 Hello and welcome. Thank you for joining us at our Mechanics Institute online program, Freedom to Discriminate. How realtors conspire to segregate housing and divide America with author Gene Slater in conversation with Professor Mitchell Schwarzard. I'm Laura Shepard, director of Events at Mechanics Institute, and we are proud to cosponsor our program with the American Institute of Architects of San Francisco and Hay Day Books. If you're new to Mechanics Institute, we were founded in 1854 and we're one of San Francisco's most vital literary and cultural centers in the heart of the city. We feature our General Interest Library and International Chess Club, ongoing author and literary programs, and our Friday Night Cinema Lit Film series. So please visit our website and also please visit us in person as the library is open and some programs are now on site. This program will be followed by a Q&A with you, our audience. So when the time comes, please put your questions in the chat. And also, if you would like to purchase Freedom to Discriminate and also books by Mitchell Schwarzard, please see Alexander Book Company.com. Actually, it's alexanderbook.com if you're ordering online or go there in person. They're open. So I'd like to introduce our program. Freedom to Discriminate uncovers Relichors' definitive role in segregating America and shaping modern conservatives' ideology. Gene Slater reveals how Relichors systematically created and justified residential segregation, dividing our nation physically, politically, and creating and prolonging racial wealth gap that affects and devastates so many families, communities, and, of course, our country's economy. We're very pleased to welcome two experts in this field, and I'd like to give a little bit of their bios. Gene Slater served as Senior Advisor on Housing for Federal, State, and Local Agencies for over 40 years. He co-founded and chairs CSG Advisors, which has been one of the nation's leading advisors on affordable housing for decades. He has advised on housing issues in 30 states, and his projects have received numerous national awards. And in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2009, he helped design the program by which the United States Treasury financed homes for 110,000 first-time buyers. He also lives and worked in New York, Boston, rural Wisconsin, Chicago, and the San Francisco Bay Area, where he now resides. And Mitchell Schwartzer is Professor of Architectural and Urban History at the California College of the Arts in Oakland and San Francisco. His books include Hella Town, Oakland's History of Development and Disruption, Architecture of the San Francisco Bay Area, Zoom Escape, Architecture in Motion and Media, and German Architectural Theory and the Search for Modern Identity. Mitchell was also a panelist in our program, Uncovering Race Place and the Patterns of Urbanization that we held last fall, and we're very pleased to welcome him back. So please welcome our guests, Gene Slater and Mitchell Schwartzer. Thank you. Should I just start off here? Yeah, I'll tell you. So what this book and this history shows, governments describe, shows the connection between two defining features of modern America that are often taken for granted as though they're like basic features of America. One is the creation of segregated neighborhoods in every city in the country. And the other is a conservative vision of freedom, of individual freedom without regard to the rights of others that has shifted the country to the right for the last 50 years. Both of these two defining features, often thought of entirely separate, were invented by the same organization, by the nation's realtors, their nation's organized real estate industry, as a way to sell houses and to divide Americans. So instead of the story of 20th and 21st century America gradually reducing barriers, this is a story of the opposite of how barriers were created and of constant innovation of how the common good, progress, community, the new deal, freedom of choice and individual rights were used, were put to be used to limit where people could live and to increasingly polarize the country. And as the center of innovation, the Bay Area in California were at the very forefront of this process. Now to understand this history, you have to begin not with a myth that the alternative created, the segregation was normal, natural, the way things have always been in this country. But the reality is at the beginning of the 20th century, racially mixed blocks in neighborhoods were common north and south, the racially mixed blocks in Louisville and Washington D.C. in, you know, lots of border cities in St. Louis and in Los Angeles in 1904, a black Los Angeles real estate agent privately reported the Negros of the city have prudently refused to segregate themselves into any locality, but purchased and but scattered and purchased homes in the areas with the best services and surroundings where you could live dependent on what you could afford, not your ancestry. And yet 13 years later in 1917, a black woman in the same city in Los Angeles said, we've been surrounded by invisible walls of steel. The white surrounded us and made it impossible to go beyond these walls. How did this change happen? Where did it come from? And it's important to recognize that all white neighborhoods were first created not in the south, but in the Bay Area, a mile from the University of California Berkeley campus. So in 1905, Duncan McDuffie, developer of Claremont Park near the Claremont Hotel and later St. Francis Wood in San Francisco, very high-end landscape subdivision. McDuffie was an ardent environmentalist. He became national president of the Sierra Club and helped create the California parks. McDuffie developing Claremont recorded the first racial covenants in this country, deed restrictions that prohibited any non-Caucasian except a servant from ever living in the homes that would be built in this high-end subdivision. And this was a marketing device to say to buyers, your children will always play with children like themselves. It was a covenant that basically said you can enforce restrictions against your neighbor. In fact, when they first tried marketing this, people said, well, it seems un-American to have deed restrictions. And I bought the property, why can't I use it the way I want? And the answer was these deed restrictions, they're not about you, they're about limiting your neighbors. The first homeowners associations in America were created to enforce these racial restrictions. McDuffie and a similar developer named Jason Nichols in Kansas City about the same time, they weren't simply individual land developers, but they were leaders, national leaders of a brand new type of organization, which were local real estate boards, which were socially exclusive, all white clubs of the most established brokers in each city, trademarked as realtors, who through their multiple listing service came to dominate 80% of home sales, and it was really their cartel-like power that made segregation possible. There was just as much, it isn't like racism created segregation, there was certainly as much racism in 1900 as there was in 1920 or 1950. What was different was you couldn't have organized segregation of separate housing markets until you had an organization that could actually make that happen and enforce that. And that's what the realtors did. Now, this racial covenant that McDuffie recorded, if you look at open house signs today, you'll see his company, Mason McDuffie, still around. This racial covenant cost developer nothing, improved so popular, it soon spread within a couple of years to middle-class, high-end subdivisions throughout California, particularly in LA, to middle-class subdivisions and to working-class subdivisions. And within 10 years, realtors in existing neighborhoods started circulating petitions saying, well, we can use this to sell homes here to make this a marketing advantage. And so that limited where people could live in existing neighborhoods. And so by the 1920s, half the homes in this country and virtually all the newer subdivisions had racial covenants. And to support such covenants, real estate boards pioneered zoning. The Supreme Court said you can't have zoning directly to limit where people could live because that violates the 14th Amendment, that's direct government action. But instead, zoning was used to support it. So the first single-family zoning in the country was created by Duncan McDuffie, who was president of the planning board, to prevent a Negro dance hall in Elmwood a few blocks from his subdivisions. Single-family zoning was created and the realtors were the key inventors and promoters of zoning throughout the country out of the same belief that only through conformity, racial conformity, building conformity, stability in real estate. But by the 1920s, realtors sort of created these racial covenants throughout the country. They needed a justification for what they were doing for this concerted effort to tell, because they needed the idea that any minority moving into a neighborhood was going to destroy that neighborhood, they needed justification for that. So they came up with what turned out to be an unbelievable fiction. But it was a fiction that any minority moving into a all-white neighborhood would reduce property values, often by 30% or 50%. This became put in every publication, every appraisal manual in the country, every real estate textbook, almost all of which were sponsored by the realtors, was taught at 165, 165 universities. This was a foolproof argument for getting neighbors to pressure sellers who could be against maintaining property values. And so this became treated as an economic objective truth throughout the country. And what made this argument so powerful was that in the 1930s, it was adopted by the Federal Housing Administration created under the New Deal. And the chief lobbyist designers and the key staff for FHA were America's realtors. They drafted the underwriting rules that measured risk by the presence of minorities. They created the maps for redlining every city. They were confidential in time. Nobody knew about these maps until like many decades later. And they provided 100% financing for new all-white suburbs that had to have racial covenants and be located far from minorities. I should say minorities at this point, non-Caucasians meant not merely African-Americans or Asian-Americans. It also meant Mexican-Americans and then in many cases Jews, Italians, Catholics, gradually over time, those groups became white and were accepted by realtors who were accepted in neighborhoods and who were remained in their previously racially mixed neighborhoods were basically blacks. That's sort of the history of how segregation evolved. So here is this incredibly powerful system. But after World War II, which has been promoted as a fight for freedom by all Americans, realtors found themselves under fence. Their own appraisers admitted this property value argument is false. Prices often rose when minorities moved in areas. Precisely because they had to pay 20% more for the same quality housing in the limited areas where they could live. President Truman's committee on civil rights called residential segregation and Jim Crow, the greatest obstacles to individual freedom. They redefined what this meant. And the Supreme Court in Shelley versus Kramer in 1948 ruled the court enforcement of racial covenants violated the 14th Amendment. So how did realtors react? In response, California realtors proposed a U.S. constitutional amendment to overturn the 14th Amendment and to create a legal apartheid in America, the same year as in South Africa. But on the advice of their lawyers, they turned instead to quieter means of doing the same thing, which was racial steering and limiting home sales justified by what they called freedom of association, the right of every race to exclude other races. And so effective was this and their control of the real estate market. Then in the 1950s, out of 325,000 new homes built in the Bay Area, 50 were sold without regard to race. And nationally, African Americans were excluded from 95% of neighborhoods and 98% of new homes. So when the civil rights movement started pushing for fair housing laws to overturn this incredibly powerful system of organized discrimination, California passed the Rumford Act in 1963. Realtors banded together, poured their national resources into a campaign in California meant to stop fair housing. They put on the ballot a proposition, Proposition 14 that would permanently ban the state or any city from ever limiting residential discrimination would forever prevent any limit on discrimination. And to put this on the ballot, so this is the height of liberalism in America. This is the same, on the same ballot, Lyndon Johnson crushed Barry Goldwater by roughly 60 to 40% in California nationally at the very height of the civil rights movement. How were they, this was a time when no prominent politician would support them, not Barry Goldwater, not Ronald Reagan until after the fact. And so they needed, they decided that the key to success, their real, real earlier spike Wilson from Fresno decided was to challenge the idea of freedom at the heart of the civil rights movement. So nine months after Martin Luther King spoke about the blank check of freedom at the March on Washington and invoked the Gettysburg address. Wilson called the realtors campaign Gettysburg 1964 saying we're involved in a great battle for liberty and freedom. And so to challenge King, he redefined freedom, which King had said meant was something that belonged to the country as a whole, that your freedom depended on everybody else's freedom that made freedom inextricable, which is the key political basis in civil rights movement instead to find freedom as a zero sum and something that's your personal property. They used the house key as the symbol of American freedom and said giving that extending freedom to others would limit your own. They invented the vocabulary of colorblind freedom, which was to say we believe in the same rights for owners of all races, namely the same right to discriminate. And so freedom of choice blazoned on freeway billboards was also then seen as freedom of conscience. And was likened to freedom of religion. All these things that you hear today were sort of invented by the realtors in this campaign. And so what they said was to support proposition 14 didn't mean in any way that you were prejudiced or supported prejudice, it meant that you believe in each American's right of individual conscience and their individual freedom. And so effective was this argument in the same ballot where Lyndon Johnson crushed Goldwater, 65% of voters supported proposition 14, including 75% of white folks that the realtors idea of freedom had triumphed in California, a moderate liberal state at the time showed it to win anywhere in the country. And at the very moment, conservatism was decisively defeated, here was the way forward. 1966 when the state Supreme Court ruled proposition 14 unconstitutional, Ronald Reagan took up the realtors cause and used it as the key to his campaign saying an individual wants to discriminate against Negroes or others and selling or renting his house. It is his right to do so. And so when Congress finally passed fair housing in 1968, days after Martin Luther King had been assassinated troops guarding US Capitol, it was largely gutted. They had no enforcement mechanism because of congressman's fear of the kind of voter revolt they had seen in proposition 14. And so what you see today is this definition of freedom as a zero sum of elevating a single narrow right and calling that freedom itself without regards to the rights of others to be used on issue after issue, on guns, on abortion, on campaign contributions and using individual freedom to justify its seeming opposite, community conformity, insistence on conformity on tradition, linked libertarians and social conservatives and provided a template for the way freedom is being used in America today. And I stop there and entertain questions from Mitchell and let's talk about this. Okay. Thank you, Jean. I mean, I want to thank you for your book. I mean, it's a really in depth analysis of the role of the Nareb, the Realty Board in promulgating segregation all through the 20th century, at least till the 1960s or 70s. And it's pretty chilling. And you also make a, I think a strong linkage between the realtors and the FHA, the formation of the federal housing and administration and then, you know, leading to the HOLC redlining maps. And lastly, you know, and we can talk about this a little bit later, the whole notion of freedom, this ideology. I wanted to talk a little beforehand though about some of the context for this whole set of events relating to Duncan McDuffie and the realtors. And I wanted to, you know, bring up for everyone, you know, a couple of important dates in the very late 19th century. One is 1893 when we have the world's Colombian exposition. And the other is 1896 when the Supreme Court decides for Ferguson over Plessy and the idea of separate but equal. I'm not going to talk much about that, but that without question, you know, is a key moment in eviscerating, you know, the post-Civil War amendments, you know, making black people equal citizens, you know, and we get this kind of green light for all types of segregation activities. And it's perhaps no accident that a lot of those activities happen right afterwards, right? And within a decade, they start to happen within the housing market. The world's Colombian exposition is really an interesting moment. It's the second American World's Fair after Philadelphia in 1876, and it's a really dramatic fair, okay? And really what it does, it's located about seven miles south of the loop, not far from the University of Chicago. And it was called the White City because, you know, these are temporary buildings that were then stuck out and painted white, you know, they're just going to be up for one season. And it was very much contrasted to the gray city of the loop, of the business city. And I think the Colombian exposition kind of sets the stage for both the city beautiful movement and the progressive era in American municipal, you know, actions. And it also kind of crystallizes a set of contrasts that I think are, you know, kind of fundamental to this idea of segregation. And that is that we're going to have the city now contrasted to the suburb or to the planned suburb, you know, and the exposition is a version of that. It's a temporary version, of course. We're going to have the grid, the city grid contrasted to serpentine curvilinear streets. We're going to have the business world, the world of chaos and industry contrasted to the world of leisure and pleasure and entertainment, okay? And these set of contrasts, which really I think kind of, they parallel a set of really important developments that are going on in the 19th century that I wanted to mention that predate, you know, what the realtors were doing in the early 20th century. One of them is the formation of what is often considered to be the world's first residential park. And it's called Llewellyn Park. It's located in West Orange, New Jersey. And it was built in 1857 by a couple of several individuals, including Alexander Jackson Davis and Frederick Lowam said they were involved somewhat. And what it was, what Llewellyn Park was, was it was connected to Manhattan by Ferry and railroad. Okay. And it was, it had five to 10 acre zoning. So it kind of pioneered another version of exclusion, exclusionary or segregated housing, you know, residents just for the upper class. And it really set the stage for a whole set of phenomenon that became common during the 20th century. It has a gate. So you had to enter and be questioned by a gatekeeper. It has serpentine streets. It has a set of beautiful landscape improvements. It's very well landscaped. It has a beautiful, it's located in the beginning of the foothills there. So you can actually have long distance views. It kind of creates this vision, you know, a vision that had been present with Alec, you know, Andrew Jackson, Downing, the architect and landscape designer of what. And something that the English had been doing as well in Regents Park and other parts of Britain. Of how can one create an alternative to the kind of messy industrial city, you know, an alternative specifically for the upper classes who are actually, you know, making that industrial city and owning it and the like. And what it was also motivated in this, I think starts to bring up the kind of perversity of someone like Duncan McDuffie. It was motivated by both trends and nationalism, Emerson by Sweden, Borgen ideas of the merger of practical life and nature of. And a lot of the residents of Llewellyn Park were abolitionists. They were there were businessmen, but there were, you know, conservative business, but there were also abolitionists. It was kind of a utopian community in some ways, although it didn't remain that for long, kind of like Sea Ranch in California in the 1960s, planned on utopian grounds. So what I find to be this really kind of strange. Cohabitation already in the middle of the 19th century that proceeds into the 20th century are people who love nature, who plan utopias, who are interested in philosophies of the harmony of, of humans as well as, as well as humans and nature of reconciling somehow industry with the natural world, these kinds of ideas. Find their way, you know, to someone like Duncan McDuffie, right? Because Duncan McDuffie, you know, no toy, you know, not alongside his planning of all, you know, these realty community, you know, real estate communities like Claremont and Cragmont and NorthBrain Berkeley as well as St. Francis Wood and San Francisco. Yeah. He was the president of the Save the Redwoods League. He was involved in the California State Park system. He was involved in the Sierra Club. He was involved in the East Bay Regional Park District. So he's part of progressive Berkeley in a lot of ways. And so what one has to look at this, at this time is that progressive Berkeley is progressive on some levels and very regressive on others. That's something we don't often. Well, I think, I mean, I think there are a couple of linkages here. I think, sorry. I think it's important to recognize that the real, the realty movement itself far beyond McDuffie and Jason Nichols, far beyond his environmentalist, they saw themselves as progressives in their, in their literature. They used the word progress like, you know, a hundred times. And the word freedom almost never other than to say there's too much freedom in America. They were in favor of regulation and of limitation. This was the progressive movement. The chief counsel for the National Association real estate boards was leading progressive lawyer in a country helped sponsor the laws for child labor. So this is a, an aspect of progressivism. This was progressivism applied to real estate and the notion of control and conformity and social order. So these were fundamental to the entire real estate, realtor movement, I think. Okay. Thank you. I didn't anticipate that. Okay. Yeah, where it was. So. I, okay. So what I think is an interesting, an interesting context. Excuse me. What I think is also a very interesting contextual point as well. Is that, you know, I think Gene talks about how there hadn't been a lot of residential segregation in American cities up until the early 20th century. And I think what, what isn't mentioned here, of course, is the fact that transportation innovations occur in the 1890s. Significantly. So transportation innovations occur in the 1890s. Significant transportation innovations. We really go from a situation where you have a walking city. Or a horse drawn city. Up to 1890 to by 1900, you have the establishment of thousands of miles throughout, across the country of electric street car lines. And what this does is it allows industry. And then residents is to leave the central parts of the city. So a city like a city can goes from being extremely mixed use the down, you know, the centers of most American cities in the 1890s were completely heterogeneous. They had churches. They had industry. They had red residences of all classes. They had commerce. And what you see by 1910 and by 1920 is almost all of those uses aside from commerce and civic, they were literally from the city of California. They were just allowed to leave the downtowns and they move out along the streetcar lines. So what transportation innovations do in the early 20th century is allowed in the automobile of course, we'll exacerbate the situation dramatically later in the 20th century. Starting in the, you know, in the teens and 1920s, what they allowed to happen is for the city to grow in It gets to be about five to 10 times as large physically, in terms of its area. And what that does is that opens up huge areas that can then be planned by developers, these kind of realtor developers, these realtor developer builder types who are all these professions are not that clearly distinguished at this time. And then they can institute new kinds of planning. And I think one of the another contextual idea that's important to bring up is that the kind of planning they're introducing up until this time, up until the early 20th century, there wasn't much planning for neighborhoods. You know, Llewellyn Park is an exception. Riverside in Illinois is an exception. Roland Park in Baltimore is an exception. Those are the kind of model planned communities, but most communities were not planned that carefully. And so now you start to see this kind of very careful planning, which includes, you know, not only improvements like macadamia streets, instead of dirt streets, you have concrete sidewalks, plumbing systems, instead of, you know, septic, you have, you know, electrical lines, you know, all sorts, and then beautiful landscaping, gated entryway, et cetera. So by the early 20th century, you're starting to see these realtor developers take a really leading role in planning. And of course, one of the areas that they involve themselves in is also planning who will live in the community. And they do that, as Gene talks about in his book quite well, they do that through a various set of mechanisms from zoning, which doesn't work, and then restrictive covenants, which really are the kind of one of the key methods all through the middle of the 20th century. So those were some of the ideas that I wanted to add to my reading of the book. And maybe the first question I wanted to ask, Gene, is it has to do with the idea of value, right? You know, I think it's stated several times that it's a falsity, right? That property values when neighborhoods are integrated go down necessarily. And I wonder what some of his thoughts are in terms of the fact that, okay, when the FHA is making mortgages easier to obtain, and then after the Second World War, financing huge numbers of, you know, basically guaranteeing the mortgages for huge numbers of housing in new suburbs across the country. What happens to the inner cities? Well, this is the period when blacks in the inner cities can move out from the historically very restricted areas that they were allowed to live in. You know, and this is the case in cities across the land and they can move to other types of neighborhoods, right? They can move, in fact, to the neighborhoods that white folks are leaving to go to the suburbs. And so it doesn't make sense to some extent to add those discussions to the idea of home values that in other words, the demand for whites in the inner cities was decreasing, especially the older parts of the inner cities, was decreasing dramatically because they were leaving for the suburbs and new parts. And so black demand was really important. And so home values are held up by black demand and there was high black demand because blacks are trying to leave what would be called the kind of restricted black enclaves that they had been living in up until that point. Same goes also for Chinese and others who are in the post-war period start to move out of Chinatown into the wider cities. So that demand is important and isn't that part of the discussion about home value? Okay, so it seems like maybe there are three different things that you've touched on that I would sort of separate out. One was the argument which was presented as objective because Realty Board said, we have no prejudice, not because of any prejudice, we're above prejudice, but for strictly economic reasons, any minority moving into a white neighborhood is gonna reduce property rights. That violated the most basic principles of economics which were namely that anytime you create a black market, anytime you limit a commodity. And so those who were excluded from 95% of neighborhoods wound up paying on average 20 to 30% more for the same quality housing. So you built up this intense demand and often to move into those white neighbors, to move into Compton, to move into those areas in the early 50s, they did it through having to pay speculators that 20 to 30% premium. So one is just the notion of value, this artifice of economics which was based really on the value to whites because realtors and the economists and the real estate economists viewed only the values that mattered to whites as being important. So that's sort of one dimension. The second dimension was the belief, and maybe not surprising in the depression but a belief that neighborhoods go through an inevitable cycle that was likened to sort of an aging body that loses the strength of its immune system and that only the strongest neighborhoods, newer neighborhoods or neighborhoods that really would maintain their values that others would inherently deteriorate. And that was sort of the premise of the mapping system that then got perverted into the redlining thing where the redlining maps which weren't known at the time, they weren't public, you couldn't get a copy. In fact, the NAACP, finally after four years of effort finally were able to see the requirements of the FHA guy. But these redlining maps were based on the premise that any area where minorities lived or industry was inherently a place that wouldn't protect home values 25 years from their FHA was ensuring loans 25 years in the future. So that was presented and saying FHA isn't racially intolerant, FHA is simply accepting the fact that the government is at risk. And the other consequence of this, this I think affects property values and the wealth gap and everything else was the government starting in the 30s basically provided 100% insurance. So a developer could get a conditional commitment to build vast new suburbs until then developers often built 10 homes a year or 20 homes a year. People didn't build thousands of homes. They could do this because they had a conditional commitment from the federal housing administration, 100% guaranteed loans. They could go to a bank in the middle of the depression, get 100% financing, no cash. But if you lived in these older racially mixed neighborhoods inner city neighborhoods, it was no cash at all. No money to improve, no money to build anything. So you had these areas that were starved whereas here you had all this capital going into high infrastructure in brand new suburbs that were racially restrictive. So values got separated by the very process of the federal government directing where income would go and of course the loans, the FHA loans that were made and the VA loans in the 50s that were almost exclusively the whites they became the basis of the wealth of the vast middle class of this country in a way that those who were included from those programs couldn't participate in. And so if you see a racial wealth gap today of 10 to one it's because you look at the Levitowns homes were sold at one sixth their relative cost compared to income of what they are today even in the same Levitown, not just California. And so people lost the opportunity to buy homes at a time when it was cheaper to get an FHA loan to buy a home than it was to rent. But that was available if you were a white. Okay, thank you. Well, I think that's sort of the context. All right, another question is this we, I think toward the end of your book you talk about the ongoing segregation in the American cities and suburbs. And I was curious about your thoughts on gated communities because gated communities are also focused on social control. They're motivated by a lot of the predominance of them are areas of ethnic change. There's xenophobia, there's an anti-urbanism and segregation and gating seems to be a kind of similar practices of social exclusion and the privatization of space. So I wonder if what your thoughts are on gating as an alternative in the latter part of the 20th century, 25% of new home communities are gated now. And a lot, and even the ones that aren't gated have very strict homeowner association regulations. So people are putting themselves paradoxically in a situation of high level of regulation in order to prevent so-called undesirable activity that could lower the quality of life as well as home values. Yeah, I think gated communities are sort of symbolic of all these trends and of fear of neighbors and fear of other races and needing to preserve social, there's as much about social classes as about race. I think that's true. I think the broader reasons that segregation has to remain is sort of the argument I'm making in the book is that over the realtors after fair housing, they had to accept fair housing that's on their letterhead, but the forces they put in place, including the creation of homeowners associations of all types, the kinds of developments, the creation of separate cities that were gonna be entirely suburban cities, instead of Oakland expanding separate communities because they could control land use, all those forces that were put in place during the period that I'm describing were very powerful legacies and would have taken government enormous effort by government which was tried and opened communities in various efforts under fair housing and always rejected by Republican administration because it violated the idea of freedom that it becomes such a centerpiece of the Republican party on every issue. And so I think if you wanna ask why segregation persists, it's because of the lack of government action to overcome the legacy that was put in place during all those decades. So I think that's the broader thing at all economic levels, not just of gated communities. Right, another question I have is relating to something I was talking about and if we can bring back Duncan McDuffie, he's a great kind of example, right? Someone who was an ardent environmentalist, progressive and at the same time segregationist and isn't there a linkage, right? Between the development of this kind of ideal suburb, right? The kind of perfect suburb that's divorced from the city, the kind of anti-urban suburb and the, you know, you're excluding, you know, the same things are excluded in this, you know, the early racial, the early covenants not only excluded race, but they excluded industry, they excluded multiple family dwellings, you know, they were class-based, they were anti-industry, they're anti-commerce. So there's a, it seems broader, right? It seems like race is a part of a larger package where you have the development, you know, I think if you, one travels around the world, one of the things I've noticed having been to many countries is it's rare to find a place like the United States where there are so few people walking on the streets, especially in suburbs, you know, people are just really ensconced in their homes. We have a kind of high privatization, you know, kind of fortress of merit, fortress domesticana. And it all seems to, you know, so the distrust of people who are different than you, who are poor, who are black, who are Mexican, seems to go along with that. That it's a bigger, it's a bigger issue and it still affects us to this day, doesn't it? Well, I think one way to think about it, I mean, McDuffie was at one extreme of environmentalism and of landscape subdivision. Most of these racial restrictions went in places that were like working-class subdivisions. So it wasn't, and once the idea started, but I think the essence of what you're getting at, I love this quote, this was a sign in the hills of Hollywood land, a development in Los Angeles. And here was their ad. And it said, protect your family by securing a home place in the home place in the hills of Hollywood land, secured by fixed and natural restrictions, fixed restrictions being racial restrictions against the inroads of metropolitanism. And yet within 25 minutes of seventh and Broadway, are you gonna sit idly by and let the march of progress go unheeded? The essence of the development of Los Angeles, the fastest growing city in the country, was come here, but find and be at the center of progress and of activity and all this stuff, but in a city that wouldn't be metropolitan, that your life wouldn't be metropolitan. So it was this two combined things of progress and speed and activity at the same time you could be insulated from that. And I think that was the message, that was sort of the appeal and the American dream that was being promoted by the realtors that added to it this racial feature of the American dream. And ultimately the argument, I hope we get to talk about freedom in the discussion, but ultimately it basically racialized freedom in the same way they had racialized real estate in order to defend their segregationist practices. Right, okay, freedom, yeah. I mean, the one aspect of the book that I find intriguing or worth asking or questioning is it's very realtor centric. You've kind of put it a lot on realtors and not a lot on anyone else. So it's kind of divorced from, like I mentioned, transportation technology, it's divorced from a lot of things. And it kind of just hones in on the realtors as the kind of culprits, despite the fact that racism was widespread without realtors, right? It was widespread before realtors existed, but segregation required realtors. Right, and then you argue that this idea of freedom, which freedom not to wear a mask, freedom not to get a vaccine in contemporary times or originates in large part with the realtors in that 1964 amendment, but wasn't, I mean, and then I was thinking about the election with Johnson and Goldwater, right? Goldwater is running in 1964 and Goldwater, right? He has this famous book, right? The Conscience of a Conservative, which is published in 1960, so several years beforehand. And it's all about freedom of workers not to unionize, not to be part of unions. That's the argument, right? It's the right to work. It's the beginning of right to work and it's exactly the same argument. It's a little noise, isn't it? So Goldwater... Yeah. Yeah, so Goldwater in the 50s already, right? Because, in fact, he has a chapter, Freedom for Labor. I looked at the text. One of the chapters is all about freedom. And it's very similar to what the realtors are talking about. So wasn't Goldwater a tremendous influence on the realtors? You kind of make it out like... Let me separate that out. So... Because it seems another instance of the realtors being... So Goldwater argument started using... Maybe my connection isn't good. Let me move to another spot in my house in case it's better. Laura, are we getting close to the point where we want to take questions? Yes, do we have questions? Maybe after this, we should take questions. Yes, please. Yes, please, people, if you have a question, please put it in chat and we will pass it on. But to answer your question, Goldwater used arguments of freedom of association in the union campaigns, but they only won 40% of the vote. And William Nolan, who ran for... The governor in 1958 also supported a anti-union move. He got defeated, he only won 40% of the vote. The difference in 1964 was Goldwater, those kinds of arguments about abstractions of freedom and attacks on unions didn't do well. Whereas this argument of freedom of choice, of individual freedom of choice and his colorblind freedom resonated far more because it directed, for many of the same union members, in fact, 82% of white union voters voted for this. This became clearly the recipe for how could you create a new kind of Republican party that would be not 40% of the vote, but would get the vast majority of the vote, including in places like California where most voters had supported the Civil Rights Act. So I think it was this, what I try and lay out in the book is what it was particularly, maybe this will be part of the questions we get, what it was particularly about the realtors phrasing of freedom and the timing of that that proved so influential. And I think was influential in the creation of a new Republican party, something that hadn't existed before a national conservative party that hadn't existed before this era. So I think it's a particular ideology that I wanna hone in on. Let's hear what the questions are. Okay, Pam will read out the first question. Well, I don't see any, so far nobody seems to have typed in. We do have one, we do have one. What are solutions today from your perspectives or did I miss hearing them? That's from, I'm not sure who the gentleman is or the woman or gentleman here. Okay, so take that question, please. Well, okay, so let's, we can talk about the world of fair housing itself, which operates on two levels. And then I'll talk about the racial wealth gap in the world of fair housing, the two elements for the federal fair housing law. One is sort of anti-discrimination and the other is about community integration and the fair housing rules themselves has not been adequately enforced. There's not money for enforcement, there's not administrative systems, even despite changes and improvements in those rules. And one of the key areas that I think you could focus on is if you look at like, there was a, if you look at discrimination that exists informally today, informally by banks who turned down African-Americans with the same credit scores by twice the number, they do whites, discrimination by appraisers, there have been lots of articles about that, discrimination by real estate agents. If people knew they would lose their licenses, if those licensing rules were enforced, it would have a powerful effect at this level of informal individual discrimination. So that's sort of one area, but I think fair housing advocates talk about. At the community level, there was a, there've been various efforts to part of the fair housing law in 1968 said that the federal government shall use its funds and deny funding from communities that don't enable integration. There was an effort certainly in the 1960s to do that, Nixon quashed that, the Oakland communities. And he said, you know what his answer was? He said, the patterns we have now, segregated neighborhoods are the result of the individual choice of millions of people, white and black, as opposed to the organized discrimination that I've tried to show happened. When Obama put in provisions for this to tie federal funding to this, this was one of the things that was circumvented by Trump in 2020, it's been rescinded by Biden, but there are lots of issues about that, about should federal support be tied to those things. So those are two of the things at the sort of national level that I think could make fair housing efforts stronger. But as I say, the resistance to them comes from this belief that your individual right to have your own life in terms of freedom isn't something that's balanced across the country and with the needs of everybody, but freedom belongs to you as an individual absolute right without regard to those of others. Being along these lines, I just wanna ask about what's happening now with the reparations commission of San Francisco, we are the first state and city to have something like this really officiated and there have been suggestions by the various commissioners to include reparations for housing of past discrimination. And I wanted to find out from you about your feeling about that or how that could be integrated into the reparations. Well, some of the work that I work, doing housing financing for state and local agencies. So some of the work we're doing in Massachusetts involves using, this is the federal funds ARPA that came last year or during the pandemic, they're creating a program that's gonna focus on deeper down payment assistance for people from socially disadvantaged backgrounds. I'm working at the moment on efforts with the state of California for shared appreciation program again to help home buyers where I think given California's constitution, it's not gonna racially call out particular individuals by race as to who should get benefits but where we can provide additional benefits to people who've lived in historically redlined areas. So we're working on approaches like that because once you make it about racial defined result in not only political but in a legal constitutional challenges that can go on for years. So the question I think in practical terms, if it's governmental policy is how can you do something that addresses those results without necessarily calling out people by their individual races? And so I think people who've lived in historically redlined areas for five or the last 10 years, that can get at the same, those are some of the approaches we're using to get at that. If you want to really crazy ideas is only my own personal idea but if you ask what the realtors could do about this bear in mind when we usually talk about reparations people's reaction is, well, this had nothing to do with me. This was done 50 years ago or this was done by my parents or immigrants. They moved here, not my, why is this my responsibility? The realtors is a somewhat different case. The same realtor organization that used their cartel-like power in race at the same time doubled real estate commissions in the early 1900s from 3% to 6% where they roughly stay today. If you took for the above the median home price in the country sold by realtors, about $370,000, if you took 1 tenth of 1% of the amount of those commissions of the National Association of Realtors made that a voluntary system to make up for what they'd done to run a program for down payment assistance run by state and local governments for socially discriminated against individuals, it wouldn't run into the kinds of legal issues because it would be private funds. So that's if the realtors wanted to do something about this, this is a way they are economically benefiting from the same cartel-like power with which they, of the same exact organization that created segregation in this country. Richard, did you wanna throw in something on this? No, I'm fine. Okay. Pam, can you see the questions now coming up? I see a question from Terence Johnson and I don't know if you've already covered this. It's just about the enforcement and proper execution of these ideas. You know, the question I would have is whether there's the political will to do that because it's as someone, I mean, I grew up in the deep South and my father was involved in mortgage insurance and the level of redlining and racial discrimination there was just staggering. He used to talk about how after the Fair Housing Act, you know, they were no longer allowed to ask people's race on form. So what they did was they requested pictures of people. Wonderful. It was like, and it's so it's getting people to, there has to be a very strict level of enforcement and unfortunately that does involve coming down hard on people, there have to be consequences for this. Right, I mean, that's why I was saying about licensing. I mean, these are state licensing rules or in some cases federal licensing rules. If complaints led to licensing denials, you would see a chilling effect on that kind of informal discrimination. That hasn't really happened in this country but that could be done relatively straightforwardly. I see another question in the chat from Jason. Can you talk a little bit about the block busting? I lived in the East New York section of Brooklyn in the 1950s when it was a community largely made up of first and second generation immigrant families. In the late 1950s, black residents began moving in and within 10 years, almost all the white residents moved out. Yeah, a couple of things about that. First, the idea of white flight, which was moving out en masse, was possible was a result of having other neighborhoods that were more highly protected. You wouldn't have had white flight unless you had highly segregated neighborhoods further out in the suburbs that one could move to, to incentivize, okay, so we'll leave. So you had those plus, as I said, these were subsidized by the federal government, these new suburban communities, both with highways as well as with FHA and infrastructure and so forth. So part of white flight was that block busting is an interesting story because block busting was the language that was used. I mean, was the realtors argument against people who sold to minorities. And, and they had rules. They said, you know, we won't sell to the first person on the block, but if it's the third person, then we'll sell to them. This is with the rules of local real estate boards. So a lot of the focus became on the individuals who were selling this as a cause, but it's really a larger social phenomenon of they created in effect these zones that you had to then protect and had to be absolutely protected else what, otherwise everybody would flee to the zones where, which would be more protected. So we sort of created this built-in system where that was the natural economic result. You know, my parents actually lived in Brownsville. My grandparents, my parents too. Which is right next to East New York. And they were part of that development. A lot of the people moved not to the suburbs first. They moved to Queens. And then they moved to the suburbs if they could. And some of them stayed in Queens. So there was a big movement from Brownsville, which was, you know, the largest contiguous Jewish neighborhood at one point. There was 250,000, you know, people in the 1920s. But by the 50s, it starts to change. And by the late 60s, there are virtually no Jews left and it's largely black. And it was a poor neighborhood always. It was poor in the 20s and it was poor in the late 60s. But so they were moving to get to a better neighborhoods. But I think that the move was exacerbated, right? By the racial transition. And so it was remarkably fast in the 1960s, like a lot of neighborhoods in the Bay Area too. You know, like the Fillmore in San Francisco or parts of Oakland. You know, you see neighborhoods going from 90 to 100% white to 90 to 100% black in 10 to 15 years, which is really rapid. But they did move to neighborhoods, they usually to apartments in Queens or sometimes better parts of other parts, better, you know, wider parts of Brooklyn. And then eventually, you know, when people had some of the people at least, you know, had the, my parents, they were able to move to neighborhoods like Great Neck, you know, on Long Island. So, you know, to go all the way to the suburbs, which were, you know, had much more of the so-called protections, you know, racial protections than city neighborhoods. Okay, are there any other questions? If you have any other questions, please put them in the general chat to everybody. Otherwise, Mitchell or Jean, do you have any other questions for each other before we close out? Well, maybe if I can, let me, since I haven't really done it, let me talk just a little about the power of this idea of freedom that the realtors used, which, you know, Mitchell asked, you know, what was it about the realtors? My point is it wasn't the national review intellectuals nor the conservative politicians who created these ideas. These were really created. And one of the things I did in the book, because I went to the archives of the National Association of Realtors, where you'll find an inch and a half thick was called forced housing action kit, which was all the materials they gave every real estate board in the country to fight fair housing. And it said, never speak about race, only speak about freedom. And it created step by step the arguments that you should use. And if you read this book, it's as though you're reading our political history ever since from this. And one of the keys, there are I think three key things that were promoted in this. One was the notion, and the power of these ideas went beyond race. And that's why it's been so incredibly powerful in the country. It was, as I said, at the time conservatives were divided between social conservatives and, you know, traditionalist, often Catholic, supported Sunday blue laws, controls on contraception and so forth. And libertarians like Goldwater, right? So there was this very striking division between these two groups but a very hard time agreeing on anything. And what the Realtors did was use the language of libertarianism to defend and insist on social traditions. On the same social traditions the social conservatives wanted. So it provided a unifying language which has united conservatives ever since. A second thing that it did was it elevated questions about, you know, where you could live or number of homeowner complaints or any issue like that into a trend. This is a transcendental into a transcend into a transcendent question. One above politics, one about your basic freedom that that was what was at stake in each of these issues which gave a reason and people that, you know, liberals and progressives are fond of saying, well, why do, you know so many working class whites support, you know things that seem to be against their economic interests? Well, for one reason it's because they see their freedom as being at stake which transcends those economic interests and makes people noble for defending their freedom. The third thing it did was it created a unifying ideology for a new Republican party that in 1964, Republicans in Congress voted much more strongly than Democrats even the same as in the North for civil rights and the Voting Rights Act. A new Republican party was being born. It originally been suggested by Charles Wallace Collins in the South in 1948 as a way to protect Jim Crow. We said if Southern Democrats leave their party and join those Republicans who will be against federal control of business and federal control of civil rights will have a national majority party. That became possible after 1964 but it took an ideology that would be racially neutral that would use colorblind freedom that could be used both North and South to win if it can win 75% of the white vote in California, you could win anywhere. So it took that ideology that became the end this notion of freedom as being the unifying issue, freedom of choice could be used to elevate as absolute rights, guns, abortion, each of these things. So even though these are disparate social movements they cohere by having the same notion of freedom at their core. And so every issue, every message reinforces that. So when you take these things they're all a version of what I call exclusive freedom as opposed to inclusive freedom. But that became so much the mantra, so much the centerpiece of the Republican Party. It's very hard. It basically creates its own dynamics. And so you see the kinds of issues about vaccine mandates and mask mandates today because it's part of that same fundamental notion that only that notion of freedom that's all America is about and is for. I'll shut up. Yeah, I mean, what's, I mean again I bring back the gated community and the CCNRs. That's so ironic then, isn't it? That those are all about limiting freedom. So you have the same huge group of Americans willing to have their freedoms limited dramatically. You can't paint a house the color you want. You can't put in plants that you want. You can't put up a flag of any type. And the restrictions are extremely varied but they're restrictions and they're onerous in a lot of ways. And this is the way a lot of, so it's a kind of paradox within this argument of freedom that people have agreed to a greater and greater level of limits to their freedom to express themselves. Because what is expressing yourself through the design of your house or the color of your house. I mean, this is fun. It's like, imagine telling people that you have to wear a certain type of clothes, you know, every day. I don't think it's paradoxical if you view this idea of freedom as being your right to live in a traditional community. If that's what freedom means, is your right to have things a certain way that excludes outsiders and excludes people who don't belong then it becomes, then it helps explain that paradox. They're not traditionally even these communities. Well, I know, but the image of them is, the image that they're trying to maintain. No, the image is traditional because they advertise the latest golf courses, golf course communities kind of pioneered this in the late fifties. Retirement communities pioneered this. That wasn't traditional to have communities where people, all people are retired. So they weren't traditional. I mean, and then- Let me take away the word traditional and say community conformity. It's freedom as being the right to live and conforming to community. That's the key idea of the realtors for community. That's almost like, you know, it's almost takes away, you know, it's not freedom in any way. To liberals. I mean, you know. Okay, gentlemen, I've come to the end of our program and our time and I wanna thank you for really uncovering and also parsing all of the issues of housing and discrimination that have created such division in this country and also that affects our civil rights. This is part of a program that is funded by the NEH on civil rights and we are presenting films and lectures and talks that are part of a discussion on civil rights and how it's expressed through our various institutions and culture. So I wanna thank you both, thank you, Gene Slater and thank you, Mitchell Schwartzer for a compelling conversation. I think all of this ripples out to different parts of our lives today and our politics today. And so we would like to encourage everyone to take some of the ideas and inspirations or revelations we've heard today and keep it in your conversation and we'll be back with you at our next program. Thank you, Laura. Thank you very much.