How government housing policies (and not just zoning) helped create America's Black/white disparities on home ownership, wealth creation

While the Opportunity Housing debate in San Jose has focused mostly on the impact of zoning on segregated communities, advocates are turning a blind eye to the myriad of other government programs that disenfranchised people of color from wealth creation and home ownership. Richard Rothstein reports in Reason magazine.

In reality, explicit government policy in the mid-20th century--imposed in the name of promoting safety and social harmony--was the most powerful force separating the races in every metropolitan area, and the effects of the policy endure. Because racial segregation results from the open, racially explicit, purposeful action of federal, state, and local governments, our residential racial boundaries are unconstitutional; because they are unconstitutional, we have an obligation to ensure that our government remedies them; because we have forgotten the history of how residential segregation was created by government, we are handicapped in our ability to address it.

In 1935, Congress adopted a National Labor Relations Act that gave unions the exclusive right to bargain with employers, provided those unions gained government certification. When the act was first introduced, it prohibited the government from certifying unions that excluded African Americans from membership. That provision was deleted from the final bill, and the federal government proceeded to certify all-white unions, including the most powerful unions in the construction grade. Not until 1964 did the government deny certificaqtion to such a group.

Think about that for a moment: Not only did Washington prohibit African Americans from living in the suburbs, but it also sanctioned their exclusion from the construction of those same suburbs and from fully participating in the great postwar economic expansion that boosted so many white working-class families to the middle class. If too many African Americans today cannot afford to move to middle-class communities, the government's labor policy as well as its housing policy bears significant responsibility.

Read the whole thing here.

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