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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.
Neighborhood composition rule Quotes in The Color of Law
The The Color of Law quotes below are all either spoken by Neighborhood composition rule or refer to Neighborhood composition rule. 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:
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Chapter 2
Quotes
The biracial character of many neighborhoods presented opportunities for different futures than the segregated ones that now seem so unexceptional. Yet those opportunities were never seized.
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Neighborhood composition rule Term Timeline in The Color of Law
The timeline below shows where the term Neighborhood composition rule appears in The Color of Law. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 2: Public Housing, Black Ghettos
...to African American families, even though all his projects were segregated. Ickes developed the “ neighborhood composition rule ,” building projects in neighborhoods of the same race. Local governments “designated [areas] exclusively for...
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...authority even unanimously declared its opposition to “the commingling of races” and defense of the neighborhood composition rule , but activists soon convinced it to stop discriminating at least officially. However, nothing changed....
(full context)
