I read this book as part of a great class I took called ‘The Ghetto: from Venice to Harlem’, and I really enjoyed it. It was maybe the beginning of my foray into urban planning literature. It’s an incredibly interesting and informative recollection of how America used the legal system to shape city and rural demographics. From redlining to white flight, it tells a compelling story that makes it hard to argue with the role that policy has had in the development of today’s still-segregated cities.

Quotes

In 1883, though, the Supreme Court rejected this congressional interpretation of its powers to enforce the Thirteenth Amendment. The Court agreed that Section 2 authorized Congress to “to pass all laws necessary and proper for abolishing all badges and incidents of slavery in the United States,” but it did not agree that exclusions from housing markets could be a “badge or incident” of slavery. In consequence, these Civil Rights Act protections were ignored for the next century.

We have become embarrassed about saying ghetto, a word that accurately describes a neighborhood where government has not only concentrated a minority but established barriers to its exit. We don’t hesitate to acknowledge that Jews in Eastern Europe were forced to live in ghettos where opportunity was limited and leaving was difficult or impossible.

But then, in 1954, one resident of a whites-only area in East Palo Alto, across a highway from the Stanford campus, sold his house to a black family. Almost immediately Floyd Lowe, president of the California Real Estate Association, set up an office in East Palo Alto to panic white families into listing their homes for sale, a practice known as blockbusting. He and other agents warned that a “Negro invasion” was imminent and that it would result in collapsing property values… The district decided to construct the new school in the heart of what had become the East Palo Alto ghetto, so black students in the existing integrated building would have to withdraw, creating a segregated African American school in the eastern section and a white one to the west. The board ignored pleas of African American and liberal white activists that it draw an east-west school boundary to establish two integrated secondary schools.