Stuff You Should Know - How Housing Discrimination Works

Episode Date: February 11, 2021

Owning a home in the US is a way to pass wealth down from one generation to the next and lift families into a comfortable life down the road. But there have been barriers to buying homes that Black Americans have faced from the time of slavery to today. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to

believe. You can find in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles W. Chuck Brian over there and this is Stuff You Should Know, the old man edition.

Do you know what I love about this topic? What? Is that it's not just a bunch of ranting about how we think things are and how people think things are. It's like so studied and statistic heavy that you can talk about how things are and then say, and here's the proof. Exactly. Here's a lot of data to back it up. It's really great. I love it when they dovetail like this. Yeah, I get the impression though that when you're talking about the studying race and especially in America, you have to back it up with data or people are like, oh yeah, I don't know about that. But I want to give a shout out to actually two scholars, both sociologists of race,

Professor Vilna Bashi-Treatler from UC Santa Barbara and Professor Tricia Rose of Brown University. Both are experts on this stuff and they helped me out big time with this and some other research on racism I've done. Dr. Bashi-Treatler said, hey, make sure you mention this hashtag we have going called site hashtag sorry and I'm making the hashtag symbol like Justin Timberlake. Hashtag site black women, C-I-T-E black women and that leads you to all sorts of good, often overlooked research by black scholars who are women that don't always get a lot of credit. So I'm glad you told me about that one. I wanted to tell everybody else. So when you, that was a stutter when you said so so sociologist, you didn't mean they were

just mediocre sociologists. No, I was not so so sociologist. I could see how that would be confusing. I was doing my impression of Phil Collins saying sociologist. So so studio. Yeah. Well, that's the last joke we're gonna tell. Oh yeah, probably. I was warned by Dr. Bashi-Treatler not to do our usual shtick when we're talking about race stuff and I was like, well, I mean, we can handle ourselves. She said, I listened to your stuff. I listened to the bras episode. Just trust me on this. All right. So then that means the housing discrimination episode officially starts now. That's right. So that's what we're talking about, dude, housing discrimination and in the United States, there is a very long history of housing discrimination and then you might say

like, well, that really sucks. That sucks that people have trouble buying a home or maybe they get less favorable terms on their loans just because of their race and that does suck. That's absolutely true. But it's even worse than that because in the United States, one of the biggest ways of growing wealth intergenerationally like over the course of generations within a single family is through a house. Yeah. I mean, it's sometimes people don't have a ton of money to invest in the stock market. Some people think the stock market is not something to trust. But one thing that has always been fairly reliable in this country, say for a few moments in history, is real estate and the idea that if you scrap up and save enough money for

a down payment for a home, that house will eventually be worth quite a bit more years later. And you can sell it and use that extra windfall of cash to invest in the stock market or to pass down to your kids so they can then get in the housing market sooner than they might have. And then it just becomes a cycle where it just builds wealth. Yeah. Like the average family in America has most of their net worth tied up in their house. And then when it comes time to sell it and the house is paid off, that's a lot of money. And then when you kick the bucket, your kids get that money and maybe they get a better house and it just keeps growing and growing. So if you put up barriers to housing, you're actually putting up barriers to passing along

intergenerational wealth. And as a big, big problem in America, still today, I saw a study from, I think, Brookings that found that the median, yeah, 2020 Brookings study said that the median net worth of a white family in America is $171,000. The median net worth of a black family in America is $17,150, about a tenth of what the median is for white people. And that is largely because of housing discrimination and the history of housing discrimination in this country. Yeah. And as far as history goes, it started with literal racist laws where they said, if you're a black person or a black family, you cannot live here. That went on for a while. And then those laws were sort of altered to the Jim Crow

separate but equal era where they said, you know what, we'll say things are better, but it's really the same effect in the end. And then they got rid of those laws and said, all right, now we've really passed the meaningful legislation and now we can just racially discriminate on the down low in very creative ways. Yeah, that's basically the pattern that it's followed. And what kind of stuck out to me, Chuck, is that before about 1900, before the rise of industrialization to a really legitimate degree in the United States, there wasn't not nearly as much segregation as we saw starting around 1900, especially in the north. Because if you had a trade or a craft in the north and you were an African American, there was a really good chance that you were going to be serving white

people as well as black people, right? And because you usually were very closely, your home was tied close to your shop, you often lived above it. If you were like a cobbler or something like that, you may live next door to a white baker or something like that. So there wasn't a lot of segregation until industrialization came along. And there was a big call for labor, which drew a lot of African Americans, a lot of black Americans out of the south, up to the north. And all of a sudden, all of those people who were living in integrated neighborhoods, all those white people, I should say, had a had a problem with this influx of black migration from the south to the north. And they responded with a lot of really disgusting

violence. Yeah, I mean, we've talked about some of these race incidents and race riots and race, almost race wars really here and there on the show. And they're always hard to talk about, but that was just sort of the reality of things at the time. In the 1930s, the new deal comes along. And this is when legislation starts to kind of kick in. When the government stepped in and said, you know what, we think we should make it easier for people to own homes. We really want to boost home ownership because that's a boon for the economy of the country. And we're going to create the Home Owners Loan Corporation, which is going to help people refinance their mortgages. But we need some criteria here to sort of establish a uniform way of like how to how to

dole out this assistance. And they reckoned, let's look at every population of 40,000 or more, and let's create a color coded map that's based on riskiness of these loans. And they said, they talked to real estate brokers, they talked to bankers, they said, help us out, help us draw these boundaries. And they came up with a one, two, three, four color graded system, right? Yeah, that's right. Because again, this was like long before credit scores were developed. So you couldn't really look at, you know, if somebody came into your bank to ask for a loan, you couldn't be like, well, your credit score is this. So I'm not going to loan. When did that start? I don't know. We should do an episode on it if we haven't already. I don't think we have.

But yeah, so the four color codes they had were also delineated by grades, grade A, B, C, and D. Grade A was the most desirable neighborhood. They were usually homogeneous, meaning white. There were lots of professionals living in there. Grade B was maybe a step down, but still largely homogeneous, if not totally homogeneous, and they were considered still desirable. And then it started to get into the lower grades, grades C and D. And C was, I think, colored yellow on the map, right? Yeah, the first two were green and blue, and then grade C was rated as declining and colored yellow. And that sort of, in fact, I think it even said infiltration of a lower grade population in the document, which you don't have to be a genius to figure

out what they were saying there. It means people of color were moving in. And then finally, you end up with the color red, grade D, which is least desirable, very densely populated areas, almost always communities of color. Right. So the HOLC created these maps, and then along came the Federal Housing Authority. And they said, well, we need similar maps, because we're not here to help stem the tide of foreclosures. We're actually here to generate new homeownership among Americans, but we still have the same issue. We've got to figure out who's credit worthy and who's not. So we're going to base it on where the people live. And they basically made identical maps to the HOLC maps. They probably used them, right? There's a lot of

debate. I don't think anyone's found the smoking gun yet, but if you take a HOLC map and an FHA map and you put them over one another, they're basically the same thing. And it's up for the debate still. But the upshot was that because of these maps, if you lived in one of these red and often yellow communities, they wouldn't lend to you for a new mortgage or even a second mortgage to, say, remodel your home. And they also wouldn't assist you with refinancing your existing mortgage, which means you're subject to foreclosure. And if you were in a red or yellow community, you were probably black or a person of color or some other ethnic minority. And that means that they were shut out of this enormous housing boom that generated a tremendous

amount of prosperity immediately after the New Deal in World War II, as we'll see. So African Americans were left out of or on the fringes of the New Deal anyway. And this is where we get to shout out Francis Perkins again, which is, it's fun to, now that we know so much about her to continually shout her out. But she did a lot of work arguing in favor of inclusion for black people in the New Deal. I guess, you know, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. But at the end of the day, the FHA imposed these rules through the New Deal. Their maps were just like the H-O-L-C. And the process of excluding these groups because they were colored red was called redlining. Is that like where that whole term comes from? That's exactly where it comes from.

Wow. So now today, any time you're discriminated against, whether it's buying insurance or anything like that, based on your race or say your community, it's called redlining now. But that's where it grew out of those H-O-L-C maps and FHA maps. And I mean, they would use terms in like their handbooks that like these communities had quote, undesirable racial or nationality groups in them. So you couldn't lend them any money or whatever. And I mean, this is still like a really big problem today. Yeah. I mean, back then, basically, and still today in many cases, that leaves you with a couple of options as a person of color. You can rent forever, oftentimes back then and still now, from a white landlord who doesn't live anywhere near that community. Not always, but usually. Or

just pay for the home and cash, which is a stretch for anybody. It's tough to do unless you're like wealthy. And there were, I have to say, there were black-owned banks, but there was nine black-owned banks in the entire United States in the 30s. So that is a place where you could turn to if you're lucky enough to have one in your area. But that was not a solution to the general population for black Americans. Yeah. And like you said, it also affected their ability to get second mortgages to do home improvements or to like expand on their house and upgrade it, remodel it. So that means that the properties are going to deteriorate and decline over the years. And it's just, it's part of that systemic racist cycle that is just prevalent. Yeah, because

still today, you know. Eventually, over time, people from the outside looking in say, look, black people can't even take care of their communities. Look at how their houses are. Just as a result of this, that is definitely, it's like the definition of systemic racism, for sure. It's just baked into the structures. If you hear dogs barking, my dogs are upstairs, and they're just very excited about this topic. Yeah, exactly. And I don't know what's going on there, but they're not going to shut up. So let's say we press on. We'll press on. Should we take a break, then press on? We're going to press on like some Lee Nails right after a break. How about that? All right, sounds good. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with

Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that Michael and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Uh-huh. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking this is the story

of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesha Tickler and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get second hand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention because maybe there is magic in the stars if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses,

major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world can crash down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we're back. And look, these things look amazing on me. Yeah, they're very nice. There's a little bit of cuticle showing. I didn't put them right up against it, but still it's passable. Well, I think if you paint them just right, that's not so

noticeable. Fill-ins. That's what I need. I need to get some fill-ins. So back to the topic at hand. That's right. Joking's over. So here's the deal. There's, like you said, a lot of debate of whether or not, or I don't think we said this part, whether or not the lenders actually use these maps, because these were government maps from government programs. It's not like they said, here banks have these and use these. But if you look at the statistics, it seems like they probably got their hands on some of these maps. It does. And also, don't forget, the government figured out how to draw these maps for every city over 40,000 people from the lenders, from the banks, from the real lenders. So was there anyway. Yeah, so they knew this anyway.

But now the government has basically said, it is okay to do this. And so, yeah, if you look at the outcome of this redlining, these redline maps, it's really hard to say, no, this didn't happen. Like, this definitely didn't make it out of government hands. Like, for example. There's a lot of great stats here. Just great. Let's trade off. Between 1934 and 1962, over 98% of all the federally backed mortgages that were issued in the United States went to white buyers. 98% between 1934 and 1962. That's right. Because of this, black ownership since then, and continuing today, is lagged behind white home ownership in America. In 2017, just a few short years ago, 44% of black Americans own their homes versus 73% of white

Americans. And then the other problem with redlining a community is you basically put a pox on it. It's cursed because that means that those houses are not going to get any kind of attention. And so they're going to continue to deteriorate. And if you live in this community, as far as a banker is concerned, you are a huge credit risk, right? And so still today, 75% of the neighborhoods that were originally redlined in those maps are redline low income communities today, which is, I mean, that's pretty surprising. And I also saw that a 1996 study found that homes in redline neighborhoods, in 1996, were still worth less than half of those in green neighborhoods. Yeah. And here's the one. I marked these as stats with an exclamation point because

that's how excited I get. But the ones that I'm really floored by, I don't even write anything except for three exclamation points. I've got three exclamation points by that 98% of back federally back mortgages. For sure. That is definitely one. Here's mine. If you might say, well, what about variables, man, and education level and income level and stuff like that? You got to factor all that in. That's a whole other side conversation as far as systemic racism and being able to go to good schools and afford a good education and get a good job and all that. So just park that to the side. But if you control for all those variables, college educated black Americans are still less likely to own their home than white Americans

without a high school diploma. Yes. That's what really gets you is when they're like, well, let us just control for all these factors. And the only variable that remains is the race of the people applying for a loan or owning a home. And it's still the case. That's when it's like, well, this is indisputable actually. Yeah. And you can put a price on this. Redfin did a study just last year in 2020 that black American families missed out on the opportunity to accumulate an average of $212,000 of what we were talking about, that intergenerational wealth per household over the last 40 years. Just over the last 40 years. I mean, we're talking about stuff that started, I mean, back in the days of slavery, but really started to take off in the 1930s

with the New Deal. And this is just since 1980, they've lost out on that amount of money per household. That's nuts. And still today, Chuck, here's another one that gets me. Black American is five times likelier to own a home in a redline neighborhood than a white American is. So this is still an issue today. So redlining these maps just set off this enormous amount of discrimination, I guess is all you can say. And then all of the horrible effects that come out of that level of discrimination, but they weren't the only things that set it off. The GI Bill really kind of came in and said, well, hold on, hold my beer. I want to mess things up too. What does hold my beer mean? It means that like there's some dude just kind of sitting there with

like his shirt just barely covering his gut, drinking a beer, watching somebody do something stupid. And he says, hold my beer and then he does something even more stupid. That's right. Yeah. I thought that's what it meant. But you know me, I'm an old man with a shirt barely covering his gut. So I wasn't quite sure. You should spend more time on Urban Dictionary. It should. I don't drink much beer anymore, though, although I do love it. What's your favorite? I mean, you know, I love tropicalia here out of Athens, Georgia. The creature comforts. I've still never had one. Well, you should come over. I have a kegerator now on my deck. Oh my God. I'm serving it up, but I don't know why I got it. I got it for friends because I don't

drink it's on a beer. And then the pandemic happened and now I've just got a half keg of beer sitting there. Got it. Got to finish it. All right. So yeah, the GI Bill, this, you know, in theory, the GI Bill is a great thing and it has done a lot of good. But in this case, it did block access to home ownership among black Americans because they would come home from World War II. The GI Bill is passed. Banks are handing out mortgages to veterans and they were actually allowed to discriminate based on race. Yes. It's shocking. Yeah. Well, like whenever you see that kind of thing, you're like, this doesn't jibe with what I understand. Just look to the Dixie Crats, the segregationists of the South who were a very powerful voting block during the Jim Crow

era and they were like to appease them and get them to vote for something like a New Deal program or to not do everything they could to block it. You had to say, okay, well, we'll make sure that blacks are excluded from this, that the black Americans won't have access to this amazing program. And they'd be like, oh, okay, cool. Let's do it. That's where a lot of that came from. And I mean, it's easy to blame the Dixie Crats, but you can also be like, well, you know, how hard did you try to go around the Dixie Crats too? I mean, it was allowed to happen. Yes. Yeah. By everybody. Despite Francis Perkins' best efforts. Yeah. Here's the stat. For instance, in Mississippi in 1947, they doled out more than 3,000

VA backed home loans that year. And two of them were to black veterans. Pretty startling. I don't even know the percentage on that. 99.98. Yeah, there's got to be a repeating something in there somewhere. And, you know, this is a big deal because when World War II ended, they wanted a housing boom. There was a lot of the supplies that would have gone to home construction during the war, went to the war effort. So the FHA said, you know what, we need a housing boom here. We're going to guarantee construction loans to you like big construction companies out there. And that's when the suburbs popped up for the first time. Yeah. And that changed everything forever. Yeah. I mean, like the birth of the suburbs were like a deliberate program created

by the federal government to basically get more people buying houses, to start that intergenerational wealth, and to create a middle class or to expand the middle class dramatically. And they were able to do that partially through, just like when the FHA came along and said, hey, you know, we're going to back these people's loans as long as they're not in a red line neighborhood. That says to the lenders, well, then, you know, that means even if this person defaults, the government will buy the loan for me, I'm going to get paid back no matter what. They did the same thing to these construction companies, too, which created this huge housing boom. But there's a caveat to it, just like with the VA loans that said, you can discriminate

based on race for loans. Even though this is really important, Chuck, even though the government, the VA would back the loan of a black veteran, just like they would back the loan of a white veteran, and you would be repaid no matter what, you were still allowed to discriminate based on race. The FHA supposedly, with the birth of the suburbs said, we're going to guarantee your construction loans so you can build suburbs, but you can't sell to black Americans. That's another one that I don't think there's a smoking gun that I saw. So I don't know if that means, like, get the word out, like, you can't sell to black people or else we're not going to back these loans, or if it was stated policy that haven't been able to turn up. But it's pretty well

understood that the FHA discriminated against black people basically moving to the suburbs by not backing construction loans like that. Well, yeah, and there were neighborhood covenants in place that said that black people cannot own homes in these neighborhoods. There were clauses that said you cannot resell your home. If you go to move, you can't sell it to a black family. Yeah, dude, if you want to be startled, go search that on Google images. There's like pictures of these clauses in deeds that say you can't sell to anybody who's not white, or even specifically, you can't sell to anybody who's black. It's really jarring. Yeah, and it's, I mean, it was sort of expressly understood that the suburbs were being created

for a reason, and that's to get white people out of the city to a place where they could live among themselves. And it's something that's still going on. I mean, during the most recent presidential election campaign, Donald Trump started playing, praying on these fears again. He was saying things like, literally, suburban housewives of America, Biden will destroy your neighborhood and your American dream. People living their suburban lifestyle dream will no longer be bothered or financially hurt by having low income housing built in your neighborhood. And these are literal quotes, and it's just, he's trying to garner a certain kind of vote, to be sure. But, you know, we'll get to other stuff. I mean, Trump has a long history in his

family with he and his father of housing discrimination. But the end result of all this is white people, you know, people call it white flight, they left the cities, moved to the suburbs, people that were in the city still, these African American families, and these yellow and redline communities, were sort of stuck there. So the government steps in to build affordable housing, which at first were racially integrated, there were black people and white people. But then, even the lower income white people fled for the suburbs. Yeah, because wages rose. Yeah, and they left cities and urban communities almost entirely black.

Yeah, so proportionately speaking, there was a tremendous drain of white people from the cities. I'm sure it was different on a city to city base. As a matter of fact, I know it was. There's not a, you can't put a whole blanket of history over every square inch of the United States. So different cities had different experiences, but proportionately speaking, black people have always made up a smaller amount of the American population overall. But then if you look at the, you know, percentage of black people say in a city in 1990, I think is when it peaked for Atlanta in particular, that's like say 50% black or something. That's a way larger proportion or disproportionate amount of black people living

in the city than say in the suburbs. And then conversely, Chuck, when you look at the suburbs and the statistics about race or demography in the suburbs, then it really kind of all comes home. Yeah, and you know, they're living in the suburbs. They decide, you know, we still need to go into the city sometimes. So we need interstates to get us there because we like going to concerts occasionally or seeing a professional sports team play. That's right. And so they built these interstates. They kind of barreled through black neighborhoods, built them there. They often became a dividing line. And, you know, these communities were set up to fail. They had less frequent garbage pickup. They had inadequate funding to keep up this public housing that they

built, lower access to basic utilities. And they were just in no position to succeed, basically. No, and I'm trying to remember what episode we talked about Pruitt-Igo housing project in St. Louis. I think it was the environmental psychology episode if I'm not mistaken. But that was a really good example of this of how people pointed to that people from the outside and were like, look, you can't like black people can't take care of anything. Look at this degraded state that this housing project is in. And it's like you said, like they were set up to fail through all through like a lack of attention, a lack of funding, just a lack of basically everything. And that kind of seems to keep perpetuating these biases. For example, and this is a big one that

we'll talk about later, that white people think if black people move into an area, their housing values are going to go down because of stuff like that. Yeah. I mean, that's sort of the, I guess you could call it the dog whistle that everyone leans on. They're like, hey, you know, we don't mind. We're not bigoted at all. We just want to keep our housing values up. That's right. So that one and then the myth that black people are just inherently uncredit worthy or not credit worthy are the two things that seem to be used the most as cover for like you said, post civil rights era segregation in the United States, the dog whistle, like you said. Yeah. I mean, and now is when we can talk a little bit about

gentrification because I mean, the way housing has worked in this country is really fascinating and really gross in a lot of ways. But just interesting to look at from a bird's eye point of view, the way people move around. And what eventually happened with the cities is that, you know, call them what you want, yuppies or dinks. There's a lot of name for upwardly mobile white people. They're like, hey, I want to move into the city. I want to be closer to the concerts, although this is going to be controversial. I'm going to get a lot of credit for this. But one of the most annoying trends of the last like 15 years is building all these concert venues out in the suburbs. Oh yeah. It's so annoying. And I know they want

their concert venues out there so they don't have to come into the city, but I hate it when one of my bands plays, you know, 30 miles out into the suburbs. I won't go. Yeah, it is kind of a pain. Although we did go out to see you. It's a huge pain. We saw Motley Crue thanks to Anita Strauss. No, that's true. So that was worth the trip because it was Motley Crue and Alice Cooper. I just think, I don't know, I think all sports stadiums and all concert venues should be in the city. I'm with you. That's definitely traditional. You go into the city for a big day out, you know, when they start moving museums way out in the ex-urbs and I'm done. But the same thing, you could make the same case when they built the highways and everything.

They just kind of built them through black communities. That's what they did with the stadiums and all that as well too. Well, no, that's true. Think about Braves. They just plunked Braves stadium Ted Turner out just right in the middle of Mechanicsville, which is a historically black community, and said, everybody move aside and don't harass all the white people who come down to see the game on game day. I mean, I love sports, but we should do a, there's such a problematic side to pro sports from that to these billionaire owners using city money to build new stadiums when their other stadium is just like 10 years old or whatever. Yes, that is definitely problematic. It's crazy. What a crazy amount of waste that produces alone. Just that alone.

Yeah. All right. So where was I? All right. White dinks are moving into the neighborhoods again in the city because they want good Thai food. And these neighborhoods become a little more attractive the more white people move in to other white people to move in and they start moving in and increasing numbers. And the houses are generally renovated or improved over time or sometimes they might bulldoze a pretty decent house with good bones just to build the biggest house possible on their postage stamp of a lot. It's crazy how close they build these mammoth houses together. I'm sure it happens everywhere, but Atlanta's got a real problem with it. But what happens is, you know, home values are going to increase. That's going to raise taxes

on the other homes around them. A lot of time, those other homes are owned by long time, lower income residents, most times people of color. It becomes unsustainable. We have a great, great program here in my neighborhood in Eastlake called neighbor in need that is Emily and I have four main charities that we work with and give to every year and neighbor in need is one of them because we like to stay really locally focused. But neighbor in need basically addresses this head on and they raise a lot of money and they use that money to take care of these people. If they hear about a neighbor that's like in need, like an older African-American couple who's been here for 40 years, they're having to pay way too much in property taxes so they

can't afford a roof on their house. They'll go put a roof on their house or they'll pay their power bill. That's great. Whatever. I mean, it's a really, really great grassroots organization so very happy to be working with them and, you know, trying to fight the sort of ills of gentrification overall. Yeah, that's neat because it also draws the community together to help the longest term residents of that community rather than that whole everybody's on their own kind of thing, which I'm sure most people who move into a community like, you know, that is gentrifying probably would want to do. They just don't know how to do it or they don't know how to contact anybody. People don't just usually go over to their neighbor's house and knock on the door

and introduce themselves anymore. So that's cool. Yeah. And, you know, this is sometimes they are able to sell their house for a pretty good, you know, the housing value does increase. So they're able to get more money than they might have before, which can be a nice windfall. But I've also seen firsthand, literally with my neighbors, these sort of predatory home builders that come in there. And while they think it's probably decent money compared to what they thought they could get, it's still lower than what they would offer a white family. It just is. Even if they were treated fairly and they walked away with a big windfall from the sale and, you know, had a lot of money to retire on, that community was still fractured. You know, the people who are having

to move and their neighbors who already had to move may have lived there for generations or even, you know, just their whole lives and they formed a community and it's not like that whole community just moves elsewhere together. They all go to different communities, often toward the end of their life and it leads to alienation, isolation. It's a, I mean, that's a real problem even if they are being paid well for the houses they're being bought out of because they don't necessarily want to move, but they just can't afford the taxes anymore. So that's a big issue with gentrification. It's tough to get around. It sounds like that neighborhood group that you're talking about, what's the name again? Neighbor in need. That they figured out a way around it.

Do you know what there needs to be, dude? And this is Chuck 2022-22 stuff. I think if you live in a house long enough, you shouldn't have to pay property tax anymore. Yeah. I think there are some... I mean, have it be a lot, maybe it's like 20 years or something, but that would solve a lot of this problem. There is zero reason why some elderly African-American couple that's been in a home for 40 years needs to be paying taxes at all on that house, much less these jacked up rates. Right. Yeah. No, I think that's totally true. Yeah. I think there's a, if it's not law, there's a proposal in Georgia to do that once you're 65 or something like that, maybe. I mean, I'm mad about property tax anyway, just because it's... I don't know. We pay so much

in taxes, then you finally scrape up enough to buy a place that you're on, and the government's then like, well, you're going to have to pay tax on that, too. Right. No, I know. It seems unfair. Also, you shouldn't have to pay full price for coffee anywhere once you reach 65 or older. Agreed. Especially after 3 p.m. All right. Well, should we take a break and then talk about the Fair Housing Act, which solved everything? It totally did. It's all great now. All right. We'll be right back up to this. Boy bands give me in this situation. If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here

to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously. I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep. We know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Oh, just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikala,

and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life in India. It's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get second hand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention because maybe there is magic in the stars if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology,

it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right. Spoiler. We ruin things. They passed the Fair Housing Act and racism has been solved in America. That's right. In 1968, and we've talked about the Fair Housing Act a little bit, and you know, it's a good thing they passed it. It did ban discrimination in housing practices officially, but it just led to a little trickier way to get around stuff by doing it on the down low. Yeah. And that is in a lot of cases. That is for if you're studying systemic racism in the United States, the passing of like the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act, the Fair Housing

Act, and some other legislation during the 60s really changed things in that it no longer was the government in the business of enforcing discrimination and segregation. And also, now you had recourse in the courts if you were discriminated against. But it didn't just erase racism in the United States. That task of enforcing basically white supremacy and racial discrimination and segregation and all the stuff that comes along with it fell to lesser institutions and everyday people who carry it out. And when you're talking about something like housing discrimination, the people who now are best able to continue enforcing segregation and discrimination in the United States are people like lenders and real estate agents.

And even people who are deciding where to buy a house, everyday Americans buying the house, often make choices that they don't necessarily think are racist. And they probably don't think that they're racist, but their housing choices often reflect inadvertent or otherwise racial choices or choices along racial lines. Yeah. In this next bit, we're sort of busting on real estate professionals a little bit. I have very good friends that are real estate agents. They're great people for the most part. We don't mean to just paint everything with a big broad brush. No, but the industry does have a history of it for sure. Yes. Yeah, we have to talk about it. So, there was one in the 80s, there was one practice called block busting, not having anything to do

with video stores. I know it was the 80s, but literally busting up a block when a real estate agent would work or sort of act as a speculator and say, either, hey, you know what, I think, you know, there are some black families that are moving into the area. You may want to think about selling just to protect your home values before they fall, or they might sell to a black family and introduce them to the area so they could then turn around, buy these houses from the white residents and then sell them to the black residents or, you know, hopefully black residents, but at a big markup. Yeah, which has insult to injury. Like they created a basically white flight from an area just from the rumor of black people moving in and then they move black people

in and sell to them at wildly inflated rates, which is crazy. And I read one story to Chuck of one of these real estate agents that was doing block busting. They would have a black dad with a stroller walk around the neighborhood like he had moved in or was thinking of moving in or whatever. And apparently just that was enough to get people to start to sell. And again, you're like, you know, this is terrible that real estate agents are doing it, but the fact that it was effective really says a lot about everyday, you know, white homeowners too. And also again, like it doesn't mean like that these white homeowners hate black people. Like they were worried about their property values because it's such an embedded myth in America that when a black

family moves into a neighborhood, they're so bad at taking care of their house and their home values that it's going to drag the home values down in throughout the entire neighborhood. And so everybody needed to get out before that happened. That's again, that's the definition of systemic racism. Yeah. And you know, this has been busted up to a large degree officially, but up until 1950, the official policy of the National Association of Real Estate Boards said a realtor should never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood members of any race or nationality whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values in that neighborhood. That was like literal policy up until 1950. And then there was a study in 2006 by the National Fair Housing Alliance that said,

and this is something else called steering, which is not blockbusting, but it's like, hey, like we want to show you houses over here in this neighborhood, because we think it's a better fit for you. And, you know, here are the financial instruments available to get mortgages for you and maybe not just for everybody. And black people historically have not given the full picture. They're maybe not shown white neighborhoods. And the study found that steering occurred 87% of the time when researchers posed as buyers and were shown homes, like these sort of undercover operations. Yeah. And steering occurs not just, you know, if you're a black home buyer, you're not just going to be shown a black neighborhood. If you're a white home buyer,

they're probably not going to take you to black neighborhoods either. So through this process of racial steering, this is basically enforcing patterns of segregation still in the United States. Yeah, there was another study by Brookings. They found that black-owned homes are undervalued by an average of $48,000. And this is one that's controlled by all the factors like home quality and amenities and everything. Three exclamation points. Yeah, it's $48,000 literally because it is a home owned by a black individual. Yep. When they control for amenities, where the home is, the size of the house, everything else about the house. If you compare it apples to apples, and it's the same house owned by a white person and the other house that's exactly the same

owned by a black person, the black person's house is going to be $48,000 less in value just because it's owned by a black person. And that's just basically that whole idea of that black people drag home values down, becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. And those same home values are all of that undervaluing. That same Brookings study found amounts to a loss of about $156 billion for black Americans. Yeah, for wealth they were not able to achieve. And we talked a lot about the great recession and the mortgage crisis kind of when it was going on and shortly thereafter. Black Americans back then were likelier to receive subprime mortgages. These were the loans that were really expensive to repay. They had higher fees. They

had higher interest rates. They also had mechanisms built in if you were a black loan owner that made it easier for the lender to seize their collateral, which usually meant their house. Yeah, sure. And so it makes sense that if you are taking a greater risk lending to somebody, as the bank, you should be able to get more money for it, right? But the problem is, is like subprime mortgages were doled out to black homeowners or black home buyers at way higher rates than they were to white home buyers. And that's a problem in and of itself if the rates are less favorable and it's easier for the bank to repossess the house. But especially it proved to be a big problem during the mortgage crisis when that bubble

burst because if you were a low income black American, you were probably denied a mortgage of any kind. But even if you were a middle to high income black home buyer, you probably got a subprime mortgage compared to say a white buyer with the same criteria that you had to offer. So that meant that when those foreclosures happened because the bubble burst, black Americans, especially wealthier black Americans, were disproportionately impacted so that that subprime mortgage debacle erased way more black intergenerational wealth than it did for white people. Yeah, I have my last three exclamation point stat. During the subprime mortgage crisis, there was a study that found black and Latino families because, you know, we've mentioned

people of color a few times. This is not just solely African American families affected. And this study found that black and Latino families making $200,000 a year or more were still more likely to receive a subprime loan than white families making less than $30,000 a year. And that nuts. And 6.2% of white people with a credit score of 660 or higher received a subprime mortgage compared to 21.4% of black borrowers with that same credit score. Yes. So Chuck, there's a big problem with all this. And it's kind of like you said at the beginning, like when you're talking about race and especially discrimination by race, people tend to be like, especially white people tend to be like, well, I don't know about that.

I mean, there's a lot of other factors involved, like it could be anything. So you really have to kind of prove that this is a thing. And ever since the federal government got out of discriminating on paper, it's gotten a lot harder to track. So back in the 70s, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, they have an Office of Research and Policy, they came up with the way of testing this to control for as many variables as possible, and just see if it's just race that is being discriminated against. And it's called paired testing. It's actually pretty clever from what I understand. Yeah, that's when you get to equally qualified candidates to apply for a home loan or to go to a real estate agent and like look at apartments or houses or whatever.

They are trained to basically be as identical as they can be to one another to respond to the questions in the same way, have the same credit history, same job status, same income level, and basically sort of be duplicates of one another except for their skin color. They're not working together. So they don't even know, like there's no bias there even because they're not like paired together. Right. They're not like, oh, they got you. I'm going to try this with them. Like they don't meet one another. They don't interact with one another. They're just doing their thing and they're just trained to do it exactly the same way. The only distinction between them is their

race. Right. And so the Urban Institute, which is a think tank, studied this and they came up with kind of four big points from this paired testing exercise, which is they found about discrimination in housing vouchers that are intended to let low income renters choose from a bigger pool of rental housing than the realtors even showed. There were fewer homes and apartments available to minorities. Like I kind of mentioned earlier, like just a smaller, like no, we'll just look here. Yeah, the racial steering usually results in fewer places being shown. And they were steered again to primarily neighborhoods of their own ethnicity. And then given less information overall, like I mentioned about mortgage products, different kinds of loans,

different kinds of ways of structuring a loan, just not given that information at all. Right. So they also found this paired testing turns up very frequently that it's not just even people of color. It's not just black Americans, but it's people of color in general. But it's not even just down to racial discrimination. There's also a lot of discrimination against people who are differently abled. They actually sometimes fare worse than minorities when it comes to housing discrimination. Paired testing has turned that up as well. So it's still, the upshot of all this is that it's still a problem. And there is like some silver lining to it. I think that same think tank, the Urban Institute also turned up that there's been a general decline

overall. It's not huge, but it's noteworthy. It's remarkable of preference and favoritism toward white buyers over buyers of like minority buyers by about 5% between 1989 and 2000. It went from about 26% to 21%. And there does seem to be a general decline in racism or discrimination, I should say, in the United States. So that's the good news is that America seems to be getting less racist. The bad news is that America is still racist. We still have a long way to go. As the study put, the study's findings confirm a hard truth that America's long journey to end housing discrimination remains unfinished. And so there's still a long way to go. And I think it's really important for everybody to realize that there's a long

history of discriminating against people of color, but also very specifically black Americans, and that it's still going on today. And even though it's in a slightly lesser form, it's very important if it's going on at all that we erase it. That's right. Agreed. You got anything else? I got nothing else. All right, Chuck. Well, then that's housing discrimination. And since I said, all right, Chuck, it's time for Listener Mail. Well, instead of reading a specific Listener Mail, and because this episode is a little heavy,

we thought we'd have a little fun, we got maybe more emails than we have for any other episode in our history. It's astounding. Literally about necko wafers. A lot of support for the necko from people and a lot of condemnation for yucking yums without even having tried them. You were all correct. We honor you all. And we're going to, Josh got some, send them to me. We're going to try some necko wafers on the air. Listen, I just realized I think I've made a grave mistake by not having any water in the basement. Yeah, I just realized this as well. Do you have a pipe you can tap into? I think we should eat the same color. Oh, really? Okay. All right. So we can kind of go, you know, nose to nose. Okay, so I've never opened one of these before.

Okay, exactly like I thought. Chuck, nasty. You know, everybody was right about yucking people's yums in general, but also because we hadn't tried them. So that's why we're doing this. I mean, they're just falling apart when I open the package. So the strike one. They smell terrible. Now I've got a mess on my table. What color are we going to do? I mean, it's hard to tell. This looks sort of like a very pale yellow that's the only hole one in my hand. Pale yellow. I don't even have that. I got white. I've got orange. It may be, maybe it is white. Okay. I'll call it white. Wait, wait, wait. I might have a pale yellow one. I do, I do, I do. Okay. All right, apology to the people of misophonia, but here we go. Oh my god.

It's just like, it's like a flatter, bigger candy heart, the conversation heart. It's not bad. It's okay. Very hard. The crunch is, I think, what probably gets people. I mean, the taste isn't bad, but it's not great. No, they're not great. But I mean, who's crazy for conversation hearts? Sickos and weirdos, you know? Same goes for me. Yeah. Well, what's the verdict? Would you ever buy and eat Nekka wafers after this? I will tell you what, I will probably eat the rest of these. I like sugar. I like crunch. As a matter of fact, I'm going to do one of the gray ones real quick. What about you? No, no. This is not my, up my alley, but I'm going to try one of those chocolates, because those were, I think, recommended. Steer clear the dark gray

ones. The licorice ones, they're awful. Oh. It tastes, oh no. This is slightly different. Oh yeah, like a little hint of cocoa. I've come around a little bit to the licorice ones at the end. Wow, I'm turning into a Nekka weirdo. Actually, the chocolate aren't bad. What about pink? Is this the type pink? Well, that's, this is winter green, I think. People are so disgusted right now. Yeah, this is, we're literally the last two people listening to this, man. I think we should wrap this up. Okay, well, if you want to tell us that we shouldn't yuck everybody's yum, especially about something we haven't tried, we need to hear that whenever we do that. It's totally true and totally right. Thank you, everybody who wrote him. You can get in touch with us at StuffPodcast

at iHeartRadio.com. I'm Munga Shatigler and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.