Racial Justice in Housing Finance: A Series on New Directions

Anti-Black racism formed the basis for policies such as redlining, racial covenants, 8 Part II: Structural Racism in Housing Finance: Understanding the System to Change the System Difference between White and Black Homeownership Rate Racial Justice in Housing Finance: A Series on New Directions and segregation in public housing, and laid the foundation for the expansion of homeownership, wealth an. [...] In addition, the foreclosure crisis and the recovery that followed point to the limitations of a government system that not only failed to regulate “bad actors,” but also perpetuated racialized narratives of who was “deserving” of aid and the unwavering belief that private actors—such as mortgage servicers and investors—were the best placed to provide aid to hard-hit borrowers and communities. [...] The current political and economic moment—in which we are confronting a global pandemic, the threat of climate change, and the urgency of the Black Lives Matter movement— must be leveraged to transform the structures that continue to cement and exacerbate racial inequalities in housing and other sectors. [...] Yet, despite the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Fair Housing Act of 1968, the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968, and the outlawing of redlining, restrictive covenants, and discrimination in the rental and sale of housing, residential segregation endures, continuing to define whiteness and frame storylines about Blackness (Massey, 2020). [...] Of course, the government played a critical role in Land Values and the Enduring Significance of Racial Residential Segregation 19 Racial Justice in Housing Finance: A Series on New Directions establishing and sustaining the policy framework that led to the emergence of a mass homeownership system basic on racism.