Where Y'at Fair Housing?

By Alex Mikulich, Ph.D., JSRI Research Fellow

As we say in New Orleans, to learn how a person is doing, it is an appropriate time to ask: Where Y’at, Fair Housing? Significant gains for homeownership have been won for people of color in the last 50 years. Due largely to the success of the Civil Rights Fair Housing legislation, African-American homeownership increased from one in three in 1950, to nearly one in two by 2000.

However, significant disparities between white home ownership and African-American homeownership persist and are associated with high levels of racial segregation. Some social scientists call residential segregation the “structural lynchpin” of American racial inequality.¹ Housing location is critical to predicting access to quality public education, development of personal wealth, employment, health and safety, democratic participation, transportation, and child care.

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