“Like Any Other Citizen Would Want” American residential segregation since 1968.

In the spring of 1968, Larman and Geraldine Williams were among the first black homebuyers in Ferguson, Missouri. Larman Williams, a public school principal, worked in the Wellston district, one of just two school districts in St. Louis County with a majority black population. A few years back, the Williams family had lived in Kinloch, the other St. Louis community with a majority-black—in Kinloch’s case, a 100 percent black—student body. Kinloch bordered what, at that time, was the all-white enclave of Ferguson.

Explaining why he chose to move to Ferguson, Mr. Williams recalled:

“I’d lived close by there, in Kinloch, which was an all-black community, and used to drift over to Ferguson and look at those lovely houses over there, and when they were all segregated, and just wondering—generally I wanted to find a home, and I wanted to locate in an area where I could get the best facilities for the amount of money that we were paying, and fire service and police protection, where the crime rate was low, like any other citizen would want.”

That is what Mr. Williams told the United States Commission on Civil Rights when it launched a national study of “the racial implications of suburban development” in January 1970 with a series of public hearings in St. Louis. Those hearings followed passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, commonly called “the Fair Housing Act,” which legally proscribed racial discrimination in housing sales, rentals, and finance. When Lyndon B. Johnson signed the act into law, he announced that “the voice of justice” had “proclaim[ed] that fair housing for all—all human beings who live in this country—[was] now a part of the American way of life.”

A half-century later, Ferguson gained national attention when protests erupted after the fatal police shooting of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown. Geraldine Williams, Larman’s ex-wife, still lived in the house that the couple had bought in 1968. But by then Ferguson was majority black, and it was financially strapped.

In that respect, the suburb was anything but remarkable. Fifty years after passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968, racial segregation and placed-based racial inequality endure in America’s cities and suburbs. They are now, as they were then, “the American way of life.”

•  •  •

Demographers use two main measures to gauge levels of residential segregation. The first, the “dissimilarity index,” measures the unevenness of the distribution of members of some group across some geographic area. This index ranges from 0 to 100, with a higher measure meaning that the group is unevenly distributed: in other words, that it is over-represented in some places and under-represented in others.

If the index of dissimilarity for black residents of St. Louis were 100, that would mean that all of the city’s black residents lived in a single sub-section, for example, a single census tract or neighborhood. If it were 0, that would mean that every part in the city had the exact same proportion of black residents. You can think about the index of dissimilarity as the percentage of the members of a group who would have to change places with non-members to achieve an even distribution.

The second measure, the “isolation index,” tracks the extent to which members of some group tend to live in geographic areas with other members of that group, physically separated from nonmembers. Like the dissimilarity index, the isolation index ranges from 0 to 100. But in this case, it reveals the percentage of group members who live in an area where the typical group member lives.

If the isolation index for black residents of St. Louis were near 0, that would that mean the average St. Louisan lived in a neighborhood with almost no black residents. (And it would suggest the total black population of the city was small). If it were 100, that would mean that the city’s average black resident lived in an all-black neighborhood.

As of the most recent decennial census, conducted in 2010, the dissimilarity index for black St. Louisans is 72. Nearly three-quarters of the city’s black residents would have to change places with other St. Louisans for the black population to be evenly distributed. The index of isolation is 61; the average black St. Louisan lives in a neighborhood that is about two-thirds black.

This may be extreme, but it is not unusual. In Detroit, the black dissimilarity index is 75, and the black isolation index is 69. In Chicago, the black dissimilarity index is 76, and the black isolation index is 64. In New York, the black dissimilarity index is 78, and the black isolation index is 51. America’s highest black dissimilarity index is in Milwaukee, where almost 82 of black residents would have to change places with other people for the black population to be evenly distributed. Milwaukee’s black isolation index is 69; its average black resident lives in a neighborhood that is more than two-thirds black.

In other words, half a century after passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968, residential racial segregation and spatial isolation endure. Change has been slow, and it has been uneven. According to sociologists Jacob Rugh and Douglas Massey, progress toward desegregation has been the greatest in small, Western cities with especially affluent black populations, like Provo, Utah; Missoula, Montana; and Boulder, Colorado. Meanwhile, segregation persists in older metropolitan areas with larger and more economically diverse black populations: places like St. Louis, where Lyndon B. Johnson’s lofty pledge of “fair housing for all” remains an empty promise.

Racial residential segregation is not just a matter of who lives where. It is a matter of who gets what. Segregation plays a critically important role in reproducing American racial inequality. The nation’s long history of racial discrimination in housing sales and rentals and in mortgage lending has produced, not just a racially, but also a spatially uneven distribution of wealth. That inequity was exacerbated when the housing bubble burst in 2008, since subprime mortgage loans—and foreclosures—were disproportionately concentrated in majority-black neighborhoods.

Unequal wealth means unequal fiscal capacity, especially for places like Ferguson: that is, for incorporated municipalities that finance local public services with local tax dollars. American racial segregation produces racial inequality in education. It furthers inequality in access to stable, high-paying jobs and safe neighborhoods and quality healthcare. It reproduces inequality in access to the very things that attracted the Williamses to Ferguson a half-century ago: the community infrastructure, the public services, and the other local amenities that “any … citizen would want.”

•  •  •

You might think a country that banned housing discrimination a half-century ago would have eradicated racial segregation by now, or at least come close. Why did that not happen?

To answer this question, a good place to start is with two 50-year-old Supreme Court cases: Jones v. Mayer, which was decided in 1968, and which originated just a few miles from the Williamses’ house in Ferguson, and James v. Valtiera, which originated in 1968, more than 2,000 miles away.

Discussing Jones, the legal scholar Rigel Oliveri notes that the Court’s decision “would have been truly monumental” if the Fair Housing Act, which “provided … the [same] protections … and then some” had not passed that same year. The case involved an interracial couple, Joseph and Barbara Jones, who wanted to buy a lot in a new community that was being built in North St. Louis County. The Joneses made a bid to the developer, the Alfred H. Mayer Company, which rejected it on the grounds that Mr. Jones was black.

The couple sued. They claimed that the company’s action violated title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, and the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which since had been recodified as sections 1981-1982 of the US Code. Section 1982, which guarantees all American citizens, regardless of race, the right to “inherit, purchase, lease, sell, hold, and convey real and personal property,” became the focus of the ensuing litigation.

The Jones’s claim was that private racial discrimination in real estate sales and rentals is an unconstitutional “badge of slavery.” The District Court and the Eighth Circuit Court dismissed the couple’s claim, holding that the amendments and the act applied only to government action, not to private discrimination.

But the U.S. Supreme Court reversed. Writing for the majority, Justice Potter Stewart quoted section 1982, noting that it granted to all American citizens, “without regard to race or color, ‘the same right’ to purchase and lease property ‘as is enjoyed by white citizens.’” He emphasized that, not just state power, but also private power, can threaten those rights. And he agreed with the Joneses that racial segregation, as reproduced by private actors like the Alfred H. Mayer Company, constitutes a “relic of slavery.

In Justice Stewart’s words:

“Just as the Black Codes, enacted after the Civil War to restrict the free exercise of [civil] rights, were substitutes for the slave system, so the exclusion of Negroes from white communities became a substitute for the Black Codes. And when racial discrimination herds men into ghettos and makes their ability to buy property turn on the color of their skin, then it too is a relic of slavery.”

In short, in 1968—the same year that the American Congress passed the Fair Housing Act—the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that racial discrimination in housing is unconstitutional. And the Court held that Congress has the authority to prohibit discrimination, regardless of whether it is enacted by the government or by private companies and individuals.

The day after the Court handed down its Jones decision, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch published an editorial cartoon showing a wrecking ball labeled “Supreme Court” smashing a birdhouse labeled “Housing Discrimination.”

Notice that, in the illustration, the “Housing Discrimination” structure remains intact. It is hard to know if the wrecking ball will demolish it, or just knock a few tiles off the birdhouse roof.

The Post-Dispatch cartoonist may not have intended this ambiguity. But even if not, it is fitting. Although Jones may have seemed to contemporaneous observers like the harbinger of “fair housing for all,” its reach was limited, and in ways that would prove consequential.

Much like the Civil Rights Act of 1968, Jones aimed to “open” the U.S. housing market. It aimed to make it “fair,” but only in the decidedly limited sense that buyers who could afford to purchase what was on offer would be permitted to do so.

Neither Jones nor the Fair Housing Act touched the American housing market’s basic structure. If the market sorts people geographically based on their ability to pay, so be it. So be it even if spatial sorting turns out to be racial sorting, by other means.

•  •  •

James v. Valtiera took on the housing market’s basic structure. Ostensibly, this second case had nothing to do with race. Its origin was 1968 San Jose, where development in the Silicon Valley was driving up housing prices rapidly, and dramatically. Anita Valtierra, a cannery worker who lived in a small apartment in the city with her seven children, wanted to move to the South Bay suburbs, where they could have a better life. Her wages were sufficiently low that she qualified for subsidized housing. But there was none to be had.

Part of the problem was that postwar local governments, like those in the suburbs near San Jose, passed zoning laws aimed at attracting the middle-class and the wealthy, while keeping out the poor. Examples are laws that stipulate that new homes must be single-family houses, or that they must be built on large lots. Harvard law professor Charles Haar identified the problem as early as 1953, when he urged that “[z]oning must not be used to set and preserve rigidly the character of certain neighborhoods in the interest of preserving property values.” Yet the practice continued, and it continues today. It is called exclusionary zoning.

In postwar California, there was an additional problem. Article 34 of the state’s constitution, ratified in 1950, required local voters’ advance approval every time a new subsidized housing project was to be constructed. Article 34 reads, in part:

“No low rent housing project shall hereafter be developed, constructed, or acquired in any manner by any state public body until, a majority of the qualified electors of the city, town or county, as the case may be, in which it is proposed to develop, construct, or acquire the same, voting upon such issue, approve such project by voting in favor thereof at an election to be held for that purpose, or at any general or special election.”

In other words, every time a developer wanted to apply for public funding to help build housing for low-income families like the Valtierras, the community where the project would be sited had veto power. They were required to vote on the issue, and simply by voting “no,” they could exclude poor would-be residents.

Ms. Valtiera and six other single mothers filed suit. Their claim was that Article 34 violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Referendums were required only when low-income housing was at issue. No referendum was required when developers sought assistance to build FHA-subsidized housing for middle-class families, or to construct highways or urban renewal projects, or to participate in other federally-funded programs. This disparity, the plaintiffs argued, constituted discrimination against the poor.

The District Court agreed. Judge Robert Peckham, writing for the three-judge court, declared: “It is no longer a permissible legislative objective to contain or exclude persons simply because they are poor.”

In its decision, the District Court stressed the connection between racial discrimination and economic discrimination. It noted that a long history of racial bias in housing, mortgage lending, employment, and other economic fields ensured that members of targeted groups—groups that, in mid-century California, included both African-Americans and Mexican-Americans, like Ms. Valtierra—were disproportionately represented among the poor.

But the U.S. Supreme Court reversed. Writing for the majority, Justice Hugo Black emphasized that Article 34 required referendums on “any low-rent public housing project, not only … projects which [would] be occupied by a racial minority.”

Justice Black invoked the value of local self-determination, and he underscored the importance of taxpayers’ rights to defend their material self-interest. In his words, Article 34 …

“ … ensures that all the people of a community will have a voice in a decision which may lead to large expenditures of local governmental funds for increased public services and to lower tax revenues. It gives them a voice in decisions that will affect the future development of their own community.”

Justice Thurgood Marshall, in a dissent joined by Justices William Brennan and Harry Blackmun, forcefully disagreed. Marshall wrote that, “singling out the poor to bear a burden not placed on any other class of citizens tramples the values that the Fourteenth Amendment was designed to protect.”

Six weeks later, President Richard Nixon praised the majority for drawing a sharp distinction between class-based and racial discrimination. In a major policy address, he told the nation that the Fair Housing Act of 1968 had failed to define precisely what the “fair” in “fair housing” means. The majority in James v. Valtierra, he said, had solved that problem.

Housing is fair, President Nixon declared, when “individuals of similar income levels in the same housing market area have a like range of housing choices available to them regardless of their race, color, religion, or national origin.”

•  •  •

Why does racial residential segregation in the U.S. persist after passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968?

No doubt, part of the answer is racism, plain and simple. When sociologists Jacob Rugh and Douglas Massey used Google Trends to measure the geographic distribution of internet searches for pejorative terms for black Americans and Latinos, they found a significant correlation with racial residential isolation, even controlling for group size, group socioeconomic status, and other relevant variables.

Another part of the explanation is the relatively weak enforcement of fair housing legislation. For 20 years after passage of the Fair Housing Act, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) had exceedingly limited authority to investigate complaints and to punish those found guilty of breaking the law. The act was amended in 1988 to strengthen HUD’s powers. But to this day, the agency relies on complainants to trigger investigations, rather than initiating them itself: an approach that limits enforcement, since racial steering and other forms of discrimination are often hard to detect.

But the most basic reason why racial segregation persists is that fair housing law never challenged its underlying structural causes: metropolitan fragmentation, exclusionary zoning, and local control over public services.

Fragmentation is the division of a metropolitan area, like St. Louis and its suburbs, into a large number of legally and fiscally autonomous local governments. At the turn of the 20th century, Ferguson was one of just six municipalities in St. Louis County. By the time Larman Williams testified before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, it was one of 84: 84 local governments that passed their own laws and collected their own taxes and spent their revenue to provide services for their own residents.

Exclusionary zoning laws were among the most far-reaching ordinances that those local governments passed. Consider the notorious case of Black Jack, a small North County municipality that incorporated in 1970. Black Jack was 99 percent white, and it was less than 1 percent black. In public meetings leading up to the town’s incorporation, its white citizens made clear that their chief motivation was the desire to pass zoning laws that would enable them to maintain Black Jack’s racial exclusivity. Just as soon as the town incorporated, its zoning commission voted to prohibit new multi-family housing.

Local control over public services means that if you cannot afford to move somewhere, you cannot access the amenities that its property tax base helps to finance. Recall Larman Williams’s reason for moving to Ferguson: he wanted to “get the best facilities … fire service and police protection, where the crime rate was low, like any other citizen would want.”

For him and his family, the Ferguson-Florissant School District was an especially important draw. During the course of his testimony, Mr. Williams was asked to compare public education in Wellston, where he worked, with public education in Ferguson, where his children attended school. He told the commission: “I think the education in the Ferguson School District where my kids reside is much better because of the amount of money that the district can afford to spend on the education of their students.”

He elaborated:

“By that I mean they can afford better teachers, they can afford more teachers, the pupil-teacher ratio can be lowered, they can spend more money on experimenting and finding new ways of teaching, new techniques, better facilities, and resources, and specialists for kids who are having difficulty, technical assistance in training in language arts, and just the whole works in the county, in my district.”

To the follow-up question, “Do you think that when your children graduate from school in Ferguson they will be many steps ahead of the children who graduate from Wellston High School?” Mr. Williams answered, simply: “That’s my hope.”

•  •  •

A strong property tax base that funds a robust public infrastructure. Excellent public services, including fire and police protection, which help keep residents safe and secure. Access to high-quality public schools that enable students to develop their abilities and to achieve their potential. Although these resources and opportunities have fled Ferguson in the past 50 years for the newer, whiter suburbs of West St. Louis County, certainly Larman Williams was correct to identify them as things that “any … citizen would want.”

What would it mean to distribute them fairly?

One answer comes from Richard Nixon, for whom “fair” means no more than “available for purchase in a racially unrestricted market.” That answer rests on the fiction—a fiction upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court a half-century ago—that race- and class-based discrimination are separate, non-intersecting, non-overlapping phenomena. And it assumes that class-based discrimination is compatible with fairness.

An alternative is the answer offered by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in the report that grew out of the investigation it launched in St. Louis. The commissioners stressed that, “[e]ven if discriminatory practices were ended, special effort would be needed to overcome residential patterns established by decades of discrimination.” They continued:

“The lack of inexpensive housing in suburbia is not only the result of market forces, but also of local practices which limit low-cost dwellings or exclude them altogether. The motivation behind these restrictions is complex, with racial and economic motivations intertwined.”

American racial segregation persists a half-century after passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968, because American racial and economic motivations remain deeply intertwined. It persists because, in the contemporary United States, we have legitimized, and we have normalized, both class-based residential segregation and a racially and economically segmented opportunity structure. Until we change that, our housing—and our society—will remain profoundly unfair.