Washington Real Estate Fair Housing

The United States has a long history of racial discrimination and segregation, which includes housing. Many Americans throughout our history have been denied or restricted access to lending, neighborhoods where they could live, and financial programs. This has been true not only in the South but also in Washington.

Types of Racism

Broadly, racism is prejudice or discrimination due to a person's race. There are many types and ways to categorize racism, but we will focus on four types: structural, institutional, internalized, and interpersonal.

Understanding Racism: Structural and Institutional

Structural Racism

Structural racism is a result of our history and attitudes formed over generations. It seeps into and is codified in another type of racism, institutional racism. Structural racism is related to how a society is set up and organized, as well as the policies and traditions put in place over time. This can include how race is discussed and treated within an institution or in the media.

This form of racism can normalize historical and institutional practices that disadvantage people of color. Even if a policy excludes a minority group and benefits white people, that would be an example of structural racism. It’s closely related to institutional racism, which enforces the structural attitudes developed over time.

Systemic racism refers to an invisible system that upholds the ideology and institutional superiority of white people over other races in society. This can occur both consciously and unconsciously. Although individuals may not perceive themselves as racist, they may continue to benefit from systems offering advantages to white people.

Research and Findings

A study conducted in 2017 by Katherine DeCelles at Harvard also highlights one of these societal benefits: job hiring.

The study summarizes by saying,

Institutional Racism

Institutional racism is a subset of structural racism, which includes the practical rules and policies an institution has in place that better serve white people while not providing the same levels of service or even harming minorities.

During the Depression, the country faced a housing shortage, and the federal government stepped in to help alleviate the issue. In doing so, they created programs that helped to segregate housing throughout the United States in a process known as redlining. 

Redlining came about with the formation of the Federal Housing Administration around 1934. The Federal Housing Administration committed to ensuring unpaid balances of borrowers who couldn’t make payments. What this did was allow many to become homeowners and be able to qualify for loans since lenders were protected from default.

This policy of segregation is even more clear when you look at one of these maps.

The Colors You See on the Map Had Grades

1. A (Best): These neighborhoods were usually upper-class white neighborhoods that were seen as providing a shallow risk of default for banks. One feature evaluated was whether it was ethnically homogeneous.
2. B (Still Desirable): This classification included mostly, if not wholly, white US-born citizens. Lenders saw these as still desirable.
3. C (Declining): These areas were typically populated with working-class people and first or second-generation immigrants. The neighborhood would often have older buildings.
4. D (Hazardous): This grade was often granted to minority communities such as Asian, Mexican, Jewish, and African-American families.

Interpersonal Racism

Interpersonal racism occurs between individual people. This type of racism is the one that is the most overt or well-publicized. It happens when a person takes action as a result of stereotypes that they hold. It might be a hate crime, housing discrimination, negative comments about minorities, or racial profiling. Since these incidents are more prominent, they are more likely to be reported in the media.

However, just because this type of racism is written about in the press does not mean that most of the time it happens, it makes it to the media—quite the opposite.

Internalized racism can manifest in a couple of forms through individuals who receive benefits from historical events, media, and institutional power. The second is from the group that is being oppressed. Over time, consistently disadvantaged people can develop attitudes that impact their sense of self, potentially leading to a sense of superiority and an inflated self-image within the advantaged group. Examples include cognitive dissonance and paternalism.

Types of Discrimination

Discrimination can be indirect or direct. However, it is easier to spot the direct kind. For example, if a business turns you away because of your sexual orientation, this would be an example of direct discrimination. Direct discrimination occurs when you or someone else is treated differently because of who you are.

Other times, you or someone else may be treated the same, but it hurts you or the other person more than others because of who you are. This is also a form of discrimination.

An example would be a policy that is discriminatory against someone with a handicap. A person may be treated like everyone else but is negatively impacted by who they are.

This is an example of what's known as disparate impact. It's a form of indirect discrimination. The US Supreme Court held in Griggs v. Duke Power Company (1971) that disparate impact (indirect discrimination) is illegal under the Civil Rights Act of 1964. 

The case centered around African-American employees at a power generation plant who were required to have a high school diploma to pass an intelligence test to be employed or transfer jobs within the plant. 

The requirement was not intended to determine if someone could perform a particular job or category of job. The long and short of it is that for requirements to be lawful, they must be job-related.

This does not preclude an employer from instituting a policy that disadvantages a person, provided an objective justification exists.

De Facto & De Jure Policies and Practices

Discrimination can happen legally or in the shadows with a non-official policy. Latin phrases for these concepts are "de jure" and "de facto." De jure is the reality based on a society's laws. De facto is how things are handled but not officially described by law.

For example, segregation in the United States occurred legally through policies at the federal, state, and local levels, representing de jure discrimination. HOLC developed neighborhood lending-risk maps that rated many neighborhoods with substantial Black populations as too risky for mortgage lending. FHA, a separate agency, used discriminatory mortgage-insurance practices. 

The Federal Housing Administration's underwriting manual suggested using highways to separate white and African-American neighborhoods, which indirectly led to segregated communities.

De facto segregation occurred through social customs and practices. Private restrictive covenants, for instance, prevented the sale of properties to minorities in many cities, including Seattle, Spokane, and Tacoma. 

Despite efforts to reverse discriminatory policies through legal action, the Federal Housing Administration's word deliberately racist policies, such as redlining and the sanctioning of racist covenants, created significant wealth gaps and limited opportunities.

Historian Kenneth Jackson even argued that no agency substantially impacted the American public more than the Federal Housing Administration in the past fifty years.

Washington State History of De Facto Segregation

Many historical zoning laws state that minorities could not purchase homes in specific neighborhoods.

One example in Seattle is a gentleman by the name of Richard Ornstein. Richard is a Jewish refugee who was attempting to buy a house at Sand Point Country Club in 1952. 

During the purchase process, it became apparent that the property had a deed restriction applied to the entire neighborhood, which meant that homes could not be sold or rented to non-whites and people who were Jewish. 

Even though 1952 was after the 1948 ruling from the Supreme Court stating that racial covenants were not enforceable, Mr. Ornstein chose not to move his family into the neighborhood after the head of the Country Club Commission pushed to stop the sale. 

As you might imagine, Mr. Ornstein did not want to move into a neighborhood that was so clearly against his presence.

The adoption of deed restrictions throughout Seattle in the 1920s and 30s, including the neighborhood of the Capitol Hill Queen and Madison Park West Seattle and places around Lake Washington, left minorities few places to live and essentially limited them to the central district and Chinatown.