Neighborhood composition rule Term Analysis

A principle that Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Public Works Administration (PWA) used to segregate public housing built during the Great Depression, through the New Deal. Essentially, the PWA agreed to construct housing for African Americans, but decided that it would only build in neighborhoods that were already predominantly African American (and limit housing for white people to majority-white neighborhoods). Local governments manipulated this rule to destroy integrated neighborhoods: for instance, if a neighborhood was only majority-white by a slim margin, local government would destroy African Americans’ houses and build all-white housing projects where they used to stand, thereby skewing the neighborhood’s population even more toward white people (and vice-versa, in integrated neighborhoods that it wanted to make mostly African American). By exploiting the neighborhood composition rule, then, federal and local governments used public housing to fight integration rather than promote it. Rothstein sees this as clear evidence that housing segregation in the United States is de jure rather than de facto.