When looking at where the Black sides are, we could start by considering where they are not.

FHA and VA loans are credited with helping form the middle class of America by making homeownership available to a large portion of the population. Large housing complexes were developed, beginning with Levittown in Long Island, NY. Similar complexes sprung up in many major cities with one thing in common. No homes could be sold to Black people, with the federal government fully backing redlining, which made segregated housing the rule and not the exception. Black sides of town evolved where the whites elected not to go. There were housing complexes created for Black and Jewish people as well; these “projects” were definitely not intended for the middle class.

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Last summer, Nathan Connolly and his wife, Shani Mott, welcomed an appraiser into their house in Baltimore, hoping to take advantage of historically low interest rates and refinance their mortgage.

They believed that their house — improved with a new $5,000 tankless water heater and $35,000 in other renovations — was worth much more than the $450,000 that they paid for it in 2017. Home prices have been on the rise nationwide since the pandemic; in Baltimore, they have gone up 42 percent in the past five years, according to Zillow.com.

But 20/20 Valuations, a Maryland appraisal company, put the home’s value at $472,000, and in turn, loanDepot, a mortgage lender, denied the couple a refinance loan.

“We were clearly aware of appraisal discrimination,” said Dr. Connolly, 44. “But to be told in so many words that our presence and the life we’ve built in our home brings the property value down? It’s an absolute gut punch.”

Source

Advertising Exclusion

Thanks to the diligent work of Mapping Prejudice and other local organizations, much light has been shed on the legacy of racial covenants included in housing deeds in Hennepin County. Racial covenants are clauses that were inserted into property deeds to prevent people who were not White from buying or occupying land. The Thorpe Brothers, prolific local housing developers, are infamous for including racial covenants in their developments. The covenants and restrictions in these developments were actually used as a selling point by the Thorpe Brothers in their advertisements. The images here are from Thorpe Brothers ads that were recently added to our Minneapolis and Hennepin County Subject Vertical Files. These brochures advertise the County Club District being constructed in Edina in 1924.

The County Club District, located just west of Minneapolis in suburban Edina, was marketed as an exclusive enclave. The brochures tout the restrictions on minimum home construction cost ($5,000 on some streets, higher on others), restrictions on the styles of houses that could be built, restrictions on fumes, restrictions on trash can placement, and prohibition of multi-family housing.

The brochures do not specifically mention the racial covenants that were added to each lot in the County Club District. For everyone reading between the lines, however, the section on restrictions ends like this: "There are numerous other restrictions which, when studied, will be found agreeable to each person who is buying a homesite. The restrictions are made for the protection of the Home Builder, and in no case can a substantial objection be raised." Many current homeowners, as well as the city of Edina, are raising substantial objections to the harmful legacy of racial covenants in the Country Club District, and many homeowners have renounced the restrictive racial covenants on their properties.

Another Article Compilation

These are mostly random articles I've come across and am saving here. Quite a few of these come from more local American News outlets which tend to provide a lot less biased news. Mediabiasfactcheck has a list of least biased news sources here. If you're not in the US and can't seem to access these pages, I think if you use a VPN and set it in the states it should work. Let me know.

Some horrifying news out of Alabama that will have really awful consequences.

Warning. These stories detail allegations of violence against Indigenous people.

Another set of articles on Florida book bans.

Tbh I don't get why it can be flouted so hard when it's directly censoring freedom of speech and forcing people to abide by a mainly religious ideology that discriminates against a large segment of the population. Freedom of religion also means freedom from religion. You can't take away books from everyone just because YOU don't like them, that's not how freedom of speech works. The state charging people with a felony for not abiding with censorship is also absolutely unconstitutional.

Continuing in the vein of Education.

Widespread Housing Discrimination Persists In The USA

Widespread Housing Discrimination Persists Against Minorities And The LGBTQ+ Community Despite Ever Expanding Federal Laws Widespread housing discrimination persists among ethnic minorities and the LGBTQ+ community. This is despite the federal government expanding on the Federal Housing Act passed over 50 years ago. Roughly 32% of people of African descent say they felt they faced…

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Map: Housing Discrimination Cases 2008 - 2017 in the Detroit Region

The map is not the best, but the data is beyond significant. The Fair Housing Center worked with UM researchers to analyze housing discrimination in the Detroit metropolitan region. The article Residential Racial and Socioeconomic Segregation as Predictors of Housing Discrimination in Detroit Metropolitan Area, found fewer complaints from Metropolitan Detroit areas with larger numbers of whites,…

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Sonoma County's recorder's office has confirmed that millions of its real estate documents contain racial covenants meant to restrict people of color from owning property, and the county is now taking steps to rectify this. 

California has a deep history of redlining, a racist practice dating back to the 1930s that prevented anyone who wasn't white from living or purchasing property in certain neighborhoods. In Sonoma County, these practices involved including racially restrictive language in real estate documents. 

“For example, there are a lot of properties that are restricted to only those of Caucasian descent,” said Deva Marie Proto, Sonoma County’s clerk-recorder-assessor.

Proto said that the recorder's office is searching for an outside vendor to identify keywords and phrases in documents that may indicate the presence of racially restrictive covenants so that those covenants can be redacted. Some keywords include “Caucasian,” “African,” “Asiatic” and “Mongolian,” she said. 

The racial covenants in places like Sonoma County differed from redlining practices in other parts of the Bay Area, which more often involved literal lines being drawn on government maps indicating which neighborhoods were “undesirable” and therefore off-limits to mortgage lenders and insurance providers. 

“Racial covenants were even more specific than that and were written into the deeds of specific properties and sometimes entire developments to prevent the sale of those properties to certain groups,” said Holden Weisman, senior director for economic equity at the Greenlining Institute, an Oakland-based nonprofit that focuses on racial and economic equity in the Bay Area. 

Update On My Living Situation (4/12/23)

The men's shelter at St John's Congregational Church & Community Center was not the place for me. I'm a trans/non-binary person currently undergoing sleep disturbances due to PTSD and I was going to have to share the room with about two-hundred other men, many who were older and larger than me. I did not sleep through the night. I never felt safe in that space nor comfortable enough to rest. I was assigned bed A7, which consisted of a tarp-covered, thin mattress, on a metal bunk. I was in pain after laying there for a few hours. As soon as the sun was out, I was out the door and on my way back to my neighbor's house. I texted him, but he hasn't responded. I let myself in because I still have the keys. I'm going to do my best to find a room to rent on Craigslist before the landowner notices that I'm still in the building and gets my neighbor in trouble. She threatened to not renew his lease if I'm living in his unit.

One of the reason's why I moved in with the retired professor who was looking for a "house-boy" who was willing to sleep with him and clean his house in place for rent, was because he was the only person that responded to my emails after days of browsing the internet for a room to rent. Craigslist shows that there are plenty of places in the ares looking for a roommate, but nobody was responding to my inquires showing interest. The only other place that replied was a housing collective that truly sparked my interest, but they seem to have a week's long process of approval, and I wouldn't be able to afford it anyway. I want to try applying either way in the hopes that they'll take me. It seems like they're a collective of like-minded young folks with a more anti-capitalistic view on housing, they seem to respect each other and hold space for different identities. Right up my alley, basically. It just seems a little bit out of reach.

Racial covenants can be found in the property records of every American community. These restrictive clauses were inserted into property deeds to prevent people who were not White from buying or occupying land.

Racial covenants served as legally-enforceable contracts. They stipulated that the property had to remain in the hands of White people and they ran with the land, which meant that it could be enforced in perpetuity. Anyone who dared to challenge this ban risked forfeiting their claim to the property.

A survey of the 30,000 covenants unearthed in Hennepin and Ramsey Counties illuminates the wide variety of people targeted. An early Minneapolis restriction proclaimed that the "premises shall not at any time be conveyed, mortgaged or leased to any person or persons of Chinese, Japanese, Moorish, Turkish, Negro, Mongolian or African blood or descent." Before 1919, Jews were often included in this laundry list of “objectionable” people.

This language shifted with time. This eugenics-inspired list gave way to simpler declarations that the property could only be “be occupied exclusively by person or persons. . .of the Caucasian Race.” While many different kinds of people were targeted by racial covenants, every restriction identified by Mapping Prejudice bars Black people, as they were perceived by White Minnesotans to be particularly likely to decrease property values.

Real estate developers used racial covenants to sell houses, promising home buyers that covenants would protect their investment.

These same developers worked with park commissioners to make land adjacent to racially-restricted neighborhoods into public green space. These parks, they argued, would enhance the value of the property in these new neighborhoods. These rising values would also benefit municipal governments by swelling local tax coffers.

White homeowners also profited from racial covenants. A team of University of Minnesota researchers has demonstrated that Minneapolis houses that had covenants are worth 14 percent more than identical houses that never had covenants. This “bonus” value persists today, more than 50 years after the Fair Housing Act made these racial restrictions illegal.

The families who owned houses with covenants were able to pass that value on to the next generation. This intergenerational transfer of assets continues to drive the racial wealth gap in the United States today.

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Matt Rota (https://lnkd.in/ePfAzYdc) for Inside Housing: "Discrimination in out-of-area housing placements: Black and Asian-led households were placed out of area to a disproportionate degree in most authorities, and councils that rehouse many Black-led households also do so in predominantly white areas". Keith Cooper reports. Illustration by Matt Rota Find the article here: https://lnkd.in/efvBKB7s

Matt Rota for Inside Housing

In Black America, Pretending to Be White Has Exposed the Truth of White Privilege - It Pays To be White-skinned

In Black America, Pretending to Be White Has Exposed the Truth of White Privilege – It Pays To be White-skinned

The NYT is reporting yet another discriminatory practice in housing. A Black professor who studies housing discrimination had his home estimated to be worth $472K. A mortgage lender then denied a refinance loanAfter he and his wife removed any indications that Black people lived there, a 2nd appraiser valued it at $750Khttps://t.co/a7WWbuQrsk— philip lewis (@Phil_Lewis_) August 18, 2022 its…

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I feel like there's some sort of unspoken discrimination going on against roommates and let's say 'alternative family arrangements' right now and somebody who is way more informed than me should probably look into that lol