Persisting Implications of Past Housing Discrimination in the Twin Cities
Home ownership in the United States is vital to building wealth and comes with opportunities to access resources that can further enrich a person’s life. However, not everyone has had equal access to home ownership in America, and the Twin Cities area of Minnesota is no different than other parts of the country. Racist housing practices in the mid 20th century denied people of color access to owning homes that would generate wealth and allow them to access other resources. In the Twin Cities, this has caused people of color to be concentrated in impoverished communities that lack adequate resources and funding. The implications of the housing policies during the mid 20th century along with failed anti-poverty policies have caused a poverty epidemic for people of color in the Twin Cities area.
My mother has told me her own personal stories that fit into residential segregation and the racial impacts it has on society. When she was a child, her family lived in North Minneapolis on the side of Broadway that was predominantly white. She told me they were the only people of color on the block. They were able to rent in the area because her mom is white. Fast forward to present day, and that same area of Minneapolis is now made up of predominantly people of color. The ability of white people to essentially choose where they want to live is not something many people of color could do. Instead, following a series of racist housing policies and exclusion from federal funding, people of color often were forced to live in communities that were overcrowded and lacked resources.
I have spent my life living in the Twin Cities of Minnesota. My family moved around a lot. Sometimes we would move every year once our lease was up and I have witnessed both the concentration of poverty in communities of color and the impacts of gentrification. Growing up, it was very obvious to me what neighborhoods were given more resources and what neighborhoods were impoverished. I could see these things just from driving to school with my mother. My school was located in an affluent neighborhood and I usually came from areas of working class. What struck me the most on these drives to school was the difference in racial demographics.
During the 20th century, the United States created a system of racialized housing policies that implemented many hurdles for people of color when it came to owning a home. This system was founded on practices like racial steering, misinformation, racial covenants, and denial of bank loans. These practices were once thought of as a way of life, meaning that it was destined for blacks and whites to live separately; neither group had any desire to live amongst each other. Richard Rothstein, author of The Color of Law, states the argument that residential segregation during the 20th century is a product of governmental practices that start at the federal level and go to the local level. Thus, the practices are a matter of law, meaning the government is the main entity controlling the unequal outcomes. The argument for people of color not wanting to integrate into residential areas can be made, but the fact is that people of color were almost always denied access. They were forced to live inside jam packed apartment buildings that did not have any parks or communal amenities.
The Twin Cities are often viewed as a large progressive urban hub in the midwest. However, what is often overlooked about the Twin Cities and Minnesota as a whole are the extreme levels of racial disparities that exist such as the median household income gap between whites and blacks. In 2017, 20% of people of color in Minnesota were living in poverty as compared to 6.9% of white people. These racial disparities can be linked to the area's troubling history with housing segregation. During the 1960s and 70s, the state created a council that was tasked with implementing fair housing policies. The council sought to create these improvements by opening up all the region’s communities to low-income residents, and in the ten years prior to 1980, the percentage of regional cities offering subsidized housing increased from 8% to 51%. Along with this, there was the federal court order that forced the Twin Cities to begin integrating public schools in the 1970s. This was seen a major step in removing residential segregation and put the two cities on a path to do such a thing. However, the growth of poverty in the urban cities caused segregation in schools to increase along with residential segregation. Saint Paul and Minneapolis did try to make efforts towards reducing these issues by implementing policies that aimed to reduce poverty, but reviewing the history of the area, it remains clear that those policies have advanced racial segregation. “Non-profit organizations fight for funding to spend on low income housing concentrated in the region’s poorest neighborhoods, where there are no jobs, and where the schools – from which most children fail to even graduate – function as pathways to prison.”
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Image of Twin Cities redlining map (1934). Federal Housing Administration created classifications for neighborhoods, marking them from tiers 1-4, ranging from most desirable to those in decline. Areas that were marked red would not be granted loans, which created neighborhoods where homes were impossible to sell.
Given the Twin Cities’ history with housing segregation and anti poverty policies, it remains unsurprising to see that not much has changed. Housing policies that were thought to remedy racial segregation are continuing to impact the situation in a negative manner. For example, the Section 8 program is designed to give families flexibility in the private housing market. This is done to prevent the concentration of poverty. However, this policy does not function that way in the Twin Cities and, instead, creates dense clusters of people who use section 8, which concentrates them to one area and creates segregation plus poverty. People who use section 8 vouchers are often rejected by landlords when they do try to move somewhere that is not in their previous segregated area. In 2018, landlords from Minneapolis sued to block a law that prohibits them from denying someone based solely on section 8 status, and won the case. This forces people to stay in pockets of segregation that are surrounded by poverty.
The policies that were created to end racial segregation and eradicate poverty have clearly failed. With this failure has led to increased economic disparities between blacks and whites in the Twin Cities. These disparities are linked to the climate of segregation and the impoverished communities the policies indirectly created. Not only do the policies need to be reworked or removed, but there also needs to be justice for the communities that are suffering from poverty.
Segregated areas are found in places that have increased poverty rates and communities that are under resourced. These places do not have equal access to good schools, healthy food options, and community building opportunities. Excluding people of color from communal resources is an injustice that should not be ignored by a government that helped to facilitate the start of it. Meanwhile, as poverty rates increase so do the patterns of segregation which have created pockets of poverty. The areas of the Twin Cities that escaped poverty are areas that are predominantly white. The lack of negative implications in white neighborhoods makes it an injustice that one group is subject to poverty because of government policies that are created by the dominant group.
For there to be a solution to residential segregation it has to come from the government. The solution needs to include new policies that are fair and equitable. If there is going to be change to this injustice then it needs to be on a structural level. As mentioned by Richard Rothstein, the federal government should buy homes and sell them to African Americans at the price their grandparents would have paid for had they were given access to the housing market. This not only allows black people to move into different neighborhoods but it also levels the playing field for generational wealth building. Most of people’s wealth is connected to their homes and for black people to be excluded from that opportunity has caused them to fall behind financially. Residential segregation correlates with high rates of poverty because those communities are often under resourced. The federal government should allocate more funds to homeowners in these areas as well as developing community amenities such as parks and gardens. The city of Minneapolis has taken initiative by ending single-family home zoning. This zoning practice kept people of color out of certain neighborhoods. Abolishing it could be a blueprint to solving the issue of residential segregation.