How the Suburbs were Segregated

Interview with historian Paige Glotzer on her new book How the Suburbs were Segregated: Developers and the Business of Exclusionary Housing, 1890-1960. The original interview appeared on Who Makes Cents: A History of Capitalism Podcast. It is being republished here with the permission of the podcast’s host

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It will come as little surprise to many people that America’s metropolitan areas are racially segregated and unequal. While the suburbs surrounding American cities tend to be relatively affluent and white, many urban areas, especially those with large non-white populations, remain under-resourced and underserved. Even as gentrification and other forces have increasingly forced poor non-white residents to seek housing on the city’s periphery, suburbs continue to be associated with wealth and whiteness. Existing explanations for this political geography tend to focus on governmental policies and consumer behavior from the time period spanning the New Deal through World War II and the immediate post-war period.

Once considered obscure academic parlance, terms like redlining, white flight and government-backed mortgages now regularly appear as part of popular discussions of housing inequality. While not refuting the importance of these events, historian Paige Glotzer situates American suburbs in a longer history of exclusionary practices dating back to the nineteenth century. In doing so, she also ties the American suburb to a broader history of racial capitalism and white settler colonialism.

Jessica Levy: Your book addresses a topic familiar to many historians, housing segregation, and yet it starts much earlier—in the nineteenth century—than most histories of American suburbs. Can you tell us why you decided to begin the book here and where you go with it?

Paige Glotzer: Many books on housing segregation in the United States focus on cities and they focus on the period after World War II. And there are good reasons for that, including changes in federal policy and the expansion of people into cities and suburbs, but I realized that I needed to provide a longer history, almost a pre-history to that post-war boom, to make sense of why certain policies were passed and why certain people gained power to make those policies. So, I actually begin with how the suburbs were segregated back in the early nineteenth century, and then I tend to focus heavily on the 1890s and turn of the twentieth century.

Now the book has an odd shape. I began that longer history transnationally because some of the most powerful people who helped write federal housing policy got their start with transnational finance when they were developing early plan segregated suburbs. I mainly focus then on Baltimore because one of the most powerful suburban developers in the early twentieth century was based in Baltimore. They were called the Roland Park Company.

So, I go transnational, then I go in very local, and then I look at the networks that the Roland Park Company helped form, including professional associations and real estate institutions. And that turns the book into more of a national story in which I follow people and ideas and ultimately, that broadens out into the more familiar federal housing policy story. However, there’s always an eye towards Baltimore, so I go back and forth a lot in the later chapters of the book.

JL: One of the major benefits of this approach is the ways in which you were able to link the early history of American suburban development to broader histories of British investment and settler colonialism. Could you expand a bit more on how you accomplish this?

PG: This is one of the things that actually surprised me in my research, and that set off my historian alarm bells that this was actually a really important thing to continue focusing on. I begin by looking at who financed America’s earliest planned segregated suburbs. It turns out that some of them (in fact, I found 400) were British investors who had a history of actually putting their money into various places where they thought the influx of white people would increase the value of land. That brought their money into places such as North American West, into places in Africa, into sites of British Empire, including in the Caribbean and including in India.

So, settler colonialism and the displacement and oppressive labor regimes that were a part of settler colonialism were the sources of the finance capital that ultimately came to Baltimore. And I think it’s really important to see how suburban development actually fits the mission of those investors because as a peripheral space on a city, those investors were also counting on an influx of white people to increase the value of that land. And so I resituate suburbs, especially segregated suburbs, from a uniquely American or even uniquely urban history to a broader story about things such as the history of capitalism, the history of settler colonialism, and the various takes on the history of movement and mobility. So in short, I follow the money and I follow the people to see why they thought segregated suburbs might be a profitable endeavor and what specific forms they thought segregated suburbs had to take in order to be profitable.

JL: The follow-the-money approach is certainly a key tactic associated with the history of capitalism, and yet, you also draw on methods associated with intellectual and cultural history in relation to tracing the evolution of the very concept of what a suburb is. Can you tell us a little bit more about the trajectory of this term?

PG: Yes. There was a shift in how the word “suburb” was used in the late nineteenth century. I argue that it was a shift that coincided with the development of the segregated planned communities on the peripheries of cities. Suburbs (plural) was a fairly generic word that would sometimes appear in real estate ads, to advertise any types of space that was just on the edge of a built-up section of a city or even of a town. It really was in some ways synonymous with periphery, but it didn’t necessarily have any meaning about how that space was used or who lived there, or any qualities of the space. And as suburban developers began to create planned communities in the 1890s, there began to be a shift in which the term suburb became singular and it started to take on specific connotations.

JL: As you describe it in the book, suburbs, like other white settler communities, were not constructed in empty space, rather, the material and cultural construction of the suburb involved a process of erasure.

PG: Yes. I argue that there was a lot of erasure that white developers especially tried to build into this term in order to make it signal that it could be an exclusive space, a segregated space, a healthy or a wealthy space. And some of that erasure was also about the diversity of uses, people, types and descriptions of what had been on the periphery. So there was essentially a battle over this term suburb, and I argue that this creation and evolution of suburb, of the word, is actually one way in which you could see developers gaining power because they helped to essentially control the terms on how the suburb came to be defined and how ultimately, over the course of a few decades, it came to be synonymous with the single-family house of racially exclusive place, a planned space. And ultimately, even places that couldn’t necessarily fit the bill later on, in other words, places that may not have even been developed and planned by big developers, sought to emulate this. So, the term suburb essentially became a white exclusive space to many people.

JL: Let’s talk a bit about developers. You’ve mentioned a few times the Roland Park Company as a central developer in your story. Now, for those like me who are from the Baltimore area, Roland Park is a familiar name, the name of a wealthy predominantly white neighborhood that continues to receive preferential treatment, as made evident by the recent controversy surrounding the removal of bike lanes, which were seen as a nuisance by many Roland Park residents. And yet, I was unfamiliar with the history of the Roland Park Company. Can you tell us who they were and how they got started?

PG: The Roland Park Company was a development company that began in Baltimore, Maryland in 1891. And they were in business up through about 1959-60 to be precise. I focus on them for a few different reasons. One, was simply archival and I think this is something many historians and people who do archival research can relate to, in which you have to follow your records. And I began this project by looking at the Roland Park Company record. I didn’t know what I would find, but that was a starting point. So, it was a little bit of a chicken and egg issue in terms of why they were central, but why did they remain central even after I began looking at many other archives? And it was that the Roland Park Company became the leaders in real estate institutions and helped to establish best practices that were institutionalized by national real estate industry.

They remained leaders in various fields. And they ultimately used that as a platform to serve as federal consultants during the Great Depression, where they helped to write the rules that became the rules of federal housing policy such as redlining.

JL: In terms of thinking about this as a history of a corporation, I find it really interesting what you do methodologically, in terms of using the Roland Park Company to illuminate a wide range of issues related to the construction of segregated housing.

PG: So, while I don’t think the Roland Park Company is the be-all and end-all, of course, of looking at segregated development, I think that they provide a way in to understanding the importance of a few different things. Number one, network. Number two, the importance of following money and ideas, and seeing how that circulates in a way that gives small groups of people power. And three, there’s a whole municipal politics to the book, that also is something where you see how street level development, block by block development and local development, actually helps to set precedents with long-term consequences for spatial arrangements of that place, Baltimore, but also of other places nationally. So I think of the Roland Park Company as both a case study of segregated housing, but also a really important starting point temporally, and then also a really important starting point for looking at the key networks that made segregated housing policy possible.

JL: Let’s talk a bit more about the process of creating exclusionary planned suburbs. What are some of the mechanisms you see being employed by developers like the Roland Park Company?

PG: So, there are many different mechanisms, and they came at different times. In terms of some of their earliest mechanisms, the Roland Park Company, as far as I can see, was one of the first developers of planned suburbs to use community-wide racially restrictive covenants that had racial clauses in them. So restrictive covenants are legally binding contracts, often written directly into deeds or perhaps there’s a document that the deed refers to. These are binding rules that are legally enforceable, every property owner had to follow them. And while there was precedent for restrictive covenants prior to the Roland Park Company, this was one of the first instances in which every single house in an entire track had to essentially have almost uniform restrictive covenants.

JL: As you mentioned, one of the things these restrictive covenants included was a clause specifically excluding people based on race. Can you tell us a bit more about this restriction?

PG: The racial restriction was new. Now, in terms of the timing of the racially restrictive covenant, in fact, the Roland Park Company had asked their lawyers in the very beginning if putting a racial restriction into their covenants was legal. And in 1893, their lawyers said, “Actually, no, that would be an embarrassment.” They actually used “an embarrassment” because Maryland specifically had such a large African American population. So, they cite things like the 14th Amendment when they said no. So, the Roland Park Company delayed putting in that racial restriction, but they did it. And they circulated their restrictive covenants by request to other developers and to city planners and policy makers beginning at the turn of the twentieth century. So that’s one of the main tools of exclusion that they used, and it was also one of the most wide-reaching in terms of how they circulated their practices.

JL: Yeah, race wasn’t the only thing the Roland Park Company included in their restrictive covenants. Indeed, one of the more revealing aspects of this particular restriction was the ways in which company officials situated it in relation to other restrictions on everything from animals to property usage.

PG: The racial restriction in the Roland Park Company covenants came in a nuisance section between bans on keeping livestock, as well as bans on producing excess smoke in the property. There were also restrictions that would double as class restrictions. Each house had to cost a minimum amount of money. Because oftentimes in the early years of development, people bought the land and then built the house. So, there were all sorts of requirements about what that house had to cost, what it had to be made of, and what it had to look like. There was a whole set of restrictions about uses: what can one do with the property? So, you couldn’t build additional buildings on your lot other than a house for instance. You couldn’t run a business out of your house. There was a whole long list of types of uses that were taken from what I think is Baltimore City’s nuisance laws. You couldn’t run an asylum, a penitentiary, a jail, a distillery, a brewery, and more on your property.

JL: No breweries? I certainly know a few Baltimoreans who would have some complaints about that restriction. So while restrictive covenants, which were basically pieces of paper, albeit, legally enforceable ones, provided one means of excluding certain people and activities from suburban communities like Roland Park, some of the other exclusionary mechanisms you describe are ones that involve the built environment.

PG: The Roland Park Company experimented with boundaries in stages. And this is where I think you can see one argument that I make in the book, which is that the process of creating segregated suburbs, and in fact, the process of defining and controlling the term suburb itself, did actually come down sometimes to street-level experimentation. The Roland Park Company sometimes did not necessarily have a plan from the beginning in terms of how segregation would work. They were trying out different things. Boundaries and the way that boundaries would take form was one of the key ways in which the company experimented. So as first, the earliest boundaries of Roland Park were built in the earliest stages of their community. Now, I had mentioned the Roland Park Company was in business from 1890 to 1960. This meant that they actually built several subdivisions over a long period of time. So, these boundaries came in stages. Each time they made a new boundary, it built on their knowledge of the previous times.

Their very first time experimenting with boundaries came when the Roland Park Company was trying to erase Cross Keys from the views and from the minds of Roland Park residents. Now, Roland Park, the earliest project of the Roland Park Company was on a high hill. This meant that they were playing with long views of a beautiful river valley, while trying to hide a black community which was just down the hillside from them. So, they began with things such as hedges, ways to essentially cut off sightlines. But also planning streets was a way of enforcing race and class segregation. Street and suburbs are often windy, but why are they windy? Well, there was a long tradition that they brought in from a new profession called landscape architecture, which was that streets should curve to maybe follow the actual natural hills and dips and valleys of the land. But they also worked with planners in the Roland Park Company to make sure that streets didn’t connect, for instance, to Cross Keys—the African American community. So, the directions of streets and the strategic use of hedges were some of their early experiments.

JL: Yeah, as you mentioned, this process of boundary making changed over time.

PG: Yes, when they moved on to their second development, Guilford, although a few things have changed. So, they began in 1891. Guilford was built around 1912-13. Gilford was being built in a moment where the Roland Park Company had more competition, where the African-American population of Baltimore was expanding rapidly, and where there was a lot of debate going on in the city about essentially creating racially exclusive neighborhoods. So, it was part of the Roland Park strategy to make Guilford stand out to its wealthy white buyers, to harden its boundaries. So instead of a hedge like they did in Cross Keys, they built a brick wall. Instead of gently curving streets around the hill, they actually had very abrupt dead-ends to their street all along the same street of where they built their wall, Greenmount Avenue and York Road. It’s one street but two names.

They also experimented with how to face the houses. So, one of the things that the Roland Park Company had an advantage in, being a developer of planned communities, was they had a little bit of control over how to divide a block and how houses are going to face. They made houses face away from Greenmount Avenue and York Road or they set it back from the street, and you can see how they would play with housing types. So if you look at a map Gilford, whether it’s from 1912 or even today in 2020, you see what amounts to essentially a de facto wall, continuous houses, dead-end streets, streets that you can’t use to enter Guilford and the wall, all right next to each other. And this was to protect Guilford from “eyesores.”

Now, what was on the other side of Greenmount Avenue and York Road? An older set of communities, including communities called Waverley, Govans, and a planned Black suburb called Wilson Park which was pretty contemporary with the Roland Park Company. So, eyesore was equated with mixed-use buildings, mixed-race neighborhoods, and actually an affluent Black neighborhood. And these are the boundaries, the more hardened boundaries that the Roland Park Company thought would be a good selling tactic and a good way of signaling control.

JL: As you have described it so far, the Roland Park Company, like other suburban developers at this time, experimented with how to create an exclusive suburban community that cater to wealthy white urbanites. Yet, this process was not simply a matter of separating the suburb from the city. At times, you show how the Roland Park Company sought to extend its influence through engaging directly in municipal politics, particularly with regards to the development of infrastructure.

PG: Yes, the Roland Park Company used infrastructure to exclude. Infrastructure or aspects of the built environment in Roland Park such as sewer pipes, trees, electric, pipes, water, and there were strategic ways in which the Roland Park Company essentially tried to get Baltimore City to finance or build key parts of Roland Park’s infrastructure that allowed the company to save money, it allowed the company to gain a voice in city hall. So, it began to be a player in municipal politics. It also began to set precedents in terms of how environmental racism worked. Because one of the advantages Roland Park had claimed was that it was clean, it had a sewage system, it was going to be modern, at the forefront of infrastructural innovation. But where did all their pipes actually go? They went down… They flowed down to a sewage disposal field, right next to a long-standing African American community called Cross Keys that was strategically shielded from view by the use of hedges and trees in Roland Park.

And so, building on the link of exclusion, essentially thinking about how did Roland Park structure itself so that its waste and its pipes and its resources ebbed and flowed and how it went into Roland Park and left Roland Park is another way of thinking about long-standing patterns of exclusion that still impact cities and suburbs today.

JL: It’s clear from your description that suburban developers like the Roland Park Company have played an outsized role in local politics for quite some time. One of the ways in which they exerted power was through the creation of professional organizations like the National Association of Real Estate Boards or NAREB. Can you tell us a little bit more about this organization?

PG: The National Association of Real Estate Boards was one of the first nationwide groups of real estate practitioners. Now, they actually had tried several times to form a group and they failed, but they finally succeeded in 1908. Now, what was their goal and why 1908? This was in the broadest sense, one of many occupations that was in the process of trying to professionalize that a lot of groups tried to do this at the turn of the twentieth century, and they look to doctors, architects, engineers, as earlier example of why trying to create some type of centralized body with membership could actually be a really good thing for them.

Realtors had a real image problem in the early twentieth century. Generally, in the American imagination, people didn’t think too highly of realtors. There is a lot of colorful terms to describe the types of scammers and swindlers that real estate practitioners were supposed to be, including sharks. So this was something that as American cities were growing rapidly as suburbs in their various forms, trying to grow, people who were dealing in land and property, thought that the time was right to try and exert more control over how those exchanges would happen.

JL: Can you tell us a bit more about who National Association of Real Estate Board’s (NAREB) members were?

PG: I should say right off the bat that this was a racially exclusive and mostly gender-exclusive association, and that was also because of a little bit of a longer history of organized real estate practice. Now, the National Association of Real Estate Boards were already real estate groups that were local real estate boards. Baltimore had one of the earliest real estate boards in the country, dating back to I want to say the 1860s or so. So, this was supposed to in some ways be a meeting of existing local groups of realtors to come into a national body. What they did was they tried to set licensing laws, so that meant that even though there were going to be realtors who are not members of the National Association of Realtors, they were not going to able to practice unless they actually got licenses that were dictated by the NAREB, National Association Real Estate Boards.

PG: They then tried to clean up real estate’s image by turning it into a profession. The early twentieth century is when you start to have NAREB producing textbooks, producing curricula for universities and schools to teach real estate, and it’s also where you start to have meetings to work out what were supposed to be the best practices in the field.

JL: And what role did suburban developers like the Roland Park Company play in NAREB?

PG: A handful of suburban developers, including members of the Roland Park Company, were the early leaders of NAREB. This was in part because planned suburbs were gaining a reputation as one of the more reputable sectors of real estate. It was harder to be a complete swindler and scam artist if you were developing 500 acres than if you were developing a row house. So they were well-positioned within the organization to step into these leadership roles, especially when it came to cleaning up real estate’s image and setting practices. The practices of developers often meant that it had its hands in a lot of different aspects of what real estate business could be.

Because NAREB became a prominent institution at the center of the American real estate industry, and because a handful of suburban developers became the leaders of NAREB, it meant that the best practices of the real estate industry were often set by or guided by suburban developers, a handful of them. The Roland Park Company was not a typical real estate practitioner. The typical real estate practitioner didn’t have the money, resources, or longevity of business as the Roland Park Company. And yet, it was the Roland Park Company and its peers who got the most say in shaping the real estate industry through their positions in NAREB.

JL: Ultimately, as you say in the introduction, this book is about power. One of the ways that you demonstrate the growing power of suburban developers is through showing how they, working through organizations like NAREB, shaped New Deal era housing policy. Can you tell us a bit more about this?

PG: Now, the story that I look at in terms of how realtors shaped the New Deal is one that some other scholars have touched on. So, I try to offer a few new things about this, and one of which is to look at how suburban developers were at the forefront of actually talking with federal policymakers through NAREB. So those leadership positions really matter. I also join scholars who looked at the way that NAREB actually got dedicated spaces in Washington, DC to meet with and lobby federal administrators for national housing bills and also for the rules of implementing housing policy once they were passed. I also look at how NAREB meetings were opened to policymakers at the state, municipal, and federal levels. So on paid time, federal officials would send their staff to NAREB meetings in order to understand NAREB institutional culture and try to emulate it in terms of the culture of what the real estate rules and implementation of policy would be.

JL: Yet this is not just a story, a realtor is dictating policy.

PG: Yes. It’s important to note that realtors were actually often opposed to federal policies, so there was actually give and take. And this is where you also get to the story of public housing, which is a whole other domain of housing policy during the New Deal, which was often carried out by separate people from the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, which did redlining, and the Federal Housing Administration, which took up lending policy. So, the nature of essentially a multi-tiered system of housing policy was shaped by realtor resistance to public housing, while it was also shaped by their approval of essentially what they saw as mortgage subsidies and development subsidies.

JL: One of the explanations you give for developers’ influence on New Deal era housing policy has to do with the nature of New Deal implementation on a local level.

PG: Yes. So not only did they get to help write the rules about which property would potentially be good for the federal government to concentrate their resources on, they were also instrumental in trying to stop the growth of more robust social safety net during the New Deal when it came to public housing. Now, one of the reasons why this was effective is that the New Deal was oftentimes federal money implemented locally through local administrators or mayors or even local businesspeople. What realtors hoped to do during the New Deal was actually use this localism to shore up racial boundaries. Not just through redlining, but also through essentially helping to create, say, public housing authorities in their cities or by helping to choose the settings of federally financed projects or by demanding that federally financed projects stay racially segregated.

PG: So, there is a huge local component to how realtors impacted the New Deal. I look at this in a few different ways, but I was really fascinated by this pilot project that brings together a lot of federal housing agencies along with a lot of local and state agencies and realtors in Maryland, and it’s actually something that was done right on the border of Guilford. It was in the neighborhood of Waverly, where essentially the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, the federal agency most associated with the redlining maps, wanted to try and actually rehabilitate, as they called it, houses that they already had on their books. So there was a lot of coordination, and it’s within this coordination where you see Baltimore’s public housing agency working with the HOLC, working with the Works Progress Administration for manpower, working with local churches and neighborhood groups to all essentially create a new set of buffer zones and boundaries to essentially make a neighborhood more valuable, Waverly. And they did it in part because the Roland Park Company was right there, and the president of the Roland Park Company was tasked to head that project based on positions he had held in NAREB.

JL: So, I want to take a step back again and talk briefly about one of the key concepts you deployed to describe these kinds of relationships, namely, racial capitalism. Racial capitalism as a conceptual framework has recently seen a resurgence in scholarship on the United States. Can you tell us how you understand this term, and how you see it doing work with regards to the creation of housing market?

PG: Racial capitalism is something that I treat as the co-construction of race and racism with the economy. Now, what does that mean? It means that when I look at housing markets, I see the way that white supremacy helped to shape housing markets, but I also look at the way that, say, housing markets were part of the making and remaking of race and racism. So, the geography of race, the very categories that people used or ascribed to racial hierarchy, these are all things where housing and profits and racism were bound up together and influence each other. That’s maybe a little bit abstract, but I think one key to making the term “racial capitalism” do work for me in my book is I’m very interested in the constant adaptations that the historical actors I look at were making to essentially assume how race and racism was working in whatever project they were doing. So whether it was a housing developer, a policymaker, I talk about lawyers, activists in my book and developers, they were all working with assumptions of how everyone else was thinking about race, profit, property, and those decisions essentially then kept reconstructing and adapting the ways that race and racism works, and the way that housing worked.

JL: To that point, you show how a new generation of developers came to the fore in the post-war period and replaced some of the earlier developers like the Roland Park company. One of the most interesting aspects of the story you tell is the ways in which these new developers embraced some of the more progressive policies of the day, things like racial integration and direct financing to previously redlined neighborhoods. While at the same time, finding new ways to deploy race in making real estate, in ways that reveal the continuities between the pre and post-war era.

PG: What I choose to focus on, is how to do some of the suburban development practices that were created and refined and circulated in the early twentieth century to understand why they survived and why do they continue into the present day to survive in the face of massive cultural, legal and economic shifts. So, part of that is I look at how there was a bit of a generational shift in developers. The Roland Park company was fading from prominence by the 1950s, but there was a new generation, and this new generation of developers and especially white developers in Baltimore weren’t just coming in on an empty slate. Regardless of what their own political beliefs were, they were coming up in the context of the previous generation of realtors.

So, I focus a lot on James Rouse, who was a white developer who operated in Baltimore, but ultimately operated around the world. And Rouse was very much focused on things that would look very post-war, that wouldn’t necessarily have much of a connection to a Roland Park or a Guilford. He also considered himself to be very liberal and thought integration, racial integration, was a good idea. That’s what he would say. And yet digging deeper, and not even that deep actually, just looking at some of his early projects under the surface, his connections to the FHA were undeniable. He started by essentially choosing which mortgages got assistance and support under New Deal housing policy. Looking at his employee connections, he had many connections with the Roland Park Company. And looking at the power he was able to wield by essentially taking his FHA Roland Park connections and launching his own career as a developer, all were ways in which you can kind of see then the shift where Rouse was still acting in essentially ways that created segregated spaces, that furthered structures of inequality, but he was doing a very different type of project and he was profiting from racism in a really different set of ways.

JL: One of the things you do to tie this back to an earlier period is highlighting the continued importance of erasure to the ways in which race and real estate work together to make a profit.

PG: Yes, one thing that really stuck out to me, that I think really, really epitomized this kind of adaptation of white supremacy, it goes back to that question of erasure, which I think is still very foundational for how racial capitalism works and how white supremacy continues to work to this day, which is that James Rouse essentially made one of his very first planned developments a gated community next to Roland Park that he called the Village of Cross Keys. And he called it the Village of Cross Keys just a couple of years after the original Cross Keys was demolished, leveled, by urban renewal, in which he played a national role in helping to create. He had no personal role in the demolition of Cross Keys, but he had helped to write the rules for urban renewal, and ultimately he created a community that took the name Cross Keys, the Village of Cross Keys, to make it a gated community that would appeal to people who lived in Roland Park, and he named the buildings in it after the people in Roland Park. And one building, the most prominent was named after the enslaver, who had originally owned a lot of the land in that area before the Roland Park company was in Baltimore.

So for someone who considered himself to be racially liberal, who wanted integration, looking at those practices, looking at the way he benefits, the assumptions he made, the things he honored and the things he erased, I think all help us to understand continuities that actually were there all along, even as on the surface of American history, you see a lot of discontinuities between the pre-war and post-war eras in terms of how segregation worked.

JL: Given this long history and the deeply entrenched racism and other forms of exclusion you reveal embedded in the real estate industry, I was wondering if you might offer some suggestions for how we move forward. Do you see any solutions to the problems we face, in terms of housing inequality?

PG: Housing needs to be affordable. There needs to be stronger tenant right protections. There needs to be more accountability to landlords, and there needs to be a rethinking of policy. There are currently rules in place, on the federal level and many state levels, that prohibit rent control and prohibit any attempt to expand or rethink public housing. So, I think, in terms of our current system, honestly, I don’t know if it can be fixed. I think, perhaps, if I could speak in unrealistic grand terms, kind of need to bring it all down and start again. How we do that, though, I’m not sure.

But I think one thing that’s really important is that the system is not necessarily broken. It was, from the very beginning, meant to bring profit to a few and create inequality, and I think it’s still doing a very good job of that. So, I don’t see any quick fixes and I think it’s also really hard to think about a big fix, when you also have accountability so scattered amongst a federal system and one in which so many people have already, in some ways, very limited ability to participate politically. And that is not even including how housing segregation affects everything else, such as educational opportunity, employment opportunity, the ability to accumulate wealth and so on and so forth.

JL: That’s some really poignant advice. I think your pessimism regarding the many challenges facing those who seek a more just and equitable form of housing and the need for large-scale transformation, are shared by many, including those currently demonstrating in the streets. For those of us whose approach to activism includes incorporating lessons from our past, what are some of the things you hope readers will take away from your book?

PG: I think that this book is going to potentially appeal to different types of readers. There are takeaways that might seem obvious to some and not to others, and I think that’s okay. But I want people to get that housing segregation was not inevitable. The specific forms of housing segregation themselves, too, were not inevitable, but enacted locally, and then, also nationally over time. I think this means that even though I can’t think of many brilliant solutions for the problem of housing inequality, I think this means that things can be changed. And people could potentially look at that long history as a way of looking to the future and thinking, “Well, if it wasn’t inevitable, this continuation is not inevitable.” That’s one takeaway.

I also want to build, as a takeaway, on one of the themes of the history of capitalism, which is that markets are neither objective nor natural. They are constructed and they are arenas of power, and they can be influenced by many, many, many different factors, including networks and including political participation and so on and so forth. I do want a takeaway of this book to be that the way that housing looks and operates is… It is not natural, and there’s no objective economic laws to fall back on that—where you can explain how things work. Looking at that history is extremely important for understanding why things work and why things haven’t worked.