Segregation by Design: Race, Architecture, and the Enclosure of the Atlanta Apartment

2017 ◽  
Vol 46 (6) ◽  
pp. 1222-1260 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Gordon Lasner
Keyword(s):  
Jim Crow ◽  
Racial Segregation ◽  
Housing Markets ◽  
Fair Housing ◽  
Racial Tension ◽  
Fair Housing Act ◽  
Site Planning ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
A Site ◽  
Apartment Complexes

This article explores the ways in which architecture, landscape design, and site planning helped maintain racial segregation in housing in Atlanta, Georgia, between the 1960s and 1990s. Under Jim Crow, apartment complexes in Atlanta hewed to national design norms. By the late 1960s, however, racial tension, rioting, and passage of the Fair Housing Act led to proliferation of the architecture of enclosure: design that helped code communities as white through pastoral symbolism and heavy, obscuring landscaping. The concept, which appeared to a lesser degree in other U.S. housing markets, was introduced to Atlanta at Riverbend (1966-1972), a swinging-singles complex developed in part by Dallas’s Trammell Crow with a site plan by California’s Lawrence Halprin & Associates. The practice was generalized in the 1970s and 1980s by Post Properties, which became one of the region’s largest builders.

Images of Race, Class, and Markets: Rethinking the Origin of U.S. Fair Housing Policy

2001 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 181-214 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mara S. Sidney
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Presidential Campaign ◽  
Executive Order ◽  
Fair Housing ◽  
Housing Discrimination ◽  
The North ◽  
American Values ◽  
Fair Housing Act ◽  
Housing Professionals ◽  
The 1960S

As the first national law to address racial discrimination in housing, the 1968 Fair Housing Act was truly a landmark piece of legislation. It prohibited homeowners, real-estate agents, lenders, and other housing professionals from engaging in a range of practices they had commonly used to keep neighborhoods racially segregated, such as refusing to sell or rent to a person because of his or her race, lying about the availability of a dwelling, or blockbusting (inducing white owners to sell by telling them that blacks were moving into the neighborhood). The last of the 1960s-era civil rights laws, the Fair Housing Act tackled the arena long felt to be the most sensitive to whites. Intense controversy, demonstrations, and violence over fair housing issues had occurred in many cities and states since at least the 1940s. Although John F. Kennedy promised during his presidential campaign to end housing discrimination “with the stroke of a pen,” once elected, he waited two years to sign a limited executive order. In 1966, a fair housing bill supported by President Johnson failed in Congress. Unlike other civil rights bills, the issue of housing evoked opposition not just from the South but also from the North. Opponents claimed that it challenged basic American values such as “a man's home is his castle”; to supporters, the symbolism of homeownership as “the American Dream” only underscored the importance of ensuring that housing was available to all Americans, regardless of race.

The Surprising Career of Federal Fair Housing Law

2000 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 215-232 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hugh Davis Graham
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Policy Development ◽  
Educational Opportunity ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
National Policy ◽  
Marshall Plan ◽  
Voting Rights Act ◽  
Fair Housing ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Open Housing

Unlike the breakthrough civil rights legislation of 1964–65, which dismantled the South's Jim Crow system and led to rapid advances in job access and educational opportunity for minorities throughout the nation, the federal fair housing legislation of the 1960s produced little substantive change. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 quickly became case studies in the dominant tradition of presidential leadership in legislative reform, joining such modern classics as Social Security and the Marshall Plan. The Open Housing Act of 1968, however, belongs to a different era of national policy development.

The Political Economy of State Fair Housing Laws before 1968

2006 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-49 ◽  
Author(s):  
William J. Collins
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Housing Markets ◽  
The Political ◽  
Fair Housing ◽  
African American Population ◽  
Political Forces ◽  
Fair Housing Act ◽  
The Great Migration ◽  
Historical Accounts

The combined influence of the Great Migration of African Americans and the civil rights movement propelled the drive for fair housing legislation, which attempted to curb overt discrimination in housing markets. This drive culminated in the federal Fair Housing Act of 1968. By that time, 57 percent of the U.S. population and 41 percent of the African American population already resided in states with a fair housing law. This article uses hazard models to analyze the diffusion of state fair housing legislation and to shed new light on the combination of economic and political forces that facilitated the laws' adoption. Outside the South, states with larger union memberships, more Jewish residents, and more NAACP members passed fair housing laws sooner than others. Including controls for a variety of competing factors does not undermine the estimates, and historical accounts of the legislative campaigns support the article's interpretation.

scholarly journals The New Housing Segregation: The Jim Crow Effects of Crime-Free Housing Ordinances

2019 ◽  
pp. 173-231
Author(s):  
Deborah Archer
Keyword(s):  
Legal System ◽  
Racial Inequality ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Racial Segregation ◽  
The United States ◽  
Persistent Problem ◽  
Housing Segregation ◽  
Fair Housing Act ◽  
Criminal Legal System ◽  
Racial Lines

America is profoundly segregated along racial lines. We attend separate schools, live in separate neighborhoods, attend different churches, and shop at different stores. This rigid racial segregation results in social, economic, and resource inequality, with White communities of opportunity on the one hand and many communities of color without access to quality schools, jobs, transportation, or health care on the other. Many people view this as an unfortunate fact of life, or as a relic of legal systems long since overturned and beyond the reach of current legal process. But this is not true. On the contrary, the law continues to play a profound role in creating and legitimizing pat-terns of racial segregation all across America. Crime-free housing ordinances are one of the most salient examples of the role law plays in producing and sustaining racial segregation today. They are, in this respect, a critical mechanism for effectuating the new housing segregation. Crime-free housing ordinances are local laws that either encourage or require private landlords to evict or exclude tenants who have had varying levels of contact with the criminal legal system. Though formally race neutral, these laws facilitate racial segregation in a number of significant ways. This is the first article to explain precisely how they do so. The Article contends that crime-free housing ordinances enable racial segregation by importing the racial biases, racial logics, and racial disparities of the criminal legal system in-to private housing markets. While scholars have examined the important role local laws played in effectuating racial inequality, they have not paid attention to crime-free housing ordinances. In addition to foregrounding how crime-free housing ordinances reinforce and perpetuate racially segregated communities, this Article proposes an intervention: a “segregative effects” claim, an underutilized cause of action under the Fair Housing Act of 1968, to challenge this segregative impact. While this intervention would not end the pervasive nature of housing segregation across the United States, it could eliminate at least one of the causes of this persistent problem: a body of law whose formal race neutrality has obscured its racially segregative effects.

Faith and Fair Housing

2013 ◽  
Vol 95 (3) ◽  
pp. 284-316
Author(s):  
Bruce G. Merritt
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Southern California ◽  
Property Values ◽  
Fair Housing ◽  
Ballot Initiative ◽  
White Neighborhoods ◽  
Property Owners ◽  
Fair Housing Act ◽  
Minority Families

In 1964, a California ballot initiative, Proposition 14, aiming to rescind a recent fair-housing act, proved controversial. Supporters argued that property owners had a right to sell to whomever they wished. An undercurrent addressed the supposed deleterious impact to property values if minority families could move into white neighborhoods. Racist motives were denied. This article analyzes the divisive effects of the issue on one southern California church community as it pondered the role of organized religion in matters of social justice.

scholarly journals The Legacy of the 1968 Fair Housing Act

2015 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 571-588 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas S. Massey
Keyword(s):  
Fair Housing ◽  
Fair Housing Act

scholarly journals The Uncertain Future of the Fair Housing Act: HUD’s Recent Changes to Disparate Impact Standard

2021 ◽  
Vol 74 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-54
Author(s):  
Leah Powers
Keyword(s):  
Negative Consequences ◽  
Disparate Impact ◽  
Supreme Court Ruling ◽  
Fair Housing ◽  
Housing Discrimination ◽  
Fair Housing Act ◽  
Final Rule ◽  
Standard Set ◽  
Uncertain Future ◽  
Core Mission

In 2013, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) published its Disparate Impact Final Rule in which it sought to formalize its longstanding interpretation of disparate impact liability under the Fair Housing Act (FHA) by setting forth a three-part burden-shifting framework. HUD subsequently revisited its disparate impact standard following the 2015 Supreme Court ruling in Inclusive Communities and published a Proposed Rule on August 19, 2019. On September 24, 2020, HUD published a new Final Rule substantially altering the disparate impact standard laid out by the 2013 Rule. This Comment will analyze the similarities and differences between the disparate impact standard in the 2013 Rule and the standard set forth in the current, 2020 Rule. Additionally, given that the 2020 Rule was drafted in response to Inclusive Communities, this Comment will examine whether, and to what extent, the 2020 Rule is consistent with the Court’s ruling. Finally, this Comment will address the criticism leveled at the 2020 Rule by fair housing advocates and explore potential consequences of the new standard. Ultimately, this Comment will argue that, although the 2020 Rule finds some textual support in Inclusive Communities for several elements of its new framework, given the broad remedial purpose of the FHA, the core mission of HUD to eradicate housing discrimination, the potential, negative consequences of the new standard, and President Biden’s recent memorandum on housing discrimination, HUD should abandon the 2020 Rule and readopt the 2013 Rule.

scholarly journals New Insights into Rental Housing Markets across the United States: Web Scraping and Analyzing Craigslist Rental Listings

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Geoff Boeing
Keyword(s):  
Census Data ◽  
Rental Housing ◽  
Housing Markets ◽  
The United States ◽  
Spatial And Temporal Patterns ◽  
Single Digit ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Alternative Sources ◽  
Apartment Complexes ◽  
The U.S

Current sources of data on rental housing – such as the census or commercial databases that focus on large apartment complexes – do not reflect recent market activity or the full scope of the U.S. rental market. To address this gap, we collected, cleaned, analyzed, mapped, and visualized 11 million Craigslist rental housing listings. The data reveal fine-grained spatial and temporal patterns within and across metropolitan housing markets in the U.S. We find some metropolitan areas have only single-digit percentages of listings below fair market rent. Nontraditional sources of volunteered geographic information offer planners real-time, local-scale estimates of rent and housing characteristics currently lacking in alternative sources, such as census data.

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