The Color of Law A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein (z-lib.org).epub

whether to allow it to proceed. It eventually paired its approval with an
ordinance forbidding racial segregation in any subsequent developments for
which the city had to engage in “slum clearance.” In response to public
protests against its policy of excluding African Americans from Stuyvesant
Town, Metropolitan Life built the Riverton Houses, a smaller development
for African Americans in Harlem. Abiding by the new ordinance, the project
was open to whites, but in practice it rented almost exclusively to African
American families.
In 1947, a New York State court rejected a challenge to Stuyvesant
Town’s racial exclusion policy. The decision was upheld on appeal in 1949;
the U.S. Supreme Court declined review. The following year, the New York
State legislature enacted a statute prohibiting racial discrimination in any
housing that received state aid in the form of a tax exemption, sale of land
below cost, or land obtained through condemnation. That same year,
Metropolitan Life finally agreed to lease “some” apartments in Stuyvesant
Town to “qualified Negro tenants.” But by then, the development was filled.
New York City’s rent control laws, by which existing tenants pay
significantly less than market-rate rents, helped to ensure that turnover
would be slow. Rapidly rising rents in apartments that had been vacated
made the development increasingly unaffordable to middle-income families.
These conditions combined to make the initial segregation of Stuyvesant
Town nearly permanent. By the 2010 census, only 4 percent of Stuyvesant
Town residents were African American, in a New York metropolitan area
that was 15 percent African American.
As in so many other instances, the low-income neighborhood that the city
razed to make way for Stuyvesant Town had been integrated and stable.
About 40 percent of those evicted were African American or Puerto Rican,
and many of them had no alternative but to move to racially isolated
communities elsewhere in the city and beyond. Although New York ceased
to allow future discrimination in publicly subsidized projects, it made no
effort to remediate the segregation it had created.
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