African American Housing Policy 1950-1960

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In the 1950s, as blacks began settling in the predominantly Jewish American area around Blue Hill Avenue in Dorchester from Roxbury to Mattapan, Boston real estate companies and banks developed a blockbusting plan for the area: they convinced white property owners in white neighborhoods to sell their houses for below-market prices by pushing them to believe that racial minorities would soon be moving in, resulting in the “decline” of the neighborhood along with plummeting property values. Along with blockbusting, the Blue Hill Avenue area (and major sections of Roxbury and Dorchester) was redlined so that only the newly arriving African-Americans would receive mortgages for housing in that section. The implementation of these federal policies …show more content…

Post-WWII, public officials saw new urban expressways as a way to revive the deteriorating urban core. Crowded urban slums were seen as tumors, and if highways could be routed through blighted urban areas, they could be reclaimed for productive uses. With the Highway Act, federal funds could be used to eradicate these areas and reinvigorate economic activity in the inner city. Accordingly, a 1944 report by the federal government recommended that highways penetrate American cities, and called for inner and outer beltways encircling cities. This decision was incredibly consequential to the development of the inner city. In most cities, the interstate system’s urban highways ripped through residential areas, and expressway construction destroyed low-income, black neighborhoods. By 1969, federal highway construction was demolishing over 62,000 housing units annually – forcing as many as 200,000 urban, low-income, mostly black people from their homes each year. When displaced black residents moved to other city neighborhoods, white residents fled. Thus, postwar urban expressway building brought massive housing destruction and a subsequent racial restructuring of the central cities, as those displaced sought relocation housing. Even if black residents sought to flee to the suburbs, they couldn’t due to racially restrictive housing policies. In many cities, these restrictions left African-Americans crowded into small neighborhoods. This forced relocation of black residents triggered a reorganization of urban neighborhoods. Coupled with limited inner-city housing, a rising black population resulted in dislocated blacks being pressed further into urban slums. Thus, the Federal-Aid Highway Act, and the expressway construction of the 1950s and the 1960s ultimately created much larger, more isolated, and more intensely segregated black neighborhoods in American cities. Rather than

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