Research Guide: Housing Segregation: Home

Antero Pietila shows how continued discrimination practices toward African Americans and Jews have shaped the cities in which we now live. Eugenics, racial thinking, and white supremacist attitudes influenced even the federal government's actions toward housing in the 20th century, dooming American cities to ghettoization. This all-American tale is told through the prism of Baltimore, from its early suburbanization in the 1880s to the consequences of "white flight" after World War II, and into the first decade of the twenty-first century.

Hate Thy Neighbor is the first work to seriously examine the role violence plays in maintaining housing segregation, illustrating how intimidation and fear are employed to force minorities back into separate neighborhoods and prevent meaningful integration. Drawing on evidence that includes in-depth interviews with ordinary citizens and analysis of Fair Housing Act cases, Bell provides a moving examination of how neighborhood racial violence is enabled today and how it harms not only the victims, but entire communities.

As Long As They Don't Move Next Door graphically demonstrates the variety of methods―including violence and intimidation, unjust laws, restrictive covenants, discrimination by realtors and mortgage lenders, and white flight to suburban enclaves―used by whites to thwart the racial integration of their neighborhoods

Describes the creation and history of "sundown towns," American towns where African-Americans were outlawed after dark, in some cases as late as the 1970s; examines their effect on whites, African-Americans, and the social system; and discusses their continued existence, arguing the importance of integration.

Argues that post-World War II housing segregation was influenced by federal programs that favored whites; and looks at Dearborn, Michigan, zoning board and city council meeting minutes to show that whites learned to view discrimination as a response to the needs of the housing market rather than as racism.

Examines how the link between blackness and criminality influenced the development of modern urban America and attitudes towards the African-American community.

A study of the relationship between race and housing in urban America, looking at the strategies employed by ethnic, political, and business interests in the years between 1940 and 1960 to segregate the City of Chicago.

Once America's "arsenal of democracy," Detroit over the last fifty years has become the symbol of the American urban crisis. In this reappraisal of racial and economic inequality in modern America, Thomas Sugrue explains how Detroit and many other once prosperous industrial cities have become the sites of persistent racialized poverty. He challenges the conventional wisdom that urban decline is the product of the social programs and racial fissures of the 1960s. Probing beneath the veneer of 1950s prosperity and social consensus, Sugrue traces the rise of a new ghetto, solidified by changes in the urban economy and labor market and by racial and class segregation.


In this provocative revision of postwar American history, Sugrue finds cities already fiercely divided by race and devastated by the exodus of industries. He focuses on urban neighborhoods, where white working-class homeowners mobilized to prevent integration as blacks tried to move out of the crumbling and overcrowded inner city. Weaving together the history of workplaces, unions, civil rights groups, political organizations, and real estate agencies, Sugrue finds the roots of today's urban poverty in a hidden history of racial violence, discrimination, and deindustrialization that reshaped the American urban landscape after World War II.

Explores the phenomena of "white flight" in the city of Atlanta, Georgia, in which white residents of the city moved out to the suburbs in response to desegregation during the Civil Rights Movement.

Public housing was an integral part of the New Deal, as the federal government funded public works to generate economic activity and offer material support to families made destitute by the Great Depression, and it remained a major element of urban policy in subsequent decades. As chronicled in New Deal Ruins, however, housing policy since the 1990s has turned to the demolition of public housing in favor of subsidized units in mixed-income communities and the use of tenant-based vouchers rather than direct housing subsidies. While these policies, articulated in the HOPE VI program begun in 1992, aimed to improve the social and economic conditions of urban residents, the results have been quite different.