A Home of Their Own: The Politics of Homeownership in Black Urban America, 1968–73

In 1986, President Ronald Reagan during one of his weekly radio addresses declared that the War on Poverty declared by President Lyndon Johnson in 1964 had in effect failed. Reagan famously said, “I guess you could say, poverty won.” The result of which, Reagan claimed in the same speech, was the creation of a “culture of poverty”. Urban rebellions, anti-poverty programs and an emergent “culture of poverty” were all part of the same explanations for poverty and blight in Black urban communities across the United States. But to what extent did federal policies regarding housing and community development play a central role in the persistence of both poverty, blight and segregation in Black communities? The Fair Housing Act of 1968 created a number of housing subsidy programs aimed at increasing the number of single-family homeowners in urban areas. The programs were administered by both the department of Housing and Urban Development and the Federal Housing Administration and by 1973 more than half a million people were using the subsidies to buy their own homes. Yet by 1974 the programs were embroiled in scandal with charges of fraud and corruption being reported in every major newspaper in the United States. As a result of fraud and real estate speculation concentrated in African American neighborhoods HUD came into possession of more than three hundred thousand units of housing that had fallen into foreclosure. To reduce its inventory HUD demolished tens of thousands of units of housing in Black communities across the country—including a high of twenty-five thousand homes in Detroit alone. This paper investigates the FHA-HUD housing scandal and its impact in Black communities in Detroit and Chicago.