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A highly-segregated city near Milpitas, in the Bay Area south of San Francisco, and the location of Stanford University. When the Peninsula Housing Association, an integrated co-operative group, tried to buy land to build a subdivision for its members in Palo Alto, it was unable because it could not get insurance from the Federal Housing Administration, and so no bank would loan it money. After one African American family managed to move to East Palo Alto, opportunistic real estate agents started blockbusting, and the neighborhood’s African American population skyrocketed: “within six years,” the area was “82 percent black.” The government stopped investing in the community and segregated its schools, housing values fell, and East Palo Alto became a slum. This typifies the way that segregation led to the formation of ghettos, which gradually deteriorated and impoverished the majority-African American communities who lived in them.
Palo Alto Quotes in The Color of Law
The The Color of Law quotes below are all either spoken by Palo Alto or refer to Palo Alto. 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 1
Quotes
Within six years the population of East Palo Alto was 82 percent black. Conditions deteriorated as African Americans who had been excluded from other neighborhoods doubled up in single-family homes. Their East Palo Alto houses had been priced so much higher than similar properties for whites that the owners had difficulty making payments without additional rental income. Federal and state housing policy had created a slum in East Palo Alto.
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Palo Alto Term Timeline in The Color of Law
The timeline below shows where the term Palo Alto 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?
...“joined and then helped to lead” a housing cooperative called the Peninsula Housing Association of Palo Alto , which bought a plot of land and tried to build several hundred houses for...
(full context)
...of the chapter, Rothstein summarizes that African American people were shut out of places like Palo Alto because property developers could not get loans unless they promised the FHA that they would...
(full context)
Accordingly, no African American people managed to move to Palo Alto until 1954, when a white man “sold his house to a black family” in East...
(full context)
As a result, “within six years […] East Palo Alto was 82 percent black” and saw its property values plummet, forcing homeowners to seek “additional...
(full context)
