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Quote by Alex Avery

“On top of all that, there’s government. What does government have to do with it, you ask? Everything. Government is coach, referee, cheerleader, and fan in the game of housing.”

Quote by Alex Avery

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Alex Avery

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“Between 1934 and 1962 the U.S government handed out billions of dollars in home loans. But those weren't available to anyone black, a system eventually referred to as redlining, which would ensure that only whites could get out of poverty and find ways to wealth. In the U.S., that's what caused the development of ghettos. People of colour were not able to invest in housing that could then be passed on down through generations, forming the sort of wealth that many white people have.”

RacismCanadaHousingGenerational WealthRedlining
Book:What Killed Jane Creba: Rap, Race, and the Invention of a Gang War
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“Government's commitment to separating residential areas by race began nationwide following the violent suppression of Reconstruction after 1877. Although the Supreme Court in 1917 forbade the first wave of policies—racial segregation by zoning ordinance—the federal government began to recommend ways that cities could evade that ruling, not only in the southern and border states but across the country. In the 1920s a Harding administration committee promoted zoning ordinances that distinguished single-family from multifamily districts. Although government publications did not say it in as many words, committee members made little effort to hide that an important purpose was to prevent racial integration. Simultaneously, and through the 1920s and the Hoover administration, the government conducted a propaganda campaign directed at white middle-class families to persuade them to move out of apartments and into single-family dwellings. During the 1930s the Roosevelt administration created maps of every metropolitan area, divided into zones of foreclosure risk based in part on the race of their occupants. The administration then insured white homeowners' mortgages if they lived in all-white neighborhoods into which there was little danger of African Americans moving. After World War II the federal government went further and spurred the suburbanization of every metropolitan area by guaranteeing bank loans to mass-production builders who would create the all-white subdivisions that came to ring American cities. In 1973, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights concluded that the 'housing industry, aided and abetted by Government, must bear the primary responsibility for the legacy of segregated housing. . . . Government and private industry came together to create a system of residential segregation.”

RacismInjusticeDiscriminationHousingSegregation
Book:The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
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“At the time, the Federal Housing Administration and Veterans Administration not only refused to insure mortgages for African Americans in designated white neighborhoods like Ladera; they also would not insure mortgages for whites in a neighborhood where African Americans were present. So once East Palo Alto was integrated, whites wanting to move into the area could no longer obtain government-insured mortgages. State-regulated insurance companies, like the Equitable Life Insurance Company and the Prudential Life Insurance Company, also declared that their policy was not to issue mortgages to whites in integrated neighborhoods. State insurance regulators had no objection to this stance. The Bank of America and other leading California banks had similar policies, also with the consent of federal banking regulators.”

RacismHousingSegregationBlockbustingMortgage Insurance
Book:The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
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“...Vito Marcantonio of New York, who argued on the the House floor that “you have no right to use housing against civil rights...Housing is advanced in the interest of the general welfare and in the interest of strength[en]ing democracy. When you separate civil rights from housing you weaken that general welfare.”

Civil RightsWelfareHousingSegregation
Book:The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
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“What was atrocious was the fact that, like every other building in the new towns, they were dumped almost at random; the leakage of escaping gas scented the so-called gas-house districts, and not surprisingly these districts frequently became among the most degraded sections of the city. Towering above the town, polluting its air, the gas tanks symbolized the dominance of 'practical' interests over life-needs.”

PollutionHousingIndustrialization
Book:The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects
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“In both the old and the new quarters a pitch of foulness and filth was reached that the lowest serf's cottage scarcely achieved in medieval Europe. It is almost impossible to enumerate objectively the bare details of this housing without being suspected of perverse exaggeration. But those who speak glibly of urban improvements during this period, or of the alleged rise in the standards of living, fight shy of the actual facts: they generously impute to the town as a whole benefits which only the more favored middle-class minority enjoyed; and they read into the original conditions those improvements which three generations of active legislation and massive sanitary engineering have finally brought about.”

HistoryHousingSanitation
Book:The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects
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