Someone paid for you

Dear Paul Fanlund,

Have you read The Color Of Law by Richard Rothstein? It came out in 2017 and spurred a lot of discussions on housing discrimination, and redlining in particular. I wouldn’t be surprised if it prompted the Mapping Prejudice Project from Dane County Planning and Development, Dane County Office of Equity and Inclusion and the Boys & Girls Clubs of Dane County. 

If you go to the project's interactive map, you’ll find that your neighborhood, University Hill Farms, is buffered by neighborhoods built with restrictive covenants to the north, east, and south.

“Property owners and builders had created segregated environments by including language both in individual home deeds, and in pacts among neighbors that prohibits future resales to African Americans,” Rothstein writes. “Proponents of such restrictions were convinced that racial exclusion would enhance their property values, and that such deeds were mere private agreements that would not run afoul of constitutional prohibitions on racially discriminatory state action.”

University Hill Farms did not have restrictive covenants, not because University Hill Farms was some new, progressive housing project, but because in 1948 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Shelley v Kraemer that restrictive covenants were unenforceable. University Hill Farms was not developed until the mid-1950’s to mid-1960’s, and by then there was a new tactic (there’s always a new tactic) to keep the undesirables out. 

The Federal Housing Administration (FHA) was formed in 1934 to provide insurance for mortgages in order to bolster homeownership among the middle class. It also created the redlining system and refused to insure mortgages in neighborhoods with immigrant, Black, Irish, and Italian residents. (Friendly reminder that those groups were not white at that time. Whiteness is not phenotypic, or genetic, or geographic. It’s a status in the U.S.’s racial hierarchy, or as Isabel Wilkerson masterfully argues, a caste.) These FHA-insured mortgages and single-family zoning were combined to build segregated suburbs. 

Rothstein writes that for years, people assumed Black people didn’t live in white neighborhoods because they couldn’t afford to. The opposite is true; it was more expensive to live in Black neighborhoods and the Black middle class often paid more for their homes because realtors and landlords gouged them, knowing they had limited options. It was because the federal government would not insure mortgages taken out by anyone who was not considered white, regardless of their income. And it would not insure mortgages in communities of color. 

Anyway, after Shelley the FHA just continued doing more of the same, justifying it on financial grounds.

“Along with the real estate industry and state courts, the FHA justified its racial policies… by claiming that a purchase by an African American in a white neighborhood, or the presence of African American in or near such a neighborhood, would cause the value of the white-owned properties to decline,” Rothstein writes. “In the three decades during which it administered this policy, however, the agency never provided or obtained evidence to support its claim that integration undermined property values.”

All of this talk about property values sounds really familiar, huh? 

I’m not telling you this history to make you feel a certain way. History is history, and I really don’t care how people feel about it. But I would think that after learning about this history you and your neighbors would want to do better, to right those wrongs. University Hill Farms is still 84.3% owner-occupied homes, while Madison as a whole is 44.5%. Hill farms is also 77.9% white, while the city as a whole is 68.8% white. The most telling statistic: University Hill Farms’ Black population is only 1.4%; Madison’s is 7.3%. Where there’s housing segregation, there’s also school segregation, which affects the resources students can access. How can you sit on your liberal bona fides when you live in and are actively working to maintain a segregated community? 

I get that when you were younger, being a “liberal” was a low bar: you basically supported unions, voted Democrat, and had to not be openly, cartoonishly hostile to people of color. But the bar is different now. Now we know that anti-racism is not about “being nice” to people of color; that’s just the bare minimum of being human. It’s about learning about inequity, the structures that keep those inequities in place, and working to change them. Screaming and shouting about more density, writing inflammatory op-eds about the future of a private pool built in a segregated community, are perpetuating the racist gatekeeping that built our unequal, divided community.

But why should your neighborhood have to change? When I was a reporter in Nebraska, I covered a rural school district that was over 90% Latino with a large immigrant (Latino and otherwise) population. Like Wisconsin, Nebraska’s school funding formula pushes the costs of education heavily onto property taxes, and this school district wanted to build a rec center. Nothing fancy; it was an open indoor space with nets, basketball hoops, other sports equipment, and a walking track. It would be available for all the sports teams and for the general community.

When the school board met to consider the proposal, a handful of older white men came to protest, saying they had gone to school decades ago, their kids were no longer in school, why should they have to pay for this? After a few patient rounds of discussion, the superintendent lost his temper and snapped, “Because someone paid for you!”

Someone paid for you. This is why my generation (Millennial) is so frustrated with the Baby Boomers. Your parents and grandparents’ generations paid money out of their own pockets so your generation could have a better life. You had access to affordable university education, because someone paid for you. But your generation, our parents’ generation, has not done the same. That is why we’re still saddled with student loan debt—since the 1980’s, your generation has cut how much state funding goes to public universities. Even though the Baby Boomers experienced stagflation in the 1970’s, for two decades Baby Boomers have called Millennials lazy and entitled, even though our salaries have not kept up with productivity—meaning our employers have grossly underpaid us—our whole adult life. What little progress we have made with our incomes has been eaten up by rising costs that are not discretionary. Food. Healthcare. Housing. And yet your generation (generally) has been so dismissive of our concerns and our proposals for how to make the world more liveable for future generations. 

Before the FHA, middle class homeownership was not common, but by the time your generation came of age it was the norm. Because someone paid for you. But they didn’t pay for everyone. And they probably didn’t anticipate how isolating and unsustainable car-centric, single-family infrastructure would be. We are not “erasing” your lifestyle out of spite, but so that everyone in the next generation can thrive.

And you would lose nothing. No one is bulldozing your home. Or your swimming pool. (Though it would be a nice gesture to make it public. That way everyone, including descendents of people gatekept out of your neighborhood, could enjoy a nice clean pool on a hot summer day.) In fact, one day when you’re no longer able to drive or maintain a single-family home, I hope you can downsize into a nice apartment or condo with access to public transportation in your neighborhood. We’re not trying to push you out. This is not zero-sum. The more the merrier.

Today as I was writing this, I received a copy of the new book by Rothstein and Leah Rothstein (a housing policy expert and Rothstein’s daughter), Just Action: How To Challenge Segregation Enacted Under The Color Of Law. Tonight I’ll crack the spine and learn more about how we can mediate the harm of this history. I hope you’ll do the same.