In 1964, California Realtors sponsored billboards across the state advocating for “Freedom of Choice.”
But Realtors weren’t lobbying for freedom of religion or freedom of speech. They were advocating for the freedom of property owners to deny housing to Blacks, Latinos, Asians and other non-Whites.
The 1964 campaign on behalf of Proposition 14, which repealed the state’s fair housing law by a wide voter margin, was just the latest in a decades-long effort that sowed the seeds of housing segregation that continues to this day.
“The real estate industry (and) the Realtors Association basically created residential segregation,” said Gene Slater, author of the book, “Freedom to Discriminate: How Realtors Conspired to Segregate Housing and Divide America.”
“There wasn’t racial segregation in the early 1900s,” Slater said. “It took the organization of real estate boards to organize racial segregation.”
This month, the California Association of Realtors took stock of that legacy and decided the time had come to repudiate its 1964 campaign to overturn the state’s fair housing law as well as its history of discriminatory practices.
“This organization has a regretful history of advancing discriminatory policies,” Otto Catrina, CAR’s 2022 president, said Friday, Oct. 21, at a Los Angeles news conference. “I’m here to say the association was wrong. We not only apologize for these practices, we strongly condemn them.”
The announcement culminated an emotional gut check that began earlier this year when several Bay Area members of the association’s diversity committee called for an apology, Catrina said. The association’s board concurred and voted at their Long Beach conference earlier this month to formally issue the mea culpa.
“We’ve been working on this for awhile,” Catrina said. “We wanted to formalize it.”
Industry reckoning
The California Realtor apology is part of a larger, nationwide reckoning Realtors are having with their industry’s role in promoting racial segregation since the early 1900s. The Chicago Association of Realtors apologized in 2018, the 50th anniversary of the federal Fair Housing Act. The National Association of Realtors issued a similar apology in November 2020, followed by recent apologies by Realtors in Atlanta, St. Louis and Minneapolis.
Realtors embraced fair housing — at least publicly — following the adoption of the federal Fair Housing Act in 1968, Slater said.
Other signs of a break with the association’s discriminatory past appeared in recent years. In the spring of 2018, the national association withdrew its support for U.S. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher’s re-election after the Orange County Republican argued home sellers should have the right to discriminate against gays and lesbians.
In 2020, the California Realtor association invited a Newsday reporter to its conference to discuss the newspaper’s undercover investigation that exposed how Long Island real estate agents continue to steer clients to neighborhoods based on race, a practice that long has contributed to housing segregation.
“NAR has been reckoning with this history for awhile,” said Bryan Greene, NAR’s vice president for policy advocacy and the association’s first fair housing policy director. “It’s just been a groundswell of recognition in various communities how real estate policy has affected racial inequality nationally and in various communities.”
Several people attending Friday’s news conference applauded CAR’s decision to apologize.
“I want to thank God for this historical moment. It’s been a long time coming,” said Derrick Luckett, California president of the National Association of Real Estate Brokers, or NAREB, a 75-year-old organization of African American real estate professionals, formed when Blacks were denied membership to Realtor associations.
“A lot of people have been denied wealth and things that they should be entitled to,” Luckett added. “And I’m hoping, going from this point forward, that we’re going to be in a better place, a better space and we’re going to be eventually one big group to make sure that we all are fighting for democracy and housing on a level playing field.”
Dolores Golden, chief executive of the Multicultural Real Estate Alliance for Urban Change, said the apology is a step toward making a unified effort to support open housing and stamping out redlining, the 20th-century practice of restricting mortgages in minority neighborhoods.
“We all applaud CAR for this apology,” Golden said. “We accept it, and we support it.”
Integration fell apart
Historians document a different America at the start of the 20th century, saying many U.S. cities were integrated before such practices as exclusionary zoning and racially restrictive deed covenants.
Slater said Realtors advocated for the Federal Housing Administration to require such deed covenants or other barriers as a condition for funding housing developments during the post-World War II housing boom.
“In the segregated South, it was government that did the segregating,” said Tom Hogen-Esch, chair of the political science department at Cal State Northridge. “On the West Coast, it was the private sector that was fulfilling the desire for segregated communities. The real estate industry was one of those elements that contributed to racial and class segregation.”
Hogen-Esch said real estate agents contributed to segregation primarily through the practices of steering and block-busting. They would steer clients away from “bad neighborhoods” or “bad schools.” Or they would propagate rumors that African Americans were going to take over a neighborhood, buying up homes cheap from panic sellers.
Housing discrimination still continues, in part because it’s so difficult to regulate, Hogen-Esch said.
The Washington Post and other news outlets have documented how home appraisals often are influenced by race, with lower appraisals for homes owned by Blacks and higher appraisals for White-owned homes or for Black-owned homes where White acquaintances stand in for the owners.
The legacy of discrimination also continues. U.S. Census figures show that while 64.5% of White, non-Hispanic Californians were homeowners in 2021, just 35.5% of Black households, 45.6% of Latino households and 61.2% of Asian households in the state were homeowners.
The denial of homeownership led to a loss of housing appreciation that contributed to higher household wealth among Whites. CAR reported that less than half of Black households earn the minimum income needed to buy a home.
“Homeownership is a key element in building generational wealth and economic security for working families,” Catrina said during the news conference Friday. “As stewards of homeownership, Realtors have a unique role to play in the fight for fair housing.”
Specifically, CAR’s leaders repudiated the role of a predecessor organization, the California Real Estate Association, which in the 1950s and 1960s supported two measures that impacted the ability of low-income and minority residents to access housing.
They include support for Article 34 in 1950, which required voter approval of public housing projects, making it difficult to build affordable housing in the state. It also included Realtor backing of Proposition 14, the 1964 ballot measure that overturned the Rumford Act, California’s fair housing law.
Article 34 remains in effect despite numerous efforts to repeal it. But the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Proposition 14 in 1967 in a case brought by Santa Ana renters Lincoln and Dorothy Mulkey.
The state Realtor group outlined a number of actions to support homeownership in underserved communities, including support for repealing Article 34 and for other legislation promoting fair housing.
The association also has partnered with housing groups in Los Angeles, Riverside and the Bay Area city of Richmond to provide grants of up to $10,000 to help minority homebuyers pay closing costs. The program has distributed or is now processing $755,000 in closing cost grants and has approved an additional $250,000 for future grants.
Donations also are being made to the Black Wealth Builders Fund to provide down payment assistance to minority homebuyers.
“It’s a step in the right direction,” Hogen-Esch said. “It’s a long overdue willingness to take responsibility for the role the industry played in segregation.”
Source: Orange County Register
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