The stark facts of housing segregation and discrimination are not the products of happenstance or random selection. They exist because they were engineered by explicit government laws and policies that served to entrench exclusionary practices. Their legacy persists in New Jersey and throughout the U.S.
In his acclaimed book The Color of Law, Richard Rothstein details the litany of discriminatory federal and state laws and policies put into place throughout the 20th century to build the nation’s segregated public housing projects. FDR’s Federal Housing Administration (FHA) mandated racial separation in housing, denying mortgages to qualifying African-Americans and precluding blacks from the promise of suburban homeownership. Government programs such as the “Own Your Own Home” campaign sought to promote homeownership, but only for white families.
