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

described how, when his family lived in Cleveland in the 1910s, landlords
could get as much as three times the rent from African Americans that they
could get from whites, because so few homes were available to black
families outside a few integrated urban neighborhoods. Landlords, Hughes
remembered, subdivided apartments designed for a single family into five or
six units, and still African Americans’ incomes had to be disproportionately
devoted to rent. Four decades later little had changed. In its 1947 brief to the
Supreme Court in Shelley v. Kraemer, the U.S. government cited half a
dozen studies, each of which demonstrated that “[c]olored people are forced
to pay higher rents and housing costs by the semi-monopoly which
segregation fosters.” In 1954, the FHA estimated that African Americans
were overcrowded at more than four times the rate of whites and were
doubled up at three times the rate of whites because of the excessive rents
they were forced to pay.
A Chicago Department of Public Welfare report in the mid-1920s stated
that African Americans were charged about 20 percent more in rent than
whites for similar dwellings. It also observed that in neighborhoods
undergoing racial change, rents increased by 50 to 225 percent when African
Americans occupied apartments that formerly housed whites. The limited
supply of housing open to African Americans gave property owners in black
neighborhoods the opportunity to make exorbitant profits.
A 1946 national magazine article described a Chicago building where the
landlord had divided a 540-square-foot storefront into six cubicles, each
housing a family. He had similarly subdivided the second story. Total
monthly rent was as great as that generated by a luxury apartment on
Chicago’s “Gold Coast” along Lake Michigan. The article recounted another
case where rents were so high that thirty-eight people lived in a six-room
apartment, sleeping in three shifts. In 1947, after a Chicago landlord
converted his property from white to black tenancy, a fire killed ten African
American tenants. The inquest revealed that a white tenant who had been
paying fifteen dollars a month was evicted so that the landlord could charge
a black family sixty dollars for the same apartment. Such exploitation was
possible only because public policy denied African Americans opportunities
to participate in the city’s white housing market.
Other urban housing markets were similarly distorted. A 1923
Philadelphia survey found that as the First Great Migration proceeded,