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Each year, Redfin explores housing’s role in the history of Black people in North America. Last year, we talked about thriving centers of Black finance and commerce, in Tulsa, Durham and Richmond, the sites of Black-owned hospitals, insurance companies and banks. This year, let’s explore how eminent-domain laws, which let the government take private land for public use, re-shaped some of America’s first Black neighborhoods.
Central Park Displaced New York’s Most Prosperous Black Neighborhood
For example, Central Park was originally supposed to be in Jones’s Wood, a tract of land on the Upper East Side owned by several wealthy families who sued to shift the park to an alternative site: Seneca Village, already populated by 264 Black residents, three churches, a school, and two cemeteries.
A Law Blocked by White Families, Enforced by Bludgeons Against Black Families
Of the 13,000 Black New Yorkers in the 1850s, 91 were qualified to vote based on property-ownership requirements; 10 of the 91 lived in Seneca Village. In 1855, authorities cleared the area for the park. Most land-owners weren’t compensated. Newspaper accounts described the Seneca Village citizens who objected to the plan as “scoundrels,” and reported that “the supremacy of the law was upheld by the policeman’s bludgeons.”
Santa Monica Was Once 25% Black
One of LA’s most-expensive areas, Santa Monica, saw the same pattern play out, only more recently. In the 1920s, Santa Monica was 25% Black, but the city outlawed a thriving Black-owned dance hall and blocked the development of a Black-owned resort. White residents refused to patronize Black businesses, and organized a Protective League to prevent land sales to Black people.
Standing in Front of Bulldozers
In the late 1940s, Santa Monica’s city manager promised to “clean up the city” by condemning Black-owned buildings and, in the 1950s, a master plan called for the construction of the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium and the 10 Freeway, using eminent-domain law to raze 500 houses and businesses in the mostly Black area of Belmar. Residents stood in front of bulldozers to no avail. Today, Santa Monica is 4% Black.
Creating the Suburbs Displaced One Million People, Two-Thirds African-American
The same thing happened in many North American cities: Treme in New Orleans, the Brooklyn area of Charlotte, Overtown in Miami, Paradise Valley in Detroit, Vinegar Hall in Charlottesville. Starting with the 1949 Housing Act and accelerated by the 1956 Interstate Highway Act, 2,532 projects in 992 cities had, by 1972, displaced one million people, two-thirds of whom were African American, in the name of urban renewal.
History Teaches Us to Examine Our Own Business Practices
How is this relevant to us? In the 19th and 20th centuries, most people pursued commerce within the norms of their day, proud of the cities and parks that they built, and often willfully blind to the impact this had on their Black neighbors. And now, we sell houses and make loans based on the norms of our day.
In the Endless Competition for Schools and Neighborhoods, Anyone with an Advantage Tries to Keep It
Many home-sellers take lower offers from white families who send in baby photos with their offer letters. Real estate agents withhold listings from the open market for the benefit of a handful of their own home-buying clients. Lenders encourage one borrower to finish his application, and forget to call another back.
Fair Housing is Part of Our Mission
The housing market that Redfin imagines when we promise to redefine real estate is better than that. We can’t possibly know how history will judge us, but if the past is any guide, we’ll wish we had paused for a moment before playing the game the way it has always been played, with the rules changing from season to season but the same type of people winning generation after generation. We’ll wish each of us had done more to make housing fair. People of color shouldn’t have to do this alone. That fight is our fight, whether our families are the ones facing discrimination or not.
Our Mission is Your Mission
Redfin has work to do as a company to honor our mission, and so do you. We’ll talk at our February 16 all-hands meeting about our next set of initiatives, but I hope you also reflect on your individual commitment to fair housing, when designing a website feature, answering a homebuyer inquiry, or hosting an open house. You’re more powerful than you think. Many thanks to our chief economist, Daryl Fairweather, for her help assembling some of the data cited in this note, and to all our employees who fight against discrimination, sometimes from our customers, sometimes in defense of our customers.
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