Housing Preserves the United State's Racial Caste System
Housing policy in the United States has a deeply racist history, and remains today as a crucial maintenance point for systemic racism. The overt racism built into the housing system in the United States, combined with the massive power differential between renters and landlords, works to segregate on combined racial and class grounds. Housing works as intended: to maintain the U.S.’s racist caste system.
A well-known example of racist housing policy is redlining, the federal practice where Black Americans were relegated to buying houses in particular, usually less-resourced, and racially homogenous neighborhoods. Redlining segregated every city in America. Its effect was not just passive segregation, but compounded into class difference via explicitly racist federal subsidies which were only given to all-white developments (developers who sold units to Black Americans were denied subsidies altogether). This actively dissuaded developers from every selling or renting to Black people. The few who would sell houses to Black Americans often made sales on contract, a “predatory agreement that combined all the responsibilities of homeownership with all the disadvantages of renting––while offering the benefits of neither.” In many cases simply unable to buy or rent affordable housing, poor Black Americans were relegated to public housing by federal and respective local governments. Meanwhile, income ceilings ensured the middle class became ineligible to live in public housing, turning it into “a warehousing system for the poor.”
The Fair Housing Act, which was created to stem housing discrimination, was a weak remediation. It has failed largely because it does nothing to counter prior explicit, de jure racism. Rather, it defines only that there cannot be overtly racist policies going forward. When the entire backbone of the housing system is built on explicitly racist practices, the majority of low-income renters are people of color. As such, the explicit racism of the past flourishes today by discriminating against the low-income renter. For instance, exclusionary zoning, which blocks affordable housing from being developed in traditionally prosperous areas by dictating house size, aesthetic, and family capacity, is redlining by another name. Though it does not explicitly call out racial segregation as a motive, exclusionary zoning acts as a blockade to racial and economic integration on a local level, further entrenching the relationship between property value and racial demographics and enriching white communities at the expense of communities of color, particularly Black homeowners. Exclusionary zoning is a strong example of the failures of the FHA; the map of redlined Seattle and the map of Seattle by single- and multi-family home zones are nearly identical.
Because housing policy has been such an effective method of racial segregation, there is little incentive for a system with a stake in maintaining segregation to truly offer services to low-income renters. Today, as the demand for low-income housing rises, the needs are not nearly met. For instance, there is nowhere in the country where a renter working 40 hours a week for minimum wage can afford an average two-bedroom apartment for that area. There is a paucity of affordable housing in the United States, not to mention subsidized housing; wait times for government-subsidized rental units can span years long.
In Washington, for instance, the waiting list for the Housing Choice Voucher program (formerly called Section-8 housing, this program helps to pay rent for low-income families) is completely closed. The program, which awards rent relief by a lottery system, has not held a lottery since 2017, and today––four years later––has neither finished assisting households on its waitlist, nor has concrete plans to open the lottery again. The demand for affordable housing far outstrips the supply, which in turn has led to an eviction industrial complex, where entire sheriff squads are tasked solely with eviction and foreclosure orders, and “moving companies specializing in evictions, their crews working all day, every weekday.”
What this means is that poor people have basically no avenue for finding a place to live. However, it is not merely a problem of availability; even when housing is procured, there is little recourse for tenants to attain their rights. A particularly evil aspect of the housing crisis in the United States, and one that lays clear the unethical power imbalance between landlords and their tenants, is the existence of the tenant blacklist.
Tenants who have faced any legal action against their landlord (even if they won the suit) are placed on a “blacklist,” distributed by private companies to landlords as a resource to deny potentially “problematic” prospective tenants. One of the few rights afforded to tenants is the right to withhold rent and act upon the implied warranty of habitability after being left without basic housing needs like running water, or heat. However, the blacklist essentially nullifies this one bargaining power a tenant has (that is, provided they even know their rights in the first place): it doesn’t matter why a tenant goes to court against a landlord when they are added to the blacklist. A tenant could even win a suit against their landlord and still find themselves blacklisted at the end of it all, finding themselves unable to rent again.
That said, the likelihood of winning a suit against a landlord is slim. Though the majority of landlords are represented by counsel, fewer than ten percent of tenants are. Further, tenants are frequently unaware how to advocate for their rights, and often unable to show up in court. Tenant complaints are rarely inspected, and burdensome rent deposit requirements for the tenure of the suit often overwhelm the ability of the tenant to continue with the judicial process. This system acts as a structural blockade, disempowering tenants even as renting needs increase.
The problem with low-income housing in the United States is not merely that it barely exists to begin with, but also that if you are low-income, then you are afforded effectively no rights. Considering the history of housing as a site to maintain structural racism, the disparity in power between landlords and tenants serves as a way to maintain class along racial lines.