Housing Segregation In Suburban America Since 1960: Presidential and Judicial Politics.

Vol. 15 No.6 (June 2005), pp.478-482

HOUSING SEGREGATION IN SUBURBAN AMERICA SINCE 1960: PRESIDENTIAL AND JUDICIAL POLITICS, by Charles M. Lamb. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 318pp. Hardback $70.00 / £45.00. ISBN: 0-521-83944-0. Paper $24.99 / £18.99. ISBN: 0-521-54827-6.

Reviewed by Joyce A. Baugh, Department of Political Science, Central Michigan University. Email: joyce.baugh@cmich.edu

The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line.

W.E.B. DuBois, 1903

W.E.B. DuBois’s prophetic words from more than a century ago unfortunately still ring true in the American polity today. Charles Lamb’s outstanding book, HOUSING SEGREGATION IN SUBURBAN AMERICA SINCE 1960: PRESIDENTIAL AND JUDICIAL POLITICS, offers immensely valuable insight into one important aspect of the metropolitan color line. In this meticulously researched, carefully written, and well-documented work, Lamb illustrates the importance of presidential policies and judicial decisions in maintaining housing segregation in the United States, particularly in suburban communities. Utilizing presidential papers and other archival documents, court decisions, and additional primary and secondary sources, he tells a powerful story of how government officials have contributed to this problem.

The book is divided into seven chapters. Early in Chapter One, Lamb identifies the traditional sociological explanations for housing segregation in the United States: discrimination by the real estate and lending industries, neighborhood preferences of blacks and whites, and economic disparities across racial groups. He then indicates that his goal is not to supplant these explanations, but to go beyond them to consider how politics, policy, and law contribute to the problem. Lamb’s purpose is to show “how various components of the political system – the presidency, the bureaucracy, Congress, and the courts – have addressed or ignored the issue of suburban segregation, thereby affecting its fundamental character” and to illustrate “how leading political figures in the United States have framed and tailored this issue in their zeal to attract and retain the crucial suburban vote” (p.3). In terms of presidential influence, the central focus is on President Richard Nixon’s national fair housing policy. The essence of Lamb’s argument is captured in this passage.

Richard Nixon did not invent the politics of suburban segregation. Opposition to housing integration in suburban America was well entrenched prior to the 1970s. Yet President Nixon solidified public opposition to federal desegregation of the suburbs at a time when the nation was poised for change. He enunciated a policy declaring that the national government would not pressure the suburbs to accept subsidized low-income housing against their will. In so doing, he formally embraced a fundamental suburban belief: that government should not and could not force a community to accept economic – and by extension racial – integration. Nixon’s policy cemented [*479] the politics of suburban segregation that informally existed before his administration. He converted suburban political preferences into national public policy – a policy that remains largely intact to this day. No president between Gerald Ford and Bill Clinton revoked that policy, and Nixon’s federal court appointees perpetuated it through their judicial decisions (pp.3-4).

Lamb asserts that Nixon’s interpretation of federal fair housing law was that the law only forbids discrimination in housing on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, and religion. The contrasting view is that the law requires integration – not just nondiscrimination in housing.

One of the most useful aspects of the first chapter is Lamb’s description of the myriad ways that the federal government has contributed to racially segregated housing. He emphasizes the impact of federal mortgage guarantee programs that channeled money to the suburbs where middle- and working-class whites were able to buy new homes, the creation of the interstate highway system that made it possible for whites to commute from their homes in the suburbs to jobs in the city, and urban renewal programs that displaced African Americans from their communities without providing sufficient replacement housing. Government decisions about where to build public housing, the location of federal jobs in suburban areas rather than in central cities, and federal income tax deductions for mortgage interest also have contributed to the problem. This brief section is particularly helpful for those who believe that racially segregated housing in the United States is merely the product of private choices, e.g., Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion in FREEMAN v. PITTS (1992) and Justice Thomas’s concurrence in MISSOURI v. JENKINS (1995). Before concluding the chapter, Lamb introduces various constitutional and statutory provisions, judicial decisions, and an executive order that have helped to shape federal fair housing policy. These are discussed more fully in later chapters.

The background and passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968, including President Lyndon Johnson’s leadership on this issue, is the subject of Chapter Two. The author offers an interesting analysis of Johnson’s transformation from being an early opponent of civil rights, to his painstaking efforts to promote passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965. Lamb chronicles the difficulties Johnson and other proponents of the Fair Housing Act faced in getting congressional approval. He notes three critical events that helped to spur passage: 1) the reversal of a key Senator’s long-standing opposition to open housing legislation (Everett Dirksen, Republican of Illinois), 2) the report of the Kerner Commission, which examined the urban rebellions of 1967 and 1968, and 3) the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Lamb then summarizes the key provisions of the Act and describes the weaknesses that have prevented it from being fully effective. Ironically, the main problem is attributable to Senator Dirksen’s support of the bill. That is, as a condition of his approval, he rejected proposals for strong enforcement by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). In the Fair Housing Act, “a majority of both houses of Congress agreed that HUD would have only the power of ‘conference, [*480] conciliation, and persuasion’ in housing discrimination cases. This means that in practice, HUD’s enforcement power extends only to asking the parties of a fair housing dispute to come together and resolve the complaint, with HUD’s assistance” (pp.47-48). By contrast, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) was given significant powers to enforce Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This includes the power to file lawsuits in federal district court, to initiate investigations even without specific complaints, and to seek court injunctions when agency officials think the Act has been violated.

Chapters Three and Four are particularly rich in their analysis of bureaucratic and presidential politics. Chapter Three focuses on the extensive efforts of George Romney, Nixon’s HUD secretary, in promoting fair housing. Romney was convinced that integrating the suburbs, both economically and racially, was necessary to end poverty and resolve racial conflict. With the assistance of key HUD staff members, he initiated two extensive programs: Operation Breakthrough and Open Communities. Operation Breakthrough was designed primarily to build a substantial amount of federally-assisted low- and moderate-income housing in both urban and suburban areas. As HUD’s general policy moved toward housing desegregation, however, “Breakthrough soon came to represent more than a large-scale attempt to build low-cost housing; it was used to help spearhead desegregation” (p.63). Not surprisingly, the program provoked hostile reactions from many of the communities targeted as demonstration sites, especially the suburbs. Despite guarantees that communities which accepted the new low-cost housing would receive top priority for funding from other HUD programs, local officials mounted heavy opposition to the program.

From the outset, Open Communities was an even more ambitious project than Operation Breakthrough. Its primary purpose was direct integration of the suburbs, not simply constructing low- and moderate-income housing. What is most astonishing is that Open Communities was planned in secret by Romney and key HUD staff members “with virtually no White House knowledge or involvement for roughly eighteen months into the administration” (p.69). Lamb utilizes internal HUD memoranda and other documents to tell an exquisitely detailed story of the project’s development, implementation, and ultimate demise. He stresses that Romney’s goal of racial and economic integration of the suburbs was opposed not only by suburban officials and members of Congress, but it conflicted directly with Nixon’s suburban electoral strategy.

Although Nixon generally supported (at least initially) Operation Breakthrough, the Open Communities project infuriated him, and, as a result, Nixon withdrew control of fair housing policy from Romney and HUD and centralized it in the White House. Lamb traces this shift in great detail in Chapter Four. He begins by discussing how Nixon’s approach to civil rights changed from one that was generally in line with the Republican Party’s more progressive stance on civil rights to a more conservative direction as he pursued his famous “Southern Strategy” in the 1968 [*481] presidential election. The idea was that the key to Republican electoral success was to win the traditionally Democratic white southern vote, along with the white suburban vote in the rest of the country. These constituents would be assured of limited presidential enforcement of civil rights and the appointment of conservative federal judges. Lamb also attributes the change to Nixon’s personal views on civil rights and race. He notes that, John Ehrlichman, one of Nixon’s closest aides, has indicated that Nixon believed that African Americans were “genetically inferior to whites” (p.119). After providing this background, the bulk of the chapter describes Nixon’s rocky relationship with Romney and explains how Nixon centralized fair housing policy in the White House, including the roles played by the president’s chief aides.

In Chapter Five, Lamb demonstrates that Nixon’s policy on suburban housing withstood five subsequent presidential administrations, even in the face of efforts to change things. Republican presidents Ford, Reagan, and George H.W. Bush were not interested in advocating suburban housing integration and were especially opposed to encouraging subsidized housing in those communities. The HUD secretaries who served under Democratic presidents Carter and Clinton sought to introduce initiatives aimed at integrating the suburbs, but substantial opposition led them to back away from those efforts. Henry Cisneros, Clinton’s HUD secretary, was somewhat successful in integrating existing public housing, and he was assisted in this endeavor by favorable federal court decisions.

While important federal court rulings are discussed in earlier chapters, Lamb’s primary concern in Chapter Six is on Nixon’s appointees to the federal courts and their rulings on housing segregation. After discussing the Warren and Burger Courts’ fair housing decisions and noting the paucity of rulings by the Rehnquist Court, he examines important lower federal court rulings, specifically those where opinions were written by Nixon appointees. Lamb indicates that only one major liberal decision regarding suburban integration was written by a Nixon appointee to those courts. While concluding that Nixon’s appointees made decisions that were in line with the president’s views, he is very careful in drawing conclusions about presidential influence. “Whether President Nixon directly influenced his judges or obliquely affected policy by picking judges who were inclined to oppose suburban integration, he would have been delighted with most of the decisional outcomes. It is far easier, in the end, to demonstrate that Nixon’s policy affected subsequent administrations and HUD than it is to show that he influenced his judicial appointees on the issue of suburban integration. Archival evidence that might demonstrate presidential influence on federal judges is simply less available than comparable evidence in the massive archives for presidential administrations, members of Congress, and federal agencies” (pp.252-253).

In a brief concluding chapter, Lamb offers final observations about the difficulty of studying presidential influence on domestic policy, President Nixon’s fair housing legacy (including its implications for the Republican Party’s continuing electoral strategy), [*482] and the possibility of achieving meaningful suburban housing integration in the future. On this latter point, Lamb is neither overly pessimistic nor optimistic. He asserts that although there currently seems to be no presidential, legislative, or judicial desire to work toward racial and economic integration of the suburbs, “the end is still unknown” and “[o]pposition to integrating the suburbs may wane over time” (p.263). The book’s final passage is nonetheless, sobering.

Racism has subsided to some extent, and people of different colors and ethnic backgrounds can coexist more peacefully today than in the past, living in the same neighborhoods. The rich and the poor, however, remain starkly segregated. . . . The well-to-do, in an attempt to protect their families, property, and quality of life, will continue to keep the poor out of their neighborhoods by resisting the construction of low-income and even moderate-income, housing. In this sense, Richard Nixon’s legacy may persevere beyond racial suburban integration. The politics of suburban segregation may live on, with income, rather than race, the critical factor in the future (pp.264-265).

While not contesting Lamb’s conclusions regarding the impact of income on suburban segregation, one could argue that race will continue to play a dominant role as well. A Dateline NBC broadcast from June of 1997 demonstrated that even when upper-income African-Americans moved into the community of Matteson, Illinois, a well-to-do suburb south of Chicago, white residents moved out. At the time of this broadcast, the population was evenly split, but 2000 census figures showed that the proportion had changed to nearly two-thirds black and one-third white. If that trend continues, the likelihood is that by the next census, the figures will be even starker.

HOUSING SEGREGATION IN SUBURBAN AMERICA SINCE 1960 is a remarkable research effort that is well-organized, well-written, and highly readable. It makes an important contribution to the literature of several fields – presidential politics, public policy, public administration, judicial policymaking, and race and politics. It will be useful both to scholars and for undergraduate and graduate courses in these fields. In addition, however, the book is accessible to members of the general public who are interested in understanding why suburban segregation continues to be a major civil rights issue. Finally, despite the prevailing view that suburban segregation is an intractable problem, Lamb provides a compelling reminder that strong presidential and judicial leadership could go a long way toward addressing it.

REFERENCES:

DuBois, W.E. Burghardt. 1903/1961. THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett Publications, Inc.

CASE REFERENCES:

FREEMAN v. PITTS, 503 U.S. 467 (1992).

MISSOURI v. JENKINS, 515 U.S. 70 (1995).

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