The housing situation that faces inhabitants of the inner cities of the United States cannot be understood without a consideration of the social, economic, and cultural history of the country. The North American colonies were founded by European immigrants who conquered, killed, and marginalized the indigenous inhabitants, and eventually herded them into reservations on worthless rural land. Tens of millions of African slaves were imported to labor on the southern cotton, sugar, and tobacco plantations, with at least as many dying in the terribly inhumane conditions of the trans-Atlantic passage as reached our shores.
The North began to industrialize with construction of a cotton mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island in 1793. During the next century, an unprecedented influx of European immigrants flooded America, primarily Irish, German, Italian, and Jewish, most of whom moved into the urban ghettos close to their ethnic brethren. They lived in tenements with poor sanitation, high crime, and chronic unemployment. When they finally began to move into the mainstream of the American middle class, it was due to pooling their resources, national prosperity, and ethnic representation in the seats of political and economic power.
Following American entry into World War II, there was a labor shortage in the factories producing supplies critical to the war effort. Rural Southern blacks, most of whom were not considered fit for military service, were encouraged to emigrate to the North with the promise of employment in these factories, and they did so in droves.
With hardly a single exception they were allowed only one housing option: to live in the segregated inner-cities in the same (but now older) tenements that had recently been abandoned by white immigrants, as well as the all-black sections of these cities which predated the war.
Having black skin has consistently been a more severe handicap to social and economic advanceme...