• Our Segregated Century
• Colin Gordon (bio)

There is no more damning reminder of our racial divide than the sustained inequality in homeownership and, as a consequence, household wealth. As of the March 2020 quarterly estimate, the African American homeownership rate (47.0 percent) is 29 points less than the white rate (76.0 percent), a disparity that has grown substantially since 1980 and is now wider than it was in 1900.¹ Median African American family wealth ($24,100), a metric almost entirely shaped by home equity, is less than one-eighth that of white households ($188,200). For families with children, that disparity yawns even wider: the median for white families in 2016 was $89,106; the median for Black families was $0.² The wealth gap, in turn, is not just one more measure of inequality but, as Melvin Oliver and Thomas Shapiro underscore, is a foundational or “sedimentary” inequality that cements other distributional and relational disparities in place. Home ownership and household wealth bolster economic mobility and security, offering both a buffer against income shocks and a “starting gate” advantage to the next generation. Especially in the United States, investments in real estate are also investments in neighborhoods offering a starkly uneven distribution of public goods and economic opportunities. Recent research on economic mobility finds African Americans (and especially African American boys) both “stuck in place” when they grow up in poor neighborhoods and deeply disadvantaged when they grow up in middle- and high-income neighborhoods.. “Race and property” as Dalton Conley underscores, “are intimately linked and form the nexus of black-white inequality.” ³

The historical background here—the trajectory of policies and practices that denied African Americans access to neighborhoods, to home credit or insurance, and to the public subsidies that transformed housing markets in [End Page 90] the middle years of the last century—is unfortunately now quite familiar. As early as 1899, W.E.B. Du Bois observed that “public opinion in the city [Philadelphia] is such that the presence of even a respectable colored family in a block will affect its value for renting or sale.” A half-century later, Robert Weaver (then of the NACCP, later to serve as the first Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (“HUD”)) offered a comprehensive checklist of causes and culprits: “community, neighborhood, and individual opposition to colored neighbors; race restrictive deed covenants; agreements, practices, and codes of ethics among real estate boards and operators; FHA acceptance and perpetuation of real estate practice; local government’s fear that adequate or more housing will encourage Negro migration; local political action to restrict Negroes to particular areas; development of exclusive one-class neighborhoods.”⁴ But rounding up the usual suspects only gets us so far. The important historical questions revolve around the timing and the causal mechanisms at work; the relationships between, and the relative culpability of, public and private actors; and the long cascade of costs and consequences for those disadvantaged by decades of unvarnished discrimination, segregation, and predation.⁵

These questions rest at the center of the two books reviewed here. Paige Glotzer’s How the Suburbs Were Segregated opens with the calculated invention of a particularly exclusive brand of residential segregation in late-19th-century Baltimore by the Roland Park Company. Glotzer traces the ways in which this segregation, which defined African American occupancy as a “nuisance” destructive to property values, was realized on the ground—by subdivision and building design, by hard and soft boundaries, and by the uneven provision of basic infrastructure. She charts the emulation, adaptation, and institutionalization of that invention—and all of the assumptions about race and property that it carried with it—in the real estate profession, in the local politics of housing, and in national housing policy. Glotzer bookends her...

• 我们隔离的世纪
• 科林·戈登（生物）

没有比这更持久的住房所有权不平等，以及由此带来的家庭财富不平凡的提醒，提醒我们我们的种族鸿沟。截至2020年3月的季度估计，非裔美国人的房屋拥有率（47.0％）比白人比率（76.0％）低29个百分点，这种差异自1980年以来已经显着增加，现在比1900年要大^。1中位数非洲裔美国家庭财富（24,100美元）几乎完全由房屋净值构成，不到白人家庭（188,200美元）的八分之一。对于有孩子的家庭，这种差距进一步扩大：2016年，白人家庭的中位数为$ 89,106；黑人家庭的中位数为$ 0。^2个反过来，贫富差距不仅是不平等的一种衡量标准，而且正如梅尔文·奥利弗（Melvin Oliver）和托马斯·夏皮罗（Thomas Shapiro）所强调的那样，是基础性的或“沉重的”不平等现象，加剧了其他地方的分配和关系差距。房屋所有权和家庭财富增强了经济流动性和安全性，既为抵制收入冲击提供了缓冲，又为下一代提供了“起点”优势。特别是在美国，房地产投资也是对公共产品分配和经济机会明显不均的社区的投资。最近对经济流动性的研究发现，非洲裔美国人（尤其是非洲裔美国男孩）在贫困地区长大时“固守”，而在中等收入和高收入地区长大时处于不利地位。³

此处的历史背景-拒绝非洲裔美国人进入社区，房屋信贷或保险以及改变住房市场的公共补贴的政策和做法的轨迹[完第90页]不幸的是，上世纪中期已经很熟悉了。早在1899年，WEB Du Bois观察到“费城的公众舆论使得即使是一个受人尊敬的有色家庭在一个街区中的存在也会影响其出租或出售的价值。” 半个世纪后，Robert Weaver（当时的NACCP，后来担任住房和城市发展部（“ HUD”）第一书记）提供了一个全面的起因和元凶清单：“社区，邻里和社区”。对有色邻居的个别反对；种族限制契据契约；房地产委员会和运营商之间的协议，惯例和道德守则；FHA接受并永久保留房地产惯例；地方政府担心适当或更多住房会鼓励黑人移民；将黑人限制在特定地区的地方政治行动；独家一级社区的发展。”⁴但是，将通常的嫌疑人围捕只会使我们走到现在。重要的历史问题围绕工作的时机和因果机制展开。公共行为者和私人行为者之间的关系以及相对应负的责任；以及数十年来不受歧视的种族隔离，掠夺和掠夺所造成的不利后果的长期成本和后果。⁵

这些问题位于此处复习的两本书的中心。佩奇·格洛泽（Paige Glotzer）的郊区划分方法罗兰公园公司（Roland Park Company）在19世纪末期的巴尔的摩精心策划了一个特别独特的住宅隔离品牌发明。Glotzer追溯了这种隔离的方式，这种隔离将非裔美国人的居住定义为对财产价值的破坏性“滋扰”，是通过细分和建筑设计，硬性和软性边界以及基础设施的不均衡提供来实现的。她在房地产行业，住房的地方政治以及国家住房政策中绘制了该发明的仿真，改编和制度化以及与之相关的所有关于种族和财产的假设。格洛泽书挡着她...