Richard Rothstein says government policy created ghettos

HNN EDITOR'S NOTE

On August 5 we received the following note from Richard Rothstein about this interview in the Deseret News:

This is an edited version of an interview that was done with me, and several errors were introduced in the editing and not checked with me prior to publication.

The errors are:

a) A sentence in the interview reads, “Private real estate groups fought against these policies because they were opposed to public involvement in private markets.” This sentence appears at the end of a discussion of FHA Title VI policies (suburban production financing), and as such, it is inaccurate. The sentence came from a discussion of public housing, which does not appear in the edited version. In reality, private real estate groups were very supportive of Title VI, but fought against public housing.

b) In the interview, I spoke of public housing policies of the PWA in the New Deal. The edited version substitutes WPA (Works Progress Administration). This is not accurate. It was the PWA (Public Works Administration) that built the first civilian public housing in the mid-1930s.

c) I spoke of Westlake in Daly City (CA). The edited transcript refers more than once to “Westlake and Daly City.” In actuality, Westlake is a subdivision within Daly City. They are not two separate projects.

Inner-city and suburban ghettos — poverty-stricken neighborhoods that are hard to escape and often inhabited by immigrants and minorities — are taken for granted as part of the American landscape.

It's easy to assume that they are a natural occurrence or were always there, especially if you were born in the 1970s or 80s when they became part of the national narrative on poverty. But historian Richard Rothstein believes that these neighborhoods are a direct result of government intervention in the private sector, specifically in real estate policies.

Rothstein, a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute, says that policies created in the 1940s, 50s and even 60s that most Americans have "forgotten about" created the ghettos of today.

"We have a myth today that the ghettos in urban areas are 'de-facto' — just an accident of the fact that people don't have enough income to move into middle class neighborhoods," Rothstein says. "That's not how it happened. We had a system established purposefully by public policy."

Rothstein talked to the Deseret News about his research on how government intervention created some of America's most impoverished and isolated neighborhoods. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

DN: You've documented government policies that deliberately created segregated neighborhoods. Can you give us some examples of how that began happening?

Rothstein: During the New Deal, the WPA (Works Progress Administration) built housing in cities across the country as part of the economic program to provide jobs and housing. During that time, low-income workers had to live in urban neighborhoods to get to work at the factories, so Jewish immigrants, Irish immigrants and African-Americans lived in integrated neighborhoods. The WPA demolished those existing neighborhoods on the pretext that they were slums and built segregated public housing instead. I'm not suggesting those neighborhoods were fully integrated, but they were much more before the WPA got into it. This happened in Atlanta, St. Louis, the Bay Area — segregated housing was created where there hadn't been before. ...

Read entire article at Deseret News