Racial Discrimination in Housing

Racial Discrimination in Housing refers to a number of methods, both historical and current, legal and illegal, that serve to discriminate against people in housing on the basis of race. Despite the passage of the Fair Housing Act in 1968, housing segregation persists today.

Common methods of the past included:

• Restrictive Covenants
• Denying Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) loans to African Americans
• Blockbusting
• Zoning laws

Articles and resources

Related SourceWatch articles

• Fair Housing Act
• Fair Housing Initiatives Program (FHIP)
• School Segregation
• Racial Disparities in Infant Mortality

External resources

• Nikole Hannah-Jones, "Segregation Now: Investigating America's Racial Divide," ProPublica.
• "A Million-Dollar Wasteland Revealed," The Washington Post, 2011-2012

External articles

2015:

• Nikole Hannah-Jones, "Supreme Court’s Latest Race Case: Housing Discrimination," ProPublica, Jan. 21, 2015.
• Jeff Nesbit, "Institutional Racism Is Our Way of Life," U.S. News and World Report, May 6, 2015.
• "Historian Says Don't 'Sanitize' How Our Government Created Ghettos," Fresh Air, National Public Radio, May 18, 2015.
• "How The U.S. Government Created Ghettos," The Kathleen Dunn Show, Wisconsin Public Radio, June 24, 2015.
• Nikole Hannah-Jones, "Living Apart: How the Government Betrayed a Landmark Civil Rights Law," ProPublica, June 25, 2015.
• Jeff Nesbit, "If You Are Black, Chances Are Your Neighbors Are Too: Study shows that Americans still live divided by race, no matter the income," U.S. News & World Report, June 29, 2015.
• "Status Update (Act 3)," This American Life, November 27, 2015.

2014:

• Ta-Nehisi Coates, "The Case for Reparations," The Atlantic, June 2014.
• Nikole Hannah-Jones, "How the Supreme Court Could Scuttle Critical Fair Housing Rule," ProPublica, Oct. 2, 2014.
• Richard Rothstein, "The Making of Ferguson," Economic Policy Institute, October 15, 2014.

2013:

• Kevin Drum, "America's Real Criminal Element: Lead," Mother Jones, January/February 2013.
• Nikole Hannah-Jones, "Congressman Introduces Bill to Prod Administration on Fair Housing Enforcement," ProPublica, January 16, 2013.
• Nikole Hannah-Jones, "Audit: Blacks, Latinos Still Likely to Face Housing Bias in Whitest Parts of Westchester," ProPublica, February 12, 2013.
• Christie Thompson, "Disparate Impact and Fair Housing: Seven Cases You Should Know," ProPublica, February 12, 2013.
• Nikole Hannah-Jones, "Westchester County Could Lose Millions for Fair Housing Failures," ProPublica, March 28, 2013.
• Nikole Hannah-Jones, "Feds Turn Up Heat on Westchester," ProPublica, April 23, 2013.
• Nikole Hannah-Jones, "Housing Crisis: Widespread Discrimination; Little Taste for Enforcement," ProPublica, June 11, 2013
• Nikole Hannah-Jones, "In Westchester, Progress on Housing and the Specter of Another Fight," ProPublica, June 18, 2013.
• "House Rules," This American Life, November 22, 2013.
• Nikole Hannah-Jones, "A Year Later, Feds Inch Forward on Fair Housing," ProPublica, Nov. 22, 2013.
• Nikole Hannah-Jones, "HUD Finally Stirs on Housing Discrimination," ProPublica, Dec. 6, 2013.

2012:

• Ben Austen, "The Last Tower: the Decline and Fall of Public Housing," Harper’s Magazine, May 2012.
• Richard Rothstein, "Public Housing: Government-Sponsored Segregation," The American Prospect, October 11, 2012.
• "PubNotes: Key Takeaways From ProPublica’s Fair Housing Investigation," ProPublica, October, 29, 2012.
• Cora Currier and Blair Hickman, "Reading Guide: Segregation in America," ProPublica, November 1, 2012.
• Nikole Hannah-Jones, "Soft on Segregation: How the Feds Failed to Integrate Westchester County," ProPublica, November 2, 2012.
• Nikole Hannah-Jones, "Mapping Segregation in Westchester," ProPublica, November 13, 2012.
• Nikole Hannah-Jones, "No Sting: Feds Won’t Go Undercover to Prove Housing Discrimination," ProPublica, Dec. 20, 2012.
• Jeff Larson and Nikole Hannah-Jones, "Housing Segregation: The Great Migration and Beyond," ProPublica, Dec. 20, 2012.

2011:

• Steve Bogira, "Separate, Unequal, and Ignored," The Chicago Reader, February 10, 2011.
• Daniel Denvir, "The 10 Most Segregated Urban Areas in America," Salon, March 29, 2011.

2010:

• Douglas S. Massey and Gregory D. Squires, "Segregation: The Invisible Elephant in the Foreclosure Debate," Huffington Post, November 1, 2010.

2000s:

• Manny Fernandez, "Study Finds Disparities in Mortgages by Race," New York Times, October 15, 2007.

1990s:

• "Unequal Burden: Income & Racial Disparities in Subprime Lending in America," U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development