University Place

How the Suburbs Were Segregated

– Welcome everyone to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab. I’m Tom Zinnen. I work at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Biotechnology Center. I also work for the Division of Extension Wisconsin 4-H. And on behalf of those folks and our other co-organizers, PBS Wisconsin, the Wisconsin Alumni Association, and the UW-Madison Science Alliance, thanks again for coming to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab. We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year. Tonight, it’s my pleasure to introduce to you Paige Glotzer. She’s an assistant professor here in the Department of History. She was born in Brooklyn, New York and went to Manalapan High School in New Jersey. Then she went to New York University to study history and political science, and she minored in architecture and urban design. Then she went to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore to get her masters and PhD in urban history. She did a postdoc at Harvard at the Joint Center for History and Economics. And then she came here in 2018. Her most recent book is entitled How the Suburbs Were Segregated. That book won the 2022 Lewis Mumford Award for the best book on the history of American city and regional planning. It also won the 2021 Kenneth Jackson Award for the best book on urban history in North America. “How the Suburbs Were Segregated” is also the title of her talk tonight. Would you please join me in welcoming Paige Glotzer to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab?

– Thank you, Tom. American cities and suburbs tend to be racially segregated. Neighborhoods are mostly Black or white, for example, and city neighborhoods that are not majority white tend to be poorer, the buildings tend to be in worse shape, and they historically receive fewer city services. Meanwhile, suburbs have historically been whiter and wealthier. I look at why, and two questions drive my work. The first is how to account for persistent housing segregation, and the second is why does housing segregation assume certain forms and not others? I argue that the answers lie with how the earliest suburban developers experimented with racial segregation as a tactic to increase sales at the turn of the 20th century. They then shared the results of those experiments widely, standardized them through associations, and helped federal policy makers codify these practices into discriminatory federal housing policy during the 1930s and ’40s.

Many people think of suburbs as a postwar phenomenon, but I actually begin in the 1890s. It’s then that realtors began to gain a large platform to shape national housing markets, and they went on to assist policy makers with those discriminatory federal housing policies that many historians who came before me use to account for the rise of large segregated metropolitan areas and a white consumer base that was, and in some cases still is, willing to defend housing segregation. I focus on one developer specifically, called the Roland Park Company. The Roland Park Company was founded in 1891 and went on to develop over 2,500 acres in northern Baltimore. And its officers played key roles in the processes that I’ve mentioned, experimenting with racial segregation, sharing ideas widely, standardizing these ideas and practices through professional associations, and codifying these practices into law with policy makers. So I can think of the Roland Park Company as both a case study, but also a look at a network of realtors, planners, and policy makers.

But to begin looking at the Roland Park Company and the history of segregation in housing in the United States, I actually begin in Britain because the Roland Park Company, despite being based in Baltimore, was financed by 400 British investors. Now, these investors included everyone from widows to teachers to mustard manufacturers, and it was easier and easier in the 1890s for a wider swath of the British population to become investors. Now, a lot of these investors chose to put their money into colonial speculation and to financial instruments that sent their money all over the world. So if there were choices to invest in things that potentially had results all over the world, why did these investors choose Baltimore? Well, in my research, I found that one thing that linked all these investors, many of whom didn’t know each other, was a particular ad sent out by a British finance company that collected their money and then put it into the Roland Park Company. And the ad said that investors could expect that their money would go into lands in newly settled parts of the United States or the colonies, where, and this is what they said, “From an influx of population, they are rapidly enhancing in value.” So this conception of housing development and investment actually fit well into existing conceptions of colonial land speculation. And Baltimore fit this bill in some other ways. It was the sixth-largest city in the United States in the 1890s, and it was the site of immigration and industrialization. And so because of those phenomena, white, native-born, wealthy Baltimoreans were starting to actually move to the periphery of Baltimore using conversations about wanting to be safe and healthy and that people and industry were making them feel unsafe and unhealthy. And like elsewhere as well, outside of Baltimore, this move to so-called empty land, the periphery, it wasn’t actually empty land.

So the places that Baltimoreans were moving towards were old country estates, meaning large tracts of acreage, usually owned by Confederate sympathizers that had formerly been worked by enslaved labor. These were breaking up at the turn of the 20th century and were ripe for subdivision into housing for these affluent, white Baltimoreans who were leaving the center of the city. So as a takeaway from the British investment that financed the Roland Park Company, I like to think of Baltimore as one stop for this investment capital. And because of that, that also means that in terms of thinking about the history of suburbs in the United States, they’re not necessarily uniquely American, but rather just one more stop for money in a larger context of race, of empire, and of cities. And furthermore, we can actually see that, when mapping the pathways that the money from particular investors actually took all over the world. So I followed that money that financed Roland Park Company’s segregated suburbs in Baltimore, and I realized that for some of those 400 investors, this was the only investment they made in their lifetimes, but for others, it was actually the latest in a line of investments around the globe, and that included in Africa, in Asia, in the Caribbean, and in the American West. So this British investment was a new form of financing housing development in Baltimore, and there were analogs in other cities across the United States, but these are stories that still need to be fully excavated and told. So this is still just in some ways the beginning of seeing how far following the money can take us in understanding the history of segregation. But one thing can be said now, which is that this changed the imperatives of what it meant to develop housing in Baltimore. Prior to British investment coming in in this form, Baltimore builders tended to be local and they had a really short turnaround time to build and get out before some financial obligations became due.

And this is what gave shape to Baltimore’s landscape of row houses. Row houses were very quick to build, and you can build a lot of them at one time. But British investment was supposed to be a long-term endeavor that yielded returns year after year after year. So this caused the Roland Park Company to turn to two tactics that distinguish it from what came before them and set them on a journey of being really important in the history of suburban housing segregation. The first thing that they turn to to try and guarantee returns year after year after year, were restrictive covenants. A restrictive covenant in its most basic form is a legally binding contract that goes with the house and imposes rules on what can be done with that piece of property. However, what was new about restrictive covenants with the Roland Park Company’s neighborhood was that these covenants were applied to an entire neighborhood, not just an individual piece of property. This allowed the Roland Park Company to set rules on a whole neighborhood at one time, as it was created, all at once, from scratch. Now, many of the rules in restrictive covenants, especially in the Roland Park Company’s restrictive covenants, seem to pertain to the look and feel of Roland Park. This included such things as housing had to be set back a certain amount from the street, but actually, there is a social component to this, because when housing had to be set back a certain amount from the street, that meant that the purchaser had to be able to afford more land.

So this was actually a type of class barrier. Another instance of the restrictive covenant was that housing had to be made of certain materials. So again, this helped to control the look and feel of Roland Park, but it also meant that purchasers had to be able to afford more expensive material. So each one of these had both a look and feel component and a social component to it. And some of these were more obvious in their sort of double nature. There was a minimum cost to be able to purchase a lot, a house in Roland Park. So sometimes that was more explicit. But in addition to these rules in the restrictive covenants, that doubled as having to do with the look and feel of Roland Park, as well as having a social component, there was also something that the Roland Park Company did that essentially created a large barrier to entry, and that was a racial restriction. The Roland Park Company included a clause in its restrictive covenants that prohibited African Americans from buying housing or living in Roland Park. It would be against the rules, and this was legally binding.

The one exception that they made was for domestic servants. So there actually was a large African-American presence in Roland Park, but not through the form of homeowners; through the form instead of domestic labor. Now, the placement of the racial restriction is really interesting to me and very telling because it actually doesn’t come in its own section. It wasn’t sort of upheld as a very special rule. It was actually stuck in a section of the restrictive covenants called the nuisance section, coming as it did between a prohibition on livestock and excessive smoke, or uses that would cause excessive smoke. So the nuisance section of the Roland Park restrictive covenants read livestock, African Americans, smoke. And this was something that the Roland Park Company thought would be acceptable in a public-facing document and would be something that could be advertised and touted as part of the creation of what they called a restricted community. Now, in addition to restrictive covenants, the other tactic that the Roland Park Company used to try and guarantee long-term returns for investors was to turn to planning, and that meant planning the physical design and landscape of Roland Park and subsequent communities that the Roland Park Company developed. So I’ll now turn to some examples of how planning not only worked, but worked in a discriminatory way. So this is Guilford.

This is a map of Guilford, which was the second development of the Roland Park Company after Roland Park. I’m using a modern map for this because the streets of Guilford are largely unchanged since it opened in 1912. But Guilford also wasn’t developed on empty land. It was part of a country estate, but also by 1912, there were some mixed race, mixed class communities that had also grown up on the east side of Guilford. And this is where the intent of the company’s planning can become clear. So I would like to draw your attention to the eastern boundary of Guilford, which is called York Road, an old turnpike road in Baltimore, leading all the way up to Pennsylvania. On the right of York Road were some of those mixed race, mixed class communities. And on the left of York Road to the west was Guilford. One of the tactics that the Roland Park Company used to separate and project separation between Guilford and the areas to the east was by limiting the through streets around York Road. So there are actually very few ways to go into or out of Guilford from York Road itself.

One of the few exceptions was 39th Street, which is a through street labeled on the map, and that had to be there because of a sewage pipe that ran beneath it. The northern third of Guilford actually has a wall. The Roland Park Company constructed a 14-foot-high wall in order to block, and I found this in the archives, block the view from inside of Guilford of what the company called “eyesores” on the outside of Guilford. And eyesores meant both people as well as the actual built environment. So that wall is still there and the photo that you’re seeing of the wall was one that I took. So the wall has also endured. Another way that the Roland Park Company created boundaries along York Road was by clustering attached housing that faced either away from York Road or was set back from the street. These were Guilford’s smallest and cheapest houses, although they were by no means small or cheap by the standards of the day. But they created a defacto wall by being connected, by being attached. And because of that, when you take it all together with the wall, the disconnected through streets, and the attached smaller houses, you actually get over one mile of almost a solid boundary that prevents easy entry to and an exit from Guilford onto and through York Road to the east.

The Roland Park Company had help when designing Guilford’s boundaries, along with, in general, their streets, their trees, and the positions of houses. They employed landscape architects who helped plan these communities. And in their case, they hired the Olmsted Brothers, who were the sons of Frederick Law Olmsted, most well known for projects such as New York’s Central Park. And the Olmsted Brothers did a variety of projects, including suburban developments, all through the early 20th century. The Olmsteds didn’t just do projects in the United States. They actually took their ideas about landscape architecture and they went all over the world, including in the service of helping American foreign relations in disputed areas like Cuba. In the early 20th century, there were parts of Cuba, following the Spanish-American War, that were claimed both by the United States and by Cuba. And in one of these areas, which was called the Isle of Pines, American expats wanted to develop a community that looked a lot like Roland Park. It had similar streets, it had similar boundaries, and the Roland Park Company hired the Olmsted Brothers, but these expats had also hired the Olmsted Brothers. So you start to see the ways that ideas were taken, just like that capital, it was taken all over the world from place to place.

This longer history of suburban development is not just wider in scope, taking us beyond the boundaries of the United States, but also, we can go hyper-local. And we can see that the ways that developer experiments started to result in influence and profit began with how design and planning provided inroads for developers like the Roland Park Company to begin to shift municipal politics in order to create favoritism for developers when it came to how the city would distribute resources. Some of this was a matter of timing. In the early 20th century, municipal governments were reorganizing across the country in order to combat political machines and corruption. And they were reorganizing to be staffed with experts, usually unelected experts. So the creation of these municipal bureaucracies gave city planners, who were a new profession at the time, and landscape architects, a newish profession at the time, more say to actually have formal power in city government. But there weren’t that many of them yet, and that meant that firms like the Olmsted Brothers went back and forth between city payroll and private payroll, often in the same place at the same time, because cities, especially when it came to doing things like large public works projects, sometimes had overlapping priorities and needs as developers creating large suburbs. So the Olmsted Brothers, for example, were designing Roland Park Company developments and Baltimore City’s park plan at the same time, and perhaps not a coincidence, that those two look coordinated in terms of where parks lined up with Roland Park Company developments. This shift in municipal relationships ended up mapping onto a shift in resources. So as the Roland Park Company formed relationships with members of city government through their planning needs, they also then had access to the ears of actual officials that many Baltimoreans and individual Baltimoreans didn’t have.

So one example of this would be the case of the Roland Park Company’s sewers. The Roland Park Company was designing its own private sewer system, right as Baltimore City was creating a master plan for citywide sewers in response to epidemics, health crises, and increasing dirt and pollution, especially in areas near its harbor. The master plan that city engineers came up with didn’t prioritize Roland Park for a variety of reasons, not least of which is, there already were private sewers. The Roland Park Company, however, managed to make requests that the city shift its order for the sewer plan and actually incorporate Roland Park’s private sewers quickly into the public system and pay the Roland Park Company for doing so. And the Roland Park Company was willing to lay out its own money and supply its own personnel in order to help facilitate this. And it worked. The city did shift its priorities for large public works, like sewers, to favor Roland Park Company developments. Meanwhile, looking at petitions of Baltimoreans elsewhere, one could see that not everyone, especially not every individual, had equal access to the city or equal success. So I also looked at a neighborhood that was known to be a poor immigrant neighborhood in eastern Baltimore, and how it took over 100 petitions to get a single pipe laid in half a block, and it took a very long time. So this unevenness was one of the ways that we can see developers, especially developers of planned suburbs, like the Roland Park Company, beginning to not only gain power, but shape the terms of where and how people lived.

There are other linkages though, between city planners, developers, and these experts that went between development and city government. And this is where one could really trace how the Roland Park Company began to develop networks across the country that made its ideas and practices begin to take on national importance. So one of the city planners that was very interested in the Roland Park Company was John Nolan, who was known for doing a lot of work, especially in the upper Midwest and especially throughout Wisconsin. Nolan requested a copy of the Roland Park Company’s restrictive covenants, crossed out Baltimore and crossed out Roland Park, and just started writing in other places. And this is how restrictive covenants began to travel and how the language of restrictive covenants started to be replicated elsewhere. Another example of this was a city planner named George Burdett Ford, based in New York, who requested a copy of the Roland Park Company’s restrictive covenants and used them as an example of model development practices in one of the very first courses on city planning at Columbia University. So a whole generation of city planners were trained to read and respect racially restrictive covenants. There are other ways to concretely trace how the Roland Park Company’s practices and ideas spread. The Olmsted Brothers also, as mentioned, did a lot of other developments across the country. They helped developers actually adapt the language of racially restrictive covenants for local circumstances.

One example of this would be when they went to California and helped work on a development called Palos Verdes Estates. In that part of California, developers were less concerned with restricting African American access than they were with restricting Mexican and Mexican American access. And so the language of restrictive covenants was taken and adapted and tweaked to change the targeted group, but retain the same logic and the same functions. And then it was put into use there. All of the circulation of ideas and practices happened informally. These were informal correspondence networks where the Roland Park Company responded to requests, to letters, to visits from people from around the country. But by the early 20th century, realtors didn’t want to keep their relationships and their correspondence networks and their sharing ideas informal. They wanted to create an association where they can formally come together to have a mechanism for formally influencing real estate practices across the country. So beginning in 1908, they formed an association called the National Association of Real Estate Boards, or NAREB. Part of the immediate impetus for forming NAREB was that realtors wanted to improve the reputation of real estate practitioners.

It may not be surprising to say, that in the early 20th century, there was not a very popular or high opinion of real estate practitioners across the country. They were seen as swindlers, as scam artists, and there were words such as sharks, which you would actually see used widely in publications when talking about realtors. Well, realtors thought that this was hurting business. And so one of the aims of forming a professional association was to create best practices, to standardize the way real estate would be done, and to try and, again, elevate the reputation of realtors across the country. And they are the ones actually, in fact, to coin and trademark the term Realtor, capital R, to only apply to their members. Because respectability and reputation were really front and center of NAREB’s mission, suburban developers, such as the Roland Park Company, became early role models within the organization of the most respected and most commendable type of development, the type of realtor who would never be called a swindler or a scam artist. This also then meant that suburban developers took on early leadership roles in NAREB and shaped its professional mission and best practices as well as its self image. The image that you’re now seeing is what realtors thought of themselves and their role in the community. So we see a white man in classical garb holding a car. Now, NAREB was a, by and large, segregated institution, so the majority of its members were men and everyone would be considered a white man.

This was a segregated organization. But he’s holding a car, almost like he’s bringing progress. Now, this is the Detroit realtor. So he’s bringing progress and holding progress in a sort of symbolic way. The classical garb is a way to equate him with someone with a lot of knowledge, someone coming out of a place of great thinkers, almost, you know, drawing a comparison to Athens or to Rome. And he’s surrounded by scenes that realtors wanted to take credit for as doing good in the community. So this meant the skyline of Detroit, the bustling commerce, the industrious white workers in Detroit, which, of course, was not a very accurate picture of industrial workers in Detroit in the early 20th century. But also a suburban house, with a white nuclear family, looking at a child playing, going back to the idea of health and safety. And that house, set back from the street, made of certain materials, would’ve been at home in a place like Roland Park. Beyond this self-image, realtors wanted to standardize what they considered to be the best practices that a realtor could follow to benefit the communities in which they worked.

Like many professional associations in the early 20th century, this meant that they put together a code of ethics that all members had to follow in order to stay members in good standing. That code of ethics was revised in 1924 to include the following. It prohibited realtors from, quote, “introducing into a neighborhood a character of property or occupancy, members of any race or nationality, or any individual whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values in that neighborhood.” A few things to note there. This was explicitly worded around race and nationality. This was a code that pertained to community property values. This was about property values in the neighborhood, and it linked property values to race. NAREB worded this part of the code of ethics broadly, and in doing so, left a lot of discretion on what this meant for individual realtors. But realtors became duty bound to enforce segregation in the name of doing good, because to do contrary would be to harm property values. And that was considered ground for expulsion from NAREB.

This part of the code of ethics followed the same logic as earlier restrictive covenants, in that it took uses of property, and the look and feel of property, and people, and the traits of people, and mixed them up and said that all of that reflected value. This idea that race was tied to property value and that property value could be thought of in terms of a whole neighborhood, standardized the logic of racial segregation in real estate. And it came directly from people who were behind restrictive covenants and considered models worth emulating. But NAREB was never totalizing. It didn’t have a complete, unshakable grip on every action of every realtor in the United States. So I’m also interested to see, not just at the sort of level of national organizing, but at the level of daily business practice, how did exclusion work? One of the ways that it worked was evident in the Roland Park Company’s archives. They used a set of cards of inter-office documents that they called exclusion files because they stamped “exclusion file” onto each one of these, and it functioned as a way to keep track of who could not live in a Roland Park Company community. So these daily decisions on exclusion files reflect how a salesman would receive an inquiry from someone who could afford a house in a Roland Park Company community, and were of the idea that they would potentially be eligible to live in a Roland Park Company community. They would talk with the salesman, but something about them would make the salesman uncomfortable or be a red flag. And the salesman would then investigate. Is there something about the religion of this person? Maybe something about their nationality? And sometimes, there were more ambiguous cases of gender roles, of women keeping their own last names, even though they were married. There was a whole slew of criteria that you would find in the exclusion file. But at the end of it, through this behind the scenes investigation, these prospective residents would be declared ineligible and they would be considered excluded. This is where we see all sorts of things, such as religious exclusion, especially of Jews, playing out. It’s where we would see southern and eastern Europeans often, but not always, being excluded. And again, this was ad hoc. This was on a case by case basis. But these were private documents. These were not public-facing ones like racially restrictive covenants, which had to be on file, along with the deed to the house and could be advertised as a feature of the community. These were secret.

And so a few things to note from this is that there was a huge range of exclusionary practices that essentially went on to encompass a huge swath of people, a whole hierarchy of people based on nationality and religion. But these were not done as publicly as a racially restrictive covenant, which was couched in anti-Blackness. It was a prohibition on African Americans. So the exclusion files essentially presented a much more porous opportunity for people to be included. But being African American was always a basis for being excluded. And so that’s an important difference between the exclusion files and racially restrictive covenants, but it gives you a whole range of exclusionary practices as they occurred day-to-day, over time. NAREB sold office hardware and filing cabinets for people to organize and store files like that. So even though it’s unclear how widely developers used exclusion files, ads like this give us a sense that potentially there were quite a few. Now, this ad was from the late 1920s, and at the end of the decade, in 1929, something changed that would completely reorient the direction of housing and housing segregation in the United States. And that was the Great Depression.

So beginning with the stock market crash in 1929, the housing industry went into a tailspin along with the rest of the national economy. And one of the emergency responses early on in the New Deal, which was a large federal response to the Great Depression, was to try and essentially think about how homeowners who were losing their mortgages needed federal assistance to stay in their homes. If the federal government could help people out of the stress situations and they could stay in their homes, that would also benefit the housing industry as a whole and it would benefit the banks who held their mortgages. Because of these different sectors all needing federal assistance in the eyes of the federal government, one of the New Deal agencies that was formed as a response to the Great Depression specifically dealt with housing and lending, and that was the Home Owner’s Loan Corporation. The H-O-L-C, or HOLC. HOLC is associated today with a practice called redlining. Redlining was built in to HOLC’s operations. In evaluating and thinking how would they essentially help people stay in their homes and how would they help out banks, HOLC redesigned what the modern American mortgage was. They changed the terms of mortgages into a standard formula that is still with Americans today, which is that mortgages could be paid out over 25 or 30 years with the same amount owed every single month. That was new in the Great Depression, and that was supposed to make it easier for people to pay their mortgages.

HOLC would actually purchase mortgages directly that were distressed, refinance them under these terms, and service them themselves, taking them off the books of banks. But because HOLC was going to directly service loans, they wanted to develop criteria for which types of mortgages would potentially be worth bailing out and which they would let go. And this is where we get to redlining. In order to determine these criteria, HOLC made maps of over 200 cities in the United States, including throughout Wisconsin, and then graded each area in a city on the basis of, yes, this is a very low-risk proposition for us. We think that we can operate with these mortgages for the long term. Or no, no-go, too risky. But what they used as a proxy for risk was race. So because of the ideas in place from institutions like NAREB and from developers that race affected property value and that African Americans especially would lower property value by their very presence, areas that had any type of African American population, regardless of the financial health of those communities, usually was considered a no-go zone for HOLC. It was coded red on the map, hence the term redlining. And throughout Wisconsin, including Madison, which you see here, Kenosha, which was another area where a map was made, Racine, Oshkosh, which actually didn’t have any top, A-rated areas at all. It was mostly redlined. And finally, Milwaukee. Those parts of Wisconsin were all subject to the terms of redlining.

Now, redlining became an extremely important, ongoing federal program, even after the Great Depression, because a subsequent agency, the Federal Housing Administration, adopted HOLC’s criteria for where to help lend, and they translated that and applied it to the entire private lending industry. So whereas HOLC was an emergency response where the federal government itself would be servicing mortgages, the FHA took the same rules and said, any bank that wants any type of good terms to do business, do lending business, they needed to follow FHA rules, and then it would actually be very good for them. And so these rules got spread very widely. Now, what was the role of NAREB and of realtors in creating redlining as policy and helping to actually adopt it from HOLC to the FHA? Well, there were actually several ways that this happened. So one of the things is that this idea that race was connected to property value was an ongoing continuation of earlier practices. But realtors themselves played a big role in actually carrying out HOLC and FHA policies. Realtors worked as map consultants and because the members of NAREB, realtors, looked up to suburban developers because the organization itself was segregated, you tended to have then, things like NAREB’s code of ethics being one of the baselines by which map consultants were rating different areas in cities.

HOLC also sent its own administrators to attend NAREB conventions, and it had its own administrators read NAREB publications. After the FHA actually adapted HOLC’s criteria, they had to create a whole manual with their rules for bankers, for lenders. And the language of those manuals, called underwriting manuals, looked like they could be restrictive covenants from the Roland Park Company. They even included whole sections on nuisances that prohibited livestock, things that caused excessive use of smoke, and racial integration. Those were all in the FHA manuals. Unsurprisingly, the FHA endorsed the use of racially restrictive covenants as a sign of good criteria for lending and also in terms of bridging profits. The FHA in its first year of existence financed 68. 8% of all Roland Park Company business. So this ended up turning around and being very profitable for suburban developers. Now, what I’ve been talking about puts us into the 1940s, which was still a very long time ago.

And so I think there might be some questions perhaps about why should this all matter? Isn’t this all illegal now? The Great Depression is over, you know, suburbs look different. Why do we still think about housing segregation in ways that necessitate we talk about redlining and developer practices? Well, yes, a lot of what I’ve been discussing is technically illegal now. For instance, in 1948, the Supreme Court, in a case called Shelley v. Kraemer, ruled that racially restrictive covenants were unenforceable. Not illegal, but unenforceable. Meaning developers could still take a chance on putting them in, and they’d have to be challenged in court and then they couldn’t hold up. But it took a lot of effort to try and challenge a racially restrictive covenant in court. The FHA removed explicit racial language from its manuals in 1949, a year after Shelley v. Kraemer. But it continued to discriminate, and it discriminated very explicitly and with intent, based on records from the archives.

NAREB revised its code of ethics in 1950 to remove language about race and nationality. And in fact, the new version of the code of ethics said that, quote, “A realtor should not be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood a character of property or use, which will clearly be detrimental to property values in that neighborhood.” But occupancy was considered a type of use. So who lived in a house still mattered, and it actually preserved the status quo. But importantly, even as laws changed, that link between race and property value did not. And that’s one of the biggest legacies of early suburban developers. But it also is still with us in certain ways, including in the physical environment. So I’d like to revisit Baltimore now in order to examine that legacy of early housing segregation. So returning to the boundaries on York Road in Guilford, with the wall, the disconnected streets, the attached small houses, looking at a redlining map of that same area, can see that the yellow strip, which was the second to lowest rating just ahead of red, that’s the entire strip of York Road. There was a redlined area underneath it. That area was 51% Black when it was redlined. And you have Guilford as green, meaning it was the top rated, it was the highest rated. The green area on the right with stripes through it called Northwood, was an undeveloped Roland Park Company neighborhood, which received a top rating simply on the basis that in the future, it would become a Roland Park Company neighborhood.

If we look at other ways of mapping data, though, we can see this place, York Road in Baltimore, even without any street names. So as of 2011, if you look at the racial distribution of Baltimore, York Road forms one of the starkest racial dividing lines in the city. If you look at mortgage foreclosures, which was a really important feature of understanding the 2008 housing crisis, we see the racial component of foreclosures and we see York Road on the map, again, without York Road even being mentioned, because there are very few foreclosures in Roland Park Company neighborhoods, in part because of this history of access to good credit. And yet on the other side of that line, we see a lot of foreclosures, which was a symptom of access to bad credit or credit on very predatory terms, such as subprime lending, which thrived in areas that had historically been denied access to good mortgages. But we even see it in terms of resources like trees. Trees are municipal resources, just like sewage, or just like electric lights or paved streets. There’s a role that the city government plays in trees, and you can see from tree coverage, the boundaries of the Roland Park Company developments, and you can see York Road.

And that undeveloped neighborhood that I had mentioned, Northwood, which received a green rating, that’s the area to the right of the map with the dense tree coverage. So trees not only are municipal resources, but also have all sorts of analogs in terms of things like public health that then also map on to race in cities. So I can begin then to try and tie this history together. I have brought together discussions of investment, institutions, planning, and policy, in order to give a history of how race became foundational to the ways housing was valued, imagined, bought, and sold in the early 20th century. And to do that, I concretely traced money, people, and ideas to examine how certain white suburban developers gained a disproportionate influence to shape the rise of a segregated housing market and the keys to their success with adapting, time and again, adapting housing segregation to bring them profits and prestige. But it’s important to also not mistake the actions of developers and planners and policy makers as people sitting in the back rooms twirling their mustaches. Exclusion was often much more mundane and more subtle than that. Exclusion formed the connections between colonial investment and urban growth, between daily managerial decisions and who could access a home. It informed the work of building professional institutions and the mechanisms of government resource distribution. And like we saw on the foreclosure map and the tree map, it shapes the landscape itself.

But to conclude, housing segregation may be persistent, but it has changed over time. And so I’d like to end by considering this. By looking at the history of housing segregation, it becomes clear that it was never inevitable. And since it was never inevitable, neither is its continuation. Thank you.