February should not be the only month we talk about racism and its intersections with homelessness. I’m committed on this newsletter to making sure that’s not the case. Nonetheless, I didn’t want Black History Month to pass by without addressing this crucial topic.
The numbers don’t lie: overt and covert racism by individuals and institutions against Black Americans particularly in housing has led to an incredibly disproportionate percentage of them experiencing homelessness. At my workplace, which serves young adults aged 18-24 who are experiencing homelessness, around 90% are BIPOC, and of that group, around 90% are Black.
You know that I’m a person for whom language is important. I believe the words we use and the words we avoid using do more than just communicate outwardly, but they also shape us inwardly. (This is why I avoid a term “homeless people” in favor of “people experiencing homelessness or “unhoused people”.)
On this topic, I’ve learned to no longer refer to “disparities by race” in homelessness rates, but rather refer to “disparities resulting from racism.” This distinction makes it clear that these disparities did not happen by accident, and that they aren’t inherent to different racial groups. (Even though some might look at this data and draw erroneous, racist conclusions.)
Homelessness is not inherent to blackness. The only reason they are connected is because of whiteness—because powerful white (and Christian!) men manufactured the idea of race as a way to remake the world in their image and with them at the top. The invention of race, which has no inherent or genetic truth, sliced up the world into new categories that dominate the way we live and the way we experience the world.
Generations on, this found its way into how we divided up the land; an intentional exclusion (detailed below) led to the entrenchment of racism into neighborhoods, cities, policies, laws, and codes, and on top of all that racism persists overtly today. When it comes to housing (and so much else), Black Americans experience the simultaneous and compounding effects of the racism thay made things the way they are and the racism that still shows up anew in the people who gate-keep housing opportunities; the past, institutionalized and the covert interplay with the present, personal and overt racism in ways that feel impossible to disentangle. And yet, we must.
If you have 15 minutes to spare, I highly recommend you watch this helpful explainer on the racial wealth gap in America, and notice how much of it centers around housing. It ends by offering up the idea of reparations, which I think is beyond reasonable, and which I know would have an immediate impact on homelessness, even as we see this as an issue much broader than that.
Lastly, I want to share this excerpt from chapter 4 of my book, where I cover these topics. For a greater discussion, please seek out The Color of Law, which I site many times in the footnotes to this section.
In their analysis on homelessness in America, The Center for Social Innovation reported what many of us have seen with our own eyes: Black people are vastly overrepresented among the unhoused. All things being equal, we should expect that any demographic’s representation in the general population would be reflected in the unhoused population. Instead, while representing just 13 percent of the general U.S. population, Black Americans account for 40 percent of the country’s homeless population. White people, on the other hand, account for 74 percent of the general population but only 49 percent of those experiencing homelessness.
Knowing that homelessness is primarily an issue of housing access, it becomes obvious that our history of housing discrimination is a direct cause for this disparity. In the last century alone, explicit and implicit practices of housing discrimination have left black Americans more vulnerable than any other people-group to housing insecurity. White soldiers returning home from the Second World War were greeted with easy access to no-money-down, low-interest loans to purchase or renovate homes, while Black soldiers’ access to the same loans was severely restricted. The practice of redlining, too, highlighted a national strategy of racial segregation by denying loans and preventing investment that would go toward renovations and community development in non-white neighborhoods. The neighborhood in which I now live was commended in 1940 by the California Real Estate Association as “being worthy of singular praise in its utilization of measures to keep it a ‘100 percent Caucasian Race Community.’”
While the Fair Housing Act of 1968 outlawed outright racial discrimination in housing, data shows that discrimination still occurs to this day. A peer-reviewed study on rental discrimination in 2003 showed that a black applicant with no criminal background is less likely to get a call back on an application than a white applicant with one. In December 2021, the Austin family, a black couple, had their San Francisco home appraised at just under $1 million. Believing this to be an undervaluation, they removed all family photos from the home and asked their white friend to pose as the owner. The new appraisal came in just under $1.5 million.
For the past century, as each generation of black Americans has been systematically denied equal access to homeownership, millions of white Americans have enjoyed generous government subsidies to secure property and its accompanying advantages. Housing subsidies have been a historic benefit for those who have been deemed worth investing in—through federally-backed low-interest loans, property tax deductions, and several other tax incentives.
The irony here is that so often we reject the idea of subsidizing housing for the poor based on a belief that people shouldn’t receive handouts. And yet, in 2018 (the most recent year for which this data is available), the federal government lost out on over $143 billion to homeowner deductions and benefits while spending less than $50 billion for rental assistance, public housing, and housing assistance grants altogether. 71 percent of white Americans own their home, compared to only 42 percent of Black Americans.
The ongoing practice of housing discrimination means that Black people are more likely to be renters, more likely to be rent-burdened (paying more than 30 percent of their income on rent), and therefore at greater risk of homelessness. Because housing discrimination has affected multiple generations, many Black people on the brink of homelessness are unable to count on support from their community. I’ve been on the phone as people reconnect with family members who desperately wish they could take in their child or sibling, but who can’t afford to because they themselves rely on subsidies such as Section 8, which carry strict rules against additional occupants, regardless of family status.
Understanding how this came to be is the first step in addressing it. Rooting out racism in its many forms in ourselves, in our churches and programs, and in our laws is the next step. We can mourn the realities for how they exist, but we must do more than that—taking up the cause of intentionally reversing these trends.
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