Creating democracy in housing: Civil rights and housing policy in Cincinnati, 1945-1980

This dissertation examines the changing geographic and economic distribution of African Americans in Cincinnati and the role of the civil rights movement, housing reformers, and government officials in shaping housing policy affecting African American residential communities. The results of this investigation show that housing policy in Cincinnati since at least 1930 helped create a massive racially segregated African American community geographically stratified by class from which neither poor nor middle-class blacks have escaped.;During the 1930s city officials and private housing reformers built racially and class segregated public housing projects designed to create self-contained communities in which social workers could train the deserving poor how to function in an urban community. These housing projects served to intensify racial residential segregation already underway in the city. But soon after World War II, civil rights advocates, housing reformers, and some city officials came to reject racial residential segregation as good public policy and identified the burgeoning ghetto as a problem. As a result, the emerging fair housing movement fought to enact laws intended to provide middle-class blacks with housing in the neighborhood of their choice and it attempted to build scatter-site subsidized housing to enable low-income blacks to escape the inner-city. These measures largely failed to end housing discrimination and in the 1970s fair housing advocates redoubled their efforts to enforce fair housing laws and sought to create affirmative action housing programs intended to encourage blacks to move into white neighborhoods and vice-versa. These measures too proved ineffective.;The failure of the fair housing movement to create significant improvements in racial residential integration can be attributed to discriminatory real estate practices, urban renewal projects which destroyed old black neighborhoods without providing adequate replacement housing, and the emergence during the 1960s of the idea of community control of self-contained neighborhoods concurrent with the white backlash against civil rights. Community control proved effective in legitimating opposition to racial and class integration of white neighborhoods. The result is that Cincinnati remains one of the nation's most residentially segregated metropolitan areas for blacks regardless of class.