512: House Rules

Ira Glass

A few years back, when Jada's mom took her and her sister out of the Akron, Ohio, public schools and put them into the Copley-Fairlawn public schools, Jada was just in third grade. But she noticed a difference immediately. This is Jada.

Ira Glass

Akron, where she'd been going to school before, is a city of around 200,000, and its school system recently met only five of the state's 24 educational goals. Copley-Fairlawn is just next door to Akron, has population a tenth of Akron's, and met all 24 of the goals. Even the school building, Jada says, was totally different.

Ira Glass

In Akron's science class, she says, instead of a greenhouse, each kid got a pumpkin seed and a bag.

Ira Glass

After two years in this nice school, third and fourth grade, Jada was kicked out. Her sister was kicked out. To go to Copley-Fairlawn, they'd been giving their grandfather's address as their home address. Their grandfather lived in the school district.

Lots of districts, of course, have been cracking down on that kind of thing. Homeowners pay high property taxes to live in a place with good schools, and lots of them feel like it's wrong for anybody to freeload. So the district told Jada and her sister they had to go. Out of Copley-Fairlawn, and back to the Akron schools.

Ira Glass

Of course, asking about the fairness of this is asking about something that is just built into our education system. It's the premise, right? Something that nobody's planning on changing, usually not on the table at all.

In America, local property taxes fund our schools. So if you live in a rich area, you get better schools. And the gaps can be huge, right? In New York State, for instance, the richest school districts, the top 10%, spend $25,000 per student, which is twice as much as the bottom 10% spends per student. And yes, there's federal money targeted to poor students, and yes, there are a tiny handful of states that have aggressively tried to shift the balance so poor kids get more because poor kids' needs are greater, but by and large, if you're living in a poor neighborhood, chances are your schools will get less money and not be as good. Neighborhood isn't destiny all the time for everybody, but for a lot of people, it comes pretty close.

Today on our radio show, things did not have to end up this way. In fact, there was a moment in our history, not that long ago, where it seemed like it wouldn't end up this way. A look at how we got to this point. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass, stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act One, Rental Gymnastics. Let's go to Nancy Updike, who has our story.

Nancy Updike

L.B. is a tall, thin man, somewhere north of 45 years old. He's soft-spoken, but he can be relentless when he's looking for an apartment. He went to one building, found the super in the hall.

Nancy Updike

That's what the super told him. But L.B. knew that with apartment hunting, sometimes no just means you haven't asked the right question yet.

Nancy Updike

That's the sound of a man coming to terms with his fate. But, just one last question.

Nancy Updike

L.B. had to let it go. Except there was an apartment available, according to a later lawsuit. L.B. had been sent to the building not by his wife, but by a housing organization, as a test. L.B. is black, and the organization had also sent a white tester, Neal. Same income as L.B., also married, a little younger. He showed up at the same building, talked to the same super.

Nancy Updike

The super let him in, and they went up to apartment 4F.

Nancy Updike

When Neal asked how much the rent was, the super said $1,150. Neal wrote it down.

Nancy Updike

That was $100 a month less than what the super had quoted L.B. The housing organization did another test at the same building, later, with women. An African-American woman named Kaaron went to the building.

Nancy Updike

When a white woman around the same age showed up, there were two studios available.

These recordings are from a lawsuit brought by an organization called the Fair Housing Justice Center. The tests were done in 2010 and 2011 in New York City.

Housing discrimination based on race is a lot less pervasive than it used to be, but it still happens, to a degree that surprised me when I started looking into it. It's gotten sneakier, so harder to detect, and it's not like it makes the news most of the time, so it's easy to believe it's not happening at all. The testers, like most Americans, had zero special interest in housing when they started the work. This is Laurel. She describes her test persona as a generic youngish white woman.

Nancy Updike

This is Kaaron again. She was one of the testers at the same building L.B. went to. She said she gets a lot of questions from friends in New York about the testing. She grew up in New Orleans.

Nancy Updike

Kaaron's got this unsinkable vibe. She's actually an actor. The testing is only an occasional job to make some extra money. All the testers at the Fair Housing Justice Center are actors, which led me to ask them a bunch of Acting 101 questions like, do you spend a lot of time developing your character and back story before going out on a test? Do you think about your motivation? They all politely said it was a lot more straightforward than that. Show up at a place, ask what's available, just like you would if you were really looking for a home.

Kaaron explained that she and the other testers are never told before they go out to a building if there's been a complaint or if it's just a random test. That's the way the Fair Housing Justice Center trained her and trains all its testers. Everyone goes out blind. No making assumptions. You're not there to trap anybody. So Kaaron went to a building in Queens one day, August, 2009, blind as usual.

Nancy Updike

She asked around the building for the super, then ran into him in the elevator.

Nancy Updike

The conversation is hard to hear over the noise of the elevator, but the super told Kaaron it was too bad, but the department had already been rented to a guy who'd been waiting for it for a long time. He sounded apologetic. It was a pleasant little chat. Kaaron thought nothing about it afterward.

Several months later, she heard from the Fair Housing Justice Center.

Nancy Updike

They told her the case was about the building where she'd talked to the super in the elevator, and Kaaron started replaying their conversation in her head. It wasn't that she couldn't believe someone might have discriminated against her in enlightened New York City, but she thought of herself as very good at reading people, how they were responding to her, and she had detected nothing.

Nancy Updike

This is the recording made by Laurel, the tester who calls herself a generic youngish white woman. She'd gone to the building the same day as Kaaron, and there was an apartment for rent. It would be available in about six weeks. The super had to do some work on it to get it ready, but he was eager to get the deal settled as soon as possible, so they went to look at the apartment right then.

Nancy Updike

This is Kaaron again.

Nancy Updike

The lawsuit that Kaaron's recording was part of went on for almost two years, and the whole time it ate away at Kaaron.

Nancy Updike

This is the era we've been in for a while now. If you're discriminated against in getting housing, there's a decent chance you don't know it happened. Maybe you don't even suspect it. The whole idea seems like a throwback, that a person's charm, tenacity, and income could count less than their race today when they try to rent or buy a home. And where you live can really matter.

Nancy Updike

This is Nikole Hannah-Jones. She's a reporter for ProPublica, and she's written a lot about housing and the way it can affect every part of a person's life, the quality of schools, and hospitals, also--

Nancy Updike

Besides that, there's also this. Black and white Americans still live substantially apart in this country. It's especially true in cities like Chicago and New York that have large African-American populations. Overall, the United States is vastly less segregated than it was 45 years ago. We're a different country. There are almost no all white neighborhoods anymore.

But there are plenty that are almost all black. In hundreds of metropolitan areas, the average white person lives in a neighborhood that's 75% white, and their neighbors who aren't white aren't likely to be African American. That's according to a study by sociologists at Brown and Florida State universities, based on the 2010 census.

The most segregated parts of the country are, and have been for decades, the Northeast and the Midwest. Milwaukee is consistently one of the most segregated cities in the country. In Milwaukee and in other cities, including New York, the level of black-white segregation by one important measure has declined only by a trickle in 30 years.

I've got a map on the wall in my office of Brooklyn that shows a giant red cluster right in the middle, where African Americans make up over 80% of the population, even though they're only 25% of the city overall, and even though on the street, New York feels like a very integrated city. This is Nikole Hannah-Jones again. She lives in New York.

Nancy Updike

How much of the current level of segregation in New York and other cities is due to discrimination, compared to other factors like poverty, that's being studied and debated. I'll get to that later in the show. But what's clear is that as the country has become less segregated overall, there are still large stubborn pockets of racial and economic segregation in major US cities. And that's true nearly half a century after we passed a critical piece of civil rights legislation, the Fair Housing Act.

It's been 45 years since we declared as a country that housing discrimination was a problem and we needed to solve it. When the law was passed, it talked big. It not only banned discrimination in the sale or rental of housing based on race and a bunch of other categories. The first line of the law says, quote, "It is the policy of the United States to provide, within constitutional limitations, for fair housing throughout the United States." Big.

Of course, laws are often big talkers, and it's a lot easier to talk big than to make effective policy. With housing, with lots of issues. But everything that went into creating the Fair Housing Act is worth looking at today, 45 years later-- standard middle aged moment to look back-- to try to understand where we are and aren't today.

Nikole Hannah-Jones, the reporter for ProPublica, spent a year and a half digging into the Fair Housing Act. Really digging, going to presidential archives, talking to people in government now and from the time the law was passed, looking at demographic data, and at policies going back 80 years, and what she found was that the story really started back when the biggest housing discriminator in the country was the federal government.

Nancy Updike

Redlining is now pretty well known, and the word has become a catch-all for various maneuvers that banks and others have used to deny loans or services based on race. But most people may not know-- I didn't know-- that it wasn't banks that popularized redlining. It was the federal government under President Franklin Roosevelt, a Democrat, that drew red lines on maps around certain neighborhoods and refused to back home loans there. There were other designations on the maps, by the way, for areas with Jews and others, anyone who was perceived as risky. Banks followed the government's lead in terms of lending, and so did big government programs that came out later, like the GI bill.

Nancy Updike

The federal government's redlining drove white flight, and the government did not see this as a problem. Open racism was mainstream in the 1930s, including in the federal government. A manual put out by the Federal Housing Administration warned against undesirable encroachment of inharmonious racial groups.

And federal attitudes and policies amplified what was already happening at the local level. There was flat out violence in some places, first of all, against blacks trying to move into white neighborhoods. There were also racial zoning laws, something called racial covenants. These were contracts attached to properties that said things like "At no time shall said premises be sold, occupied, let, or leased to anyone of any race other than the Caucasian." But discriminatory policies by the federal government had more reach than any local policy.

Nancy Updike

Around 1930, most black Americans in Northern cities are living in neighborhoods that are about 30% black. By the '60s, the neighborhoods of African Americans in the industrial Northeast are 74% percent black and higher.

Nancy Updike

By 1967, President Lyndon Johnson had already signed into law two civil rights bills, but he couldn't get much traction on a housing law. So he flattered a new young senator, Walter Mondale, into helping lead the push for a housing bill in the Senate.

Nancy Updike

Mondale told Nikole that when he brought up a housing bill, some liberal Northern senators told him--

Nancy Updike

The idea that housing was a Northern problem as well as a Southern one was also made clear when Reverend Martin Luther King went to Chicago to push for what he called open-housing.

Nancy Updike

More and more Americans were finding blatant racial discrimination to be gross and unacceptable, but that didn't mean they were prepared for their own lives to change. What Mondale figured out was that the Senate version of that disconnect, if he leveraged it right, might work in the Fair Housing Bill's favor.

Nancy Updike

There's no recording of Campbell's testimony, but it's in the written record. He was a lieutenant in the Navy, a navigator, who'd been serving for eight years and was still on active duty when he was assigned to the Defense Intelligence Agency in Arlington, Virginia. He said he spent weeks going to more than 30 apartments in the area, wearing his uniform, which he described as complete with gold stripes and gold wings.

Some places told him flat out, "we aren't integrated." Others turned him away by saying that they had an exceptionally long waiting list, or that it would take at least four weeks to process a routine application. Finally, the only way that Campbell-- a military officer who had been hired by the Pentagon-- the only way that he was able to find a place for his family to live was by renting the home of a fellow military officer who was being posted elsewhere for a couple of years.

Campbell's testimony started changing some Senator's minds, even some outright segregationists. Campbell had fought for his country but was being turned away from housing for his family. It seemed un-American. But still the bill didn't pass, and the country was in the midst of massive upheaval.

Nancy Updike

This is Newark, New Jersey in 1967. Some of you probably lived through the riots in your cities, but for those who didn't, this video from Newark looks like scenes from a foreign war, where the military is fighting in the streets of a city. Truckloads of men in military uniforms are driving through. And riots were happening in cities all over the country. Los Angeles, Chicago, Cleveland, San Francisco, Tampa, Buffalo, Atlanta, Boston, Omaha, Waukegan, Detroit, Durham, Memphis, Milwaukee, Minneapolis.

Nancy Updike

President Johnson appointed a commission known as the Kerner Commission, Republicans and Democrats, to look into the riots, which were freaking out the entire country-- no surprise. In debates, some members of Congress argued that civil rights legislation, including a housing law, would reward and encourage rioting. The Kerner Commission's report came out while Congress was debating a fair housing bill for the third time, after it had failed to pass twice before.

The report was published as a paperback book-- I'm looking down at a copy right now-- and it's got three questions emblazoned on the front. These are the questions President Johnson had publicly asked the commission to address. What happened? Why did it happen? What can be done?

Nancy Updike

The report is more than 600 pages, but its conclusion was simple, and has been famously and repeatedly quoted since. Quote, "Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black and one white, separate and unequal." The commissioners had spent months going to the cities, looking at data, interviewing people, residents, police, politicians, and they concluded that there was one central driving force behind the riots. This is Nikole quoting from the book. She's got her own copy.

Nancy Updike

This is the governor of Michigan at the time, George Romney, Mitt Romney's father. George Romney was about to become a huge player in the story of the Fair Housing Act. His state had been hit with one of the worst riots in US history, Detroit in 1967. Romney called in the National Guard, President Johnson sent in army troops, 43 people died, over 1,000 injured, tens of millions of dollars worth of damage. Governor Romney was planning to run for president in the coming year, and he gave a live televised speech to the people of Michigan in the aftermath of the Detroit riots.

Nancy Updike

Romney believed the country was in danger of splintering, and he laid out a whole plan in his speech to fight that. He wanted tough law enforcement, moral and religious renewal, both very popular ideas. But he also declared that, while others were calling for more separation between blacks and whites in response to the riots, he, Romney, was going to lead Michigan in the opposite direction with a special focus on housing. And he didn't just throw in a token sentence about it.

Nancy Updike

George Romney was way out ahead of the federal government here. The Fair Housing Act had failed to pass Congress in 1966, failed again in 1967, even though it was gaining votes. In 1968, the Kerner Commission report came out, but still the bill was expected to fail a third time, until Reverend Martin Luther King was assassinated. A week later, the Fair Housing Act passed, and the fight to implement it began.

Ira Glass

Nancy Updike. Coming up, George Romney versus the President of the United States. That's in a minute, from Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International, when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life, I'm Ira Glass. Today's program, House Rules. If neighborhood is destiny, or something like that, how we have ended up in the neighborhoods that we're in. We're devoting our whole show today to the story of the law that ordered the federal government to proactively integrate housing in this country, and what happened after it was passed.

Nancy Updike tells our story this hour. A lot of that story is based on research done by Nikole Hannah-Jones, from the investigative reporting organization ProPublica. She's been researching this history for a special project on fair housing laws that's on ProPublica's homepage right now.

We have arrived at Act Two of our program. Act Two, The Missionary. So Nancy now picks up our story where we left off, 1968, when the Fair Housing Act was signed into law.

Nancy Updike

The next president after the Fair Housing Act passed was Richard Nixon, and to head the department that was going to oversee the new law he appointed George Romney, former governor of Michigan, former businessman, recent author of a book called The Concerns of a Citizen. In the book, there's a speech he gave that starts, "I have just returned from a tour across America. It was the kind of tour that few Americans have taken and few would care to take. I saw the America of ugly streets and rotten buildings. The America of congestion, illiteracy, and want. The America of shattered expectations and rising fury." He gave that speech months before the Kerner Commission report came out.

Nancy Updike

Again, this is Nikole Hannah-Jones, the reporter from ProPublica.

Nancy Updike

Why did Nixon pick Romney to lead housing? He definitely wasn't a political soul mate. But Romney made sense. He was a high profile Republican who was credible on housing issues because of his stand in Michigan.

So Romney's new job was Secretary of HUD, the Department of Housing and Urban Development. And this was a job for a confident man, because here's HUD in 1968. It's a newly formed department-- had been created only three years before-- and it was administering programs that, until recently, had explicitly discriminated based on race, running public housing that was either only for whites or only for blacks, denying loans in integrated areas, now charged with doing the exact opposite, enforcing the brand new fair housing law. And for enforcement, Romney was left mainly with a vague section of the law that instructed HUD to--

Nancy Updike

The question was how to do it. Here's how Romney went about trying to fulfill that mandate to affirmatively further fair housing.

Nancy Updike

President Nixon was complicated on civil rights, like he was on everything. His administration worked to build up minority-owned businesses. They made efforts to desegregate schools. But when it came to housing, Nixon was vehemently against what he called forced integration. So opposed that for a while he was bent on pushing a constitutional amendment to ban it.

Nancy Updike

Romney had the backbone and the bullheadedness of a true believer. He thought housing segregation was a central part of, quote, "the greatest crisis in our nation's history." He didn't have the patience for building momentum or trying to sway Nixon.

So Romney's archives have all of these letters going back and forth between Romney and his advisers, and his advisers writing each other, putting together their plan to affirmatively further the Fair Housing Act.

Nancy Updike

So under Romney, HUD started checking, were communities complying with the Fair Housing Act, and if not, withhold money. Use federal dollars as both carrot and stick.

Nancy Updike

As Romney is moving ahead with his plan, having some initial successes, he gets a letter from Nixon's advisor John Ehrlichman, saying basically--

Romney clearly had guile, but he couldn't keep his program secret forever. And he'd started something that couldn't last without the support of the White House. And the White House was hearing complaints about what he was doing. From Michigan, Romney's home state. Romney had tried to withhold money from a city called Warren, Michigan, because of discriminatory housing policies. Romney had had a previous run in with Warren as governor.

Nancy Updike

Warren was one of the places white Detroiters had fled to after the riots.

Nancy Updike

As HUD secretary, Romney made a tentative deal with Warren officials, and that might have been the end of it, but then the case got press. The Detroit News headline was "US picks Warren as prime target in move to integrate all suburbs." Residents of Warren and other suburbs were up in arms. Warren's mayor said the town would not be, quote, "a guinea pig for integration experiments." The White House told Romney to back off and give Warren the money.

When Nixon had appointed Romney, he praised his, quote, "missionary zeal." Now Nixon and his advisers were talking in memos behind the scenes about having, quote, "a serious Romney problem." When Romney tried to pressure Atlanta, a group of Nixon's Southern supporters met with the president. They'd been key to his election.

Nancy Updike

Nixon stopped meeting with Romney. Not only were some of his supporters complaining to him, he also didn't agree with what Romney was doing. He sent an intermediary to Romney to tell him that his special skill set would now be most useful to the administration in Mexico as ambassador.

Nancy Updike

A new law is a battlefield. People and branches of government fight over interpretation and enforcement, and lack of precision in a law's wording can be turned to anyone's advantage. Romney had used the broadness of affirmatively furthering fair housing to push federal action. Nixon used the vagueness of those words to limit federal action.

Nancy Updike

In a private memo to his advisers, Nixon wrote, quote, "Even if I should become convinced, and I don't think it would be possible to convince me, that forced integration of education and housing was in the best interests of blacks and not too detrimental to whites, I could not possibly support it in good conscience."

Nancy Updike

President Nixon elaborated on his views in that memo to his advisers Ehrlichman and Haldeman, basically a long single-spaced typed letter.

Nancy Updike

The Fair Housing Act has been enforced unevenly by the federal government, to say the least, in the last four decades. A lot has depended on individual people or advocacy organizations bringing lawsuits under the act one at a time, or the Department of Justice bringing lawsuits. For the first 20 years of the law, HUD didn't even have the power to sue a landlord or company if HUD believed they were discriminating. HUD couldn't compel anyone to do anything. They could just mediate, like a sort of housing couples therapist.

And the part of the Fair Housing Act that was meant to address the big picture, to make sure zoning laws and local housing policies comply with the law, the mandate to affirmatively further fair housing, to actively fix the problem, that's been more or less in a coma since George Romney left, even though periodically people try to revive it by deciding on some new interpretation of what it means to affirmatively further fair housing. The Obama administration recently made a move to revive it. We'll see what happens with that.

So given this record of enforcement, where are we? Well, there's no question that black-white segregation has declined significantly overall in the United States. Specifically, some African Americans have left the highly segregated cities of the Northeast and the Midwest and migrated to less segregated Sun Belt cities. Also, relatively small numbers of African Americans who can afford it have moved into formerly all white or mostly white communities. What's left behind are concentrated areas that are usually poor and mostly African-American.

But that can make it seem like segregation now is all about poverty rather than race, and it's not. The average African-American household making $75,000 a year or more, that family lives in a poorer neighborhood than the average white family making less than $40,000 a year. That is, a black family making twice as much money as a white family probably still lives in a poorer neighborhood. That's according to a study from Brown University. Racial segregation and not just people's income is key to understanding where people live and why, though I'm not sure we're facing the reality of that today.

Nancy Updike

This is L.B. again, the housing tester for the Fair Housing Justice Center who kept telling the super that his wife really liked the building.

Nancy Updike

The point of the Fair Housing Act is not that every black person in America has to have a white neighbor, and anything short of that means they're being discriminated against, but look at where we are 45 years later. Some states have no housing testers at all. They're basically on the honor system. In the places that do have it, most of the testing is done not by the government, but by advocacy organizations like the one L.B. works for. Which for New York City means its 8.3 million people are relying for most of their testing for compliance with the Fair Housing Act on a nonprofit organization and a group of actors hired part-time.

Ira Glass

Nancy Updike is one of the producers of our program. Nikole Hannah-Jones' investigative series on the history and enforcement of the fair housing laws is at ProPublica's website, propublica.org.

Ira Glass

Our program was produced today by our senior producer Julie Snyder, with Alex Blumberg, Ben Calhoun, Sarah Koenig, Miki Meek, Jonathan Menjivar, Brian Reed, Robyn Semien, Alissa Shipp, and Nancy Updike. Production help from Dana Chivvis. Seth Lind is our operations director. Emily Condon's our production manager. Elise Bergerson's our administrative assistant. Adrianne Mathiowetz runs our website. Research help from Michelle Harris and Julie Beer. Music help from Damien Graef and Rob Geddis.

[ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS]

Our website, thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. Thanks as always to Torey Malatia-- you know, This American Life was on the air for like, I don't know, eight months, something like that, when one day, as the guy running our home station WBEZ, Torey gave me a phone call.

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.

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