving having tried them. You
were all correct. We honor you all, and we're gonna
Josh got some sent them to me. We're gonna try

(51:06):
some necka wafers on the air. Listen there. I just
realized I think I made a grave mistake by not
having any water in the basement. Yeah, I just realized
this as well. Do you have a pipe to tap into?
I think we should eat the same color. Oh really? Okay,
all right, so we can kind of go, you know,
nose to nose. I'm never open one these before. Okay, exactly, already,

(51:29):
so nasty. You know, everybody was right about yucking people's
yams in general, but also because we hadn't tried them.
So that's why we're doing this. I mean, they're just
falling apart when I opened the package. So to strike one,
I've got a mess on my table. What color are
we gonna do? I mean it's hard to tell. This
looks sort of like a very pale yellow. That's the

(51:51):
only whole one in my hand. Pale yellow. I don't
even have that. I got white. I've got orange it
maybe maybe it is white, Okay, I'll call it. Wait wait, wait, wait,
I might have a palio when I do, I do it. Okay,
apology to the people of Mesophonia, but here we go.
Oh my god, it's just like it's like a flatter um,

(52:18):
bigger candy heart. The conversation hart, it's not bam like okay,
very hard, the crunches. I think what probably gets people.
I mean, the taste isn't bad, but it's not great. No,
they're not great, But I mean, who's crazy for conversation hearts,
sickos and weirdos? You know, the same goes for me. Well,

(52:40):
what's the verdict? Would you ever buy and eat Neca
wafers after this? I will tell you what. I will
probably eat the rest of these. And I like sugar.
I like as atter fact, I'm gonna do one of
the gray ones real quick. What about you? Uh no, no,
that is not my up my alley. But I'm gonna

(53:02):
try one of those chocolates because those where I think
recommended steer clear, the dark gray ones, the liquorice ones.
They're awful. It tastes Oh no, it is slightly different. Yeah,
I get a little hint up cocoa. I've come around
a little bit to the liquorice ones. At the end Wow,
I'm turning into an eco weirdo. Actually, the chocolate aren't bad.

(53:23):
What about pink? Try pink? Well, that's um, this is
winter green. I think people are so disgusted right now. Yeah,
this is all right. We're literally the last two people
listening to this. Man, I think we should wrap this. Okay. Well, um,
if you want to tell us that we shouldn't yuck
everybody's jump, especially about something we haven't tried, we need

(53:44):
to hear that whenever we do that. It's totally true
and totally right. Thank you everybody who wrote him. You
can get in touch with us at Stuff podcast at
I heart radio dot calm Stuff. You should know it
is pretty action of I heart Radio. For more podcasts
for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

(54:05):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H