Memo to local housing advocates: urban segregation predates redlining by, oh, a couple thousand years
The Democratic party's redlining policies during the New Deal, which championed deep federal government intervention in the housing finance and insurance markets, were deeply flawed: racist in impact, anti-free market, and the progenitor of a bundle of negative, unintended consequences. But to suggest, as local housing advocates and academics recently have*, that those flawed FDR policies are the root of current segregation (or, more accurately, lack of integration) in American cities, is just ahistorical misinformation. Liberal historian Carl H. Nightingale in his epic work Segregation: A Global HIstory of Divided Cities provides a useful context.
People did not need to wait for the invention of race in the West to start dividing cities, nor to replicate urban segregation over large regions of the world. In fact, for about seventy centuries--arguably since the invention of cities themselves--we have repeatedly committed acts of inequitable and forcible city-splitting. Along the way, we have justified our actions in the name of just about every other concept of human difference imaginable, marking off separate residential territories for different classes, clans, castes, crafts, nations, religions, civilizations, and even sexes. The most successful forms of ancient segregationist politics were based on more complex and specific combinations of these ideas: that the gods should live in separate, more splendid places than mere mortals; that city dwellers should live separately from those in the countryside, and that foreigners should live apart from local people.
Read the whole book here.
* “San Jose’s a very segregated space,” said a San Jose State University professor . “White people did not want to live by Black people historically in this country, so they created mechanisms, and one of them was redlining.” The article from which this quote was taken provides useful examples of how local progressive advocates mislead the public about racial residential patterns in Santa Clara County.