Richard Rothstein’s recent The Color of Law (2017) has popularized a fact well-known to urban historians since Kenneth T. Jackson broke the news about redlining in his Crabgrass Frontier: the truth that the federal government actively and explicitly sponsored the entrenchment of racial residential segregation in our nation’s metropolises well into the 1960’s.
Many contemporary observers of Johnson’s Federal Fair Housing Act (1968) viewed it as a watershed moment in this long history of denying Americans of color their right to equal opportunity in housing. This was a reasonable reaction, as Johnson proclaimed that “fair housing for all--all human beings who live in this country--is now a part of the American way of life.” The promise had been made. Fulfilling it would take great affirmative action on all levels of government.
Taking the case of the Dayton, Ohio, this poster will explore how the Federal government helped to segregate and eventually reneged on its promise to integrate the suburbs throughout the 1970’s. Despite the support planners in the Miami Valley furnished for what was considered, at the time, the most groundbreaking plan to build public housing outside of the central city, a string of Presidential administrations and congressional sessions doomed it to failure.
The Dayton Fair Share Housing Plan was not without successes, but changes to housing policy in the 1970’s decreased the likelihood of its fulfilling its promise to address historical wrongs. In building what suburban historians have called “the northern wing of his ‘Southern Strategy,” Richard Nixon ousted Director of Housing and Urban Development George Romney, who had held up the Dayton Plan as his model for nationwide integration. Gerald Ford did much to blunt the Fair Share idea’s integrative tools when he favored Section 8 housing over public housing. And Ronald Reagan severely cut the funds available to the Miami Valley Regional Planning Commission when he took office.
This poster will acknowledge that other factors native to the midwestern industrial metropolis such as deindustrialization and depopulation played roles in the failure of the Dayton Plan to integrate the metropolitan area. While the Fair Share idea went on to have successed in other arenas, as we see in the jurisprudence related to Gautreaux and Mount Laurel, in the end, the federal government reneged on the promise it made in the Fair Housing Act.
Dayton was the third most segregated metropolitan area in the nation by 1980. By 2010, the Miami Valley had the 4th highest concentration of black poverty. How could the Miami Valley, which had done so much to make good on the promise of the Fair Housing Act, look this way some forty years later? This poster will provide some answers.