Previous
Fair Housing Act
A government agency, started by President Roosevelt’s administration as part of the New Deal, that regulates housing in the United States and insures housing-related loans made by private banks. Although the FHA’s loan insurance was one of the primary drivers behind the 20th century’s explosion in homeownership in the United States, the FHA also invented redlining both by “includ[ing] a whites-only requirement” on all bank mortgages and ordering real estate agents to treat all African American borrowers and predominantly African American neighborhoods as uncreditworthy in its Underwriting Manual. It is reasonable to say that the FHA is the agent most responsible for ensuring that African Americans could not access the same home financing as white people. In fact, the FHA actively promoted segregation and was explicit about “the racial bases of its decisions,” even when this meant openly ignoring Supreme Court decisions (like the 1948 Shelley v. Kraemer case, which outlawed the enforcement of restrictive covenants). The Federal Housing Administration is not to be confused with the Fair Housing Act, which has the same initials but was based on opposite principles.
Federal Housing Administration (FHA) Quotes in The Color of Law
The The Color of Law quotes below are all either spoken by Federal Housing Administration (FHA) or refer to Federal Housing Administration (FHA). For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 2
Quotes
The director of the Federal Housing Administration supported Tenerowicz, stating that the presence of African Americans in the area would threaten property values of nearby residents. Foreman was forced to resign. The Federal Works Agency then proposed a different project for African Americans on a plot that the Detroit Housing Commission recommended, in an industrial area deemed unsuitable for whites. It soon became apparent that this site, too, would provoke protests because it was not far enough away from a white neighborhood. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt protested to the president. The FWA again reversed course and assigned African Americans to the Sojourner Truth project. Whites in the neighborhood rioted, leading to one hundred arrests (all but three were African Americans) and thirty-eight hospitalizations (all but five were African Americans).
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 6
Quotes
The full cycle went like this: when a neighborhood first integrated, property values increased because of African Americans’ need to pay higher prices for homes than whites. But then property values fell once speculators had panicked enough white homeowners into selling at deep discounts.
Falling sale prices in neighborhoods where blockbusters created white panic was deemed as proof by the FHA that property values would decline if African Americans moved in. But if the agency had not adopted a discriminatory and unconstitutional racial policy, African Americans would have been able, like whites, to locate throughout metropolitan areas rather than attempting to establish presence in only a few blockbusted communities, and speculators would not have been able to prey on white fears that their neighborhoods would soon turn from all white to all black.
Related Characters:
Related Symbols:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 11
Quotes
The Fair Housing Act of 1968 prohibited future discrimination, but it was not primarily discrimination (although this still contributed) that kept African Americans out of most white suburbs after the law was passed. It was primarily unaffordability. The right that was unconstitutionally denied to African Americans in the late 1940s cannot be restored by passing a Fair Housing law that tells their descendants they can now buy homes in the suburbs, if only they can afford it. The advantage that FHA and VA loans gave the white lower-middle class in the 1940s and ‘50s has become permanent.
Related Characters:
Related Symbols:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Get the entire The Color of Law LitChart as a printable PDF.
Federal Housing Administration (FHA) Term Timeline in The Color of Law
The timeline below shows where the term Federal Housing Administration (FHA) appears in The Color of Law. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 1: If San Francisco, Then Everywhere?
...(except the rich) money without insurance from the federal government, and the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) would not insure any construction for African American families. The Peninsula Housing Association included a...
(full context)
...places like Palo Alto because property developers could not get loans unless they promised the FHA that they would not sell to African American people, and because real estate agents, fearing...
(full context)
...decided this practice did not count as “unethical.” They also did not object when the FHA, private insurance companies, and prominent banks stopped insuring mortgages to white families seeking to live...
(full context)
Chapter 2: Public Housing, Black Ghettos
...government policies enforced this arrangement. In one egregious case, a congressman with support from the Federal Housing Administration made the Federal Works Agency (FWA) fire its director and reassign a proposed blacks-only housing...
(full context)
Chapter 4: “Own Your Own Home”
...stated that “inharmonious racial or nationality groups” should lower the appraised value of homes. The FHA focused loans on new white suburbs (preferably those separated from black neighborhoods by “boulevards or...
(full context)
...of this chapter, Rothstein notes that VA loans were also made in collaboration with the FHA’s Underwriting Manual, which meant they were unattainable for black Americans. The FHA and the VA...
(full context)
...built two suburbs in St. Louis. The first was all-white and got funding from the FHA, but the second, which in theory was nearly identical, housed middle-class African American people. But...
(full context)
In Part VI, Rothstein makes it clear that the FHA was open about “the racial bases of its decisions.” One builder got denied a loan...
(full context)
Chapter 5: Private Agreements, Government Enforcement
...in deeds to houses and neighborhood agreements to keep African American people out. Eventually, the FHA made these kinds of promises explicit, but the Supreme Court decided that they are unenforceable...
(full context)
In Part III, Rothstein explains that the FHA also gave better ratings to homes with restrictive covenants that banned selling to African American...
(full context)
...Kraemer, because enforcing them required government involvement and therefore violates the Fourteenth Amendment. But the FHA responded with “massive resistance,” deciding not to make any changes whatsoever—residents would no longer be...
(full context)
Ultimately, little changed after Shelley v. Kraemer. One integrated housing cooperative petitioned the FHA under the new law, but were told that their “interracial community” was ineligible for insurance....
(full context)
...knowing that courts could no longer evict black families in violation of these covenants, the FHA changed the punishment to “exorbitant” fines often exceeding the price of the actual home. The...
(full context)
Chapter 6: White Flight
Rothstein recalls that the FHA’s justification for denying financing to African American people was its belief that their presence “in...
(full context)
In Part I of this chapter, Rothstein explains that the FHA was simply wrong about black neighbors reducing white residents’ property values. First, middle-class African American...
(full context)
In Part II, Rothstein notes that the FHA’s failure to insure mortgages ultimately caused the same reduction in property prices it hoped to...
(full context)
Chapter 8: Local Tactics
...the story of Frank Stevenson, who was unable to reduce his commute time because the “FHA- and VA-insured subdivisions” sprouting up near the Ford Motor plant where he worked were only...
(full context)
...existing neighborhood would accept African American people, the AFSC decided to build its own. Although FHA restrictions prevented the AFSC from getting a loan, it managed to get a favor from...
(full context)
