Their excuse (itself a racist one) was that racial mixing in housing lowered property values. The real estate industry had been deeply involved in the exclusion of Blacks from the suburbs and resisted the idea of “forcing” Whites to accept Black people as neighbors. As Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor describes in “Race for Profit,” something very different happened. Proponents argued that this would integrate cities and suburbs and give African Americans a stake in the system. The HUD act provided incentives for private industry and real estate companies to create housing markets for African-Americans. Combined with de facto and de jure exclusion of African Americans from new, White-only suburbs, redlining created a segregated and exploitative housing market for Black people, a major factor in the inner-city uprisings of the 1960s. The act banned redlining, which had made it difficult or impossible for people of color to borrow money to buy housing in their neighborhoods. In 1968, Congress passed the Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Act.
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