Policies That Affected Residential Segregation

Richard Rothstein argues that governments at the federal, state, and local levels acted consistently and with meaningful effect to subjugate African Americans. Though both of them have definitely had a very negative impact, I believe that policies and laws that affected residential segregation had more of an impact on African American lives than those that reduced wages for African Americans. Two of the major policies that have led to residential segregation and have made it have more of an impact on African American lives than those that reduced wages for African Americans are President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, and the 1949 Housing Act. In President Franklin Roosevelt’s Deal, we saw the first segregated public housing projects. These first segregated public housing projects were started because the FHA claimed that if African Americans lived in the same neighborhoods as whites, the property values of those neighborhoods would decline. However, the FHA didn’t have any
They had done research that demonstrated that property values actually rose when African Americans moved into white neighborhoods, but elected to ignore their own research. At the beginning of World War II, the government created housing for workers who came to work at defense-related factories. However this housing was allocated by race as well. In some of the areas where this housing was constructed, there was no past housing segregation until the government created these housing accommodations. The housing accommodations that the government had for African Americans were worse quality, while they set aside the better quality homes for the whites. This, Rothstein says, “established segregated living patterns that persist to this day” ().
The Housing Act of 1949 also majorly contributed to the issue of segregation and was proposed by President Harry Truman because of a major civilian housing shortage as it was the end of World War II, veterans