Home Inequity: Race, Wealth, and Housing in St. Louis Since 1940.*

Home Inequity: Race, Wealth, and Housing in St. Louis since 1940.*

Colin Gordon, University of Iowa (History) [email protected]

Sarah K. Bruch, University of Iowa (Sociology) [email protected]

* The authors thank Kyu Young Lee, Jennifer Marks, and Ashley Dorn for research assistance, Matt Nelson of the Minnesota Population Center for help with the 1940 full-count Census, and participants at the Race and Space Seminar, Hall Center, University of Kansas, for comments on an earlier version. Funding provided by a University of Iowa, Office of Vice President for Research, Internal Funding Initiative. Direct correspondence to Colin Gordon, Department of History, University of Iowa, 280 Schaeffer Hall, Iowa City, IA 52242 [email protected].

Manuscript

Home Inequity: Race, Wealth, and Housing in St. Louis since 1940

There are few starker measures of economic inequality, in terms of either distributional outcomes

or historical implications, than the racial wealth gap. The black-white wealth gap has persisted

despite the promise of Reconstruction, the Great Migration, and the legal and political gains of

the long civil rights movement. Wealth, in turn, is not just a distributional marker; it is also a

key determinant of economic security, mobility, and opportunity (Spilerman 2000; Conley 1999;

Oliver and Shapiro 2006). Wealth allows individuals and families to smooth out short-term

volatility in income (O’Brien 2012; Hacker 2008;), to bolster future income through education

and other investments in human capital (Pfeffer 2011; Conley 1999; Altonji and Doraszelski

2005), and to offer the next generation a “starting gate” advantage in the form of both home

ownership (a “de facto purchase of educational resources” [Pfeffer 2011] in the U.S. setting) and

in vivos transfers (assistance buying a home, paying for college, or starting a business) or

inheritances (Pfeffer 2016; Avery and Rendall, 2002, 1303; Conley 1999; Charles 2002; Henretta

1984).

The racial wealth gap is both the outcome of a long history of racial inequality and a key

mechanism sustaining it across generations (Conley 1999; Pfeffer 2011). Oliver and Shapiro

(2006) characterize the racial wealth gap as a “sedimentary” strata of inequality—a metaphor

that captures both the endurance and hardening of past forms of discrimination, and its

imperviousness to solutions. Slavery, of course, created a singularly dismal starting point for

black wealth (Ransom and Sutch 2001), a disadvantage sustained by the labor, penal, and credit

institutions of the Jim Crow South (Nier 2007; Alston and Ferrie 1985), the deeply-segregated

labor and housing markets of the urban North (Fox-Gotham 2002; Hirsch 1983; Sugrue 1996;

Author 2008; Boustan 2016), and the sharply disparate racial impacts of deindustrialization

(Wilson 1990), wage stagnation (Austin 2013), and mass-incarceration (Petit and Western 2004;

Schneider and Turner 2015; Sykes and Marato 2016).

For most Americans, home equity is the single most important component of family wealth (Federal Reserve 2016). African-Americans rely disproportionately on home equity as a source of wealth, and yet home ownership stands out—across this history—as an arena of sustained and pervasive racial discrimination (Squires 2007; Pager and Shepherd 2008; Rothstein

2017). Formal legal restrictions, including racial zoning ordinances and race-restrictive deed covenants, sharply constrained African-American housing opportunities in the first half of the twentieth century (Gonda 2015; Boustan 2016; Author 2008; Fox-Gotham 2002). As these instruments fell to “equal protection” legal challenges, they were replicated and reinvented by both private realty (Helper 1979) and public policies—including local zoning, and the now- infamous embrace of “redlining” by federal housing and mortgage programs (Rothstein 2017;

Katznelson 2005; Greer 2013, Hillier 2003, Jackson 1980; Author 2008). African-Americans, as a result, have been substantially excluded from both opportunities for homeownership, and its benefits (Killewald and Bryan 2016). “Race and property” as Conley (1999, 5) underscores, “are intimately linked and form the nexus of black-white inequality.”

While the role of housing segregation and discrimination in creating and sustaining the racial wealth gap is widely recognized (Oliver and Shapiro 2006; Conley 1999; Krivo and

Kaufman 2004: Shapiro 2004), there is a gap in our understanding of this process, stemming from the temporal and spatial limits of national survey data on housing and family wealth. This data, available from the early 1980s, picks up the story only after a half-century of private and state-sponsored segregation, federal housing and mortgage policies, and dramatic demographic

2 change (black migration and white flight) had shaped African-American neighborhoods and

African-American assets. And it offers only a national glimpse of a story shaped largely by local practices, patterns, and policies.

In this paper, we examine the historical process of wealth accumulation through home equity for a sample of homeowners in St. Louis from 1940 to 2016. To do so, we draw on three resources: the newly-available full-count census for 1940 (Ruggles et al 2015); the archival records of the St. Louis Assessor’s Office; and a close historical understanding of local housing patterns and policies (Author 2008). We use our understanding of the St. Louis setting and the

1940 full count decennial census to draw a stratified sample of black and white homeowners; we use the Assessor’s records to assemble data on housing values, transactions, and tenure for the sample properties from 1940 through 2016.

The result is a descriptive portrait of racial wealth inequality across this era – pointing to household and neighborhood processes that affect wealth accumulation through home equity for blacks and whites. We find stark and sustained racial segregation in local housing markets, short housing tenure and dynamic patterns of mobility for white homeowners to neighborhoods with increasing housing values, and long housing tenure for black owners in neighborhoods marked by disinvestment and declining home values. The consequence is a dramatic erosion of wealth and equity for the 1940 black owners and their heirs, contrasted with an accumulation of wealth and equity for the 1940 white owners.

Racial Gaps in Wealth and Homeownership

The racial wealth gap, as measured by the triennial Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) and earlier surveys, has changed little over the last half-century. Median white wealth grew nearly

3 fourfold between 1962 and 2010 (Urban Institute 2017), before slipping during the Great

Recession. The median wealth of black families, by contrast, is essentially flat across this era, peaking at just over 16 percent of white wealth at the end of the 1990s, falling back to barely half that in 2013, and settling in at just over 10% in the latest (2016) survey (Bricker et al 2017).

This gap far exceeds the gap in median income (62 percent) or median wages (75 percent)

(Census Historical Income Tables; Wilson and Rodgers 2016). Estimates based on other surveys echo these patterns.1

The racial wealth gap is shaped largely by patterns of inequality in housing, a fact attenuated by the fact that home equity makes up a much greater share of the wealth of black homeowners than of white homeowners (Oliver and Shapiro, 2006; Wolff and Gittleman 2004;

Burds-Sharp and Rasch 2015). Indeed, for most lower-income households, assets other than home equity are rare, and often negative (Boehm and Schlottman 2008). Even as African-

Americans rely heavily on home equity as a source of wealth, their access to homeownership has been constrained by an array of factors. The black homeownership rate has stubbornly trailed the white homeownership rate by about 25 points since 1900 (Collins and Margo 2011; Buist et al

1994), a gap that persists across the income spectrum (Horton and Thomas 1998; Jackman and

Jackman 1980). Where black homeownership did gain a foothold, often in neighborhoods undergoing racial transition (Boustan and Margo 2013), home values slipped and the benefits of

1 We use the SCF series, with estimates for 1962 using the Survey of Financial Characteristics of Consumers 1962 and Survey of Changes in Family Finances 1963 (Urban Institute 2017). The Survey on Income and Program Participation (SIPP), a longitudinal panel survey of households, has included a supplemental survey on wealth since 1984 (Eggleston and Klee 2016). The Panel Study on Income Dynamics (PSID) has also collected detailed information on wealth since 1984. Scholars have used the SIPP and PSID for estimates of the net worth of demographic subgroups (Shapiro and Oliver 1996; Conley 1999; Altonji et al 2005), and for historical trends (Shapiro, Meschede, and Osoro 2013; Wolff and Gittleman 2004) that cover roughly the same chronological span of the SCF. 4 homeownership—as a tax deduction, as a hedge against inflation, as a source of forced savings— evaporated (Buist et al 1994; Kain and Quigley 1972; Parcel 1982). When black borrowers surmounted the high denial rates in private credit markets, they were saddled with higher interest and insurance rates (Chiteji 2010).

Understanding Racial Inequality in Wealth and Home Equity

To understand the mechanisms by which housing wealth is created (or destroyed), we need to trace black and white homeownership in their local contexts; in the settings where distinct patterns of housing segregation, residential development, and opportunities for homeownership were forged. And we need to trace these patterns across the historical era (from the 1930s through the 1970s) in which segregation, innovations in mortgage finance, “white flight,” deindustrialization, and central city disinvestment recast the urban landscape.

Racial differences in rates of homeownership are shaped by economic and demographic factors (differences in income, educational attainment, and family structure) and by institutional factors—especially an elaborate and sustained pattern of discrimination in private realty and home finance. Indeed, homeownership and the terms of homeownership have historically been one of the most contentious and racially exclusionary domains of American life. During the long twentieth century, private realty and public policy starkly segregated the American urban landscape—a pattern readily (if coarsely) evident in decennial census data (Cutler et al 2001;

Frey 2015). This segregation, most pronounced in border and rust belt cities, became the

“linchpin” of American race relations and racial inequality (Massey and Denton 1998). And yet we have only scattered evidence, based on local surveys (Kain and Quigley 1972) or national

5 data (Flippen 2001) of the ways in which segregation constrained homeownership, lowered the value of black homes, and raised the costs of black homeownership.

Across much of the last century, African-Americans faced significant obstacles to homeownership. Prior to the New Deal era innovations in housing finance, homebuyers had to put 50 percent down and pay off the mortgage balance in 3-5 years, putting homeownership out of the reach of most Americans.2 For those who could afford such terms, few banks or realtors were willing to open their doors. These patterns of discrimination, hardening with the Great

Migration, have been traced in some local settings (Garb 2005), and in broad national strokes

(Collins and Margo, 2011). Without access to conventional credit, many resorted to risky

“contract” sales in which the mortgagee claimed no equity until the housing contract was paid in full (Satter 2009, Sagalyn 1983, Hirsch 1998, Nier 2007). For those who cobbled together the financing, options were bounded by race-restrictive deed covenants (Gonda 2015), vigilante violence (Boyle 2004), and a real estate industry that embrace neighborhood “homogeneity” as its highest professional ethic (Helper 1969). Since the “Freedom of Residence” efforts of the

1960s, local audits have consistently documented discrimination by realtors determined to stem

“invasion” or to “flip” neighborhoods (Pager and Shepherd 2008; Yinger 1995; Yinger and Ross

2005).

We have a broad understanding, in turn, of the ways in which these local practices and assumptions became embedded in federal housing policy. In the 1930s, the New Deal’s Home

Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) financed or refinanced nearly one in five residential

2 For mortgage terms, see Snowden, Kenneth A., “Terms on nonfarm home mortgages, by type of mortgage and holder: 1920–1967.” Table Dc1192-1209 in Historical Statistics of the United States, Earliest Times to the Present: Millennial Edition, edited by Susan B. Carter, Scott Sigmund Gartner, Michael R. Haines, Alan L. Olmstead, Richard Sutch, and Gavin Wright. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/ISBN-9780511132971.Dc903-1288

6 mortgages. The HOLC, aimed at relieving distressed borrowers and lenders alike, revolutionized home finance and home ownership by offering long-term, low-down-payment mortgage options.

But the benefits, notoriously, were far from even. HOLC lending was guided by a hastily- assembled library of “residential security” maps that rated the creditworthiness of virtually every urban neighborhood in the country. Lacking the capacity to survey cities themselves, the New

Deal turned to local realty interests whose guiding motive was the maintenance of racial segregation. The textual area descriptions which accompanied the HOLC maps echoed private real-estate appraisals of the era, using the threat of racial “incursion” or “invasion” as the primary marker of property value (Rothstein 2017; Author 2008; Fox-Gotham 2002; Hillier

2003; Greer 2013; Katznelson 2005).

In some respects, these discriminatory practices waned over time: enforcement of race- restrictive deed covenants was struck down by the Supreme Court in Shelley v. Kramer (1948), the FHA phased out formal redlining in the early 1960s, and the Jones v. Mayer decision (1968) extended equal protection to private real estate transactions. But in other respects, they lived on.

Local zoning drew on the logic and motives of earlier restrictions, and used large-lot single- family zones and prohibitions on other uses to continue to sort the local population by race and class (Author 2008). Past exclusion or discrimination, and the resulting racial gap in home equity, made it harder for the next generation to buy a home, even as legal obstacles fell

(Katznelson 2005; Krivo and Kaufman 2004). As a result, the segregation accomplished in the first half of the twentieth century proved remarkably resilient (Massey and Denton 1998).

Discrimination persisted in every aspect and stage of homeownership (Pager and

Shepherd 2008; Yinger and Ross 2002; Apgar et al 2009). We have only fragmentary evidence on mortgage terms prior to the 1980s: the 1940 Census of Housing includes tract-level details on

7 interest rates and the holder of the first mortgage, and local fair housing advocates documented uneven credit access and terms in many settings in the 1960s and 1970s. Only since 1989 has the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HDMA) collected systematic racial and neighborhood data on loan originations. At that point, the denial rate for African-American applicants was 2.5 times that of white applicants. Follow-up work, controlling for the applicants’ income and credit history, found African-Americans 80 percent more likely to be denied (Munnel et al1996; Yinger

1995; Yinger and Ross 2002; Apgar et al 2009).

Indeed, for the last 30 years, evidence of such racial inequality is unequivocal. As home finance has been deregulated, discrimination has drifted from outright denial to predatory credit terms (Rugh and Massey 2010; Yinger and Ross 2002; Apgar and Calder 2005). African-

American borrowers are often forced to accept higher rates as a penalty for smaller downpayments—a small difference that compounds into a wide gap over the life of the loan

(Yinger 1995; Krivo and Kaufman 2004). And numerous studies, drawing on both the HDMA and the post-1985 American Housing Survey, document a persistent racial gap in mortgage pricing even when controlling for borrower, property, and loan characteristics ((Boehm and

Schlottmann 2007; Boehm et al 2006; Krivo and Kaufman 2004).

Discrimination in mortgage financing has not only raised the costs of homeownership for

African-Americans, it has also undermined the security of that investment. Again, the data is thin for the middle years of the last century and relatively rich for recent decades: Since the early

1990s, for example, subprime lending has grown dramatically. Between 1994 and 2006, subprime loan originations grew nearly twentyfold, from 35 billion to 660 billion, from 4 percent of home loans to almost 20 percent (Apgar et al 2009; Oliver and Shapiro 2006; HUD 2000). By

1998 subprime lending captured over half of all refinancing loans in predominantly African-

American neighborhoods, in contrast to only 8 percent in predominantly white neighborhoods

(HUD 2000; Yinger and Ross 2002). More deeply exposed to subprime loans, African-

Americans bore much of the brunt of the 2007 housing bust which, once it had played out, widened the racial homeownership gap (Faber and Ellen 2016; Faber 2013; McKernan et al

2013; Grinstein-Weiss et al 2015; JCHS 2016).

As a source of wealth and security for African-Americans, then, homeownership has been both crucial and fragile. Across this history, African-Americans became homeowners at lower rates, their home purchases cost more and were worth less, their investments were crowded into segregated neighborhoods where housing values stagnated, and they financed and refinanced on relatively dismal and often predatory terms. All of these factors made it harder for African-

Americans to make and sustain investments in homeownership, and diminished the returns when they did.

In this story, distinct local patterns of residential development, racial segregation, migration, and housing policy yielded important regional and metropolitan variations. And the middle years of the last century—from New Deal innovations in home finance through the urban decline of the 1970s—were the most crucial. It is on these two dimensions, however, that conventional data on wealth and housing is the weakest. While the available survey and census data capture important national estimates of these patterns for the last generation, they lack both local context and sufficient historical reach. The Integrated Public Use Microdata series

(IPUMS) allows cross-tabulation of census data from 1850 on, but cannot be reliably used to examine geographic areas smaller than states or regions (Ruggles et al 2015). The longitudinal panels (the PSID and the SIPP) and cross-sectional surveys such as the American Housing

Survey (AHS) and the Survey of Consumer Finances complement the picture provided by the

9 decennial data but, due to sample size and privacy constraints, cannot offer reliable estimates for smaller geographic areas. As to historical coverage, the decennial Census provides housing and demographic data, accessible as aggregate measures by Census geography, household or individual microdata, or (currently from 1850 through 1940) as complete-count records.

However, the data are limited (the Census offers no measure of wealth, for example), discontinuous (there is no income information until 1950), and—until the onset of the American

Community Survey in 2006—available only every 10 years. Other surveys, although exceptionally valuable in providing insights into the current period, given their historical coverage (the PSID was launched in 1968, the AHS in 1973, the SIPP and SCF in 1983), pick up the story after much of the damage in American cities, in African-American neighborhoods, and to African American families has been done.3

The central role played by segregation and exclusion in shaping housing opportunity, alongside the temporal and spatial limits of the conventional data, draw our attention to the importance of understanding local conditions and patterns. The opportunity here is twofold:

First, close examination of one setting allows us to use an understanding of the distinctly local patterns, policies, and practices that shape local housing and housing opportunity. Second, the newly-available full-count census for 1940 (which includes full household demographics, and housing metrics including the street and address) and the unique, and largely untapped, archival records of the local assessor allow us to trace patterns of homeownership, housing values, and housing tenure across this era. We leverage both of these opportunities (as we describe more

3 Recent industry and economic data also include housing values (based on actual sales by zip code), and mortgage data (on values, terms, and the demographics of applicants). But, again, the historical reach of such data extends only back to the 1980s (for the federal home mortgage disclosure data [HDMA]) or 1990s (for industry data such Zillow and CoreLogic).

10 fully below) in constructing both a typology of neighborhoods in St. Louis, and in drawing a sample of homeowners from across those neighborhoods.

Why St. Louis?

We choose the City of St. Louis for this investigation for a number of reasons. The City’s

African-American community was well-established at the turn of the twentieth century, making up 6.1 percent of the population in 1900—a point at which the black populations of Chicago,

Detroit, and New York were all under 2 percent (Gibson and Jung 2005). The northside neighborhood of “the Ville” was focal point of the City’s African-American middle class and of

African-American homeownership.

As the African-American population was established early, so too were the institutions of local segregation. These included a racial zoning ordinance in 1916, a set of formal restrictions on African-American occupancy maintained by local realtors, an extensive web of neighborhood-based race restrictive deed covenants, and a fragmented municipal structure that used local zoning to sustain restrictive agreements and extend segregation into the suburbs

(Author 2008; Orfield 1981). Measures of segregation rose steeply in response: Between 1890 and 1940 the dissimilarity index for St. Louis rose from 0.34 to 0.85, and remained above 0.8 until 1980 before falling back to .71 in 2010 (Cutler et al 1999). Indeed, by 1980 St. Louis was one of a handful of “hypersegregated” metros betraying high levels of segregation across multiple dimensions (Massey and Denton 1998: Farley 2005; Frey 2015). For these reasons, the

City and adjoining St. Louis County were ground zero for legal battles over race and property, including Shelley v Kraemer (1948), Jones v Mayer (1968), and U.S. v Black Jack (the 1974 case that first tackled “exclusionary” zoning).

In turn, St. Louis has always been a starkly biracial setting: in every census from 1900 to

1990 over 98 percent of the City’s population were categorized as black or white, and even after the 2000 census expanded the race question to allow multiple race responses, fully 94 percent of

St. Louis residents still chose “white alone” (47.1 percent) or “black alone” (46.9 percent) in the latest enumeration (the 2015 American Community Survey).

This was also a century marked by dramatic population loss and racial transition in St.

Louis. According to decennial Census estimates, the white population, about 540,000 in 1900 and just over 700,000 in 1950, is now barely 150,000. The African-American population, just

36,000 in 1900, doubled every twenty years into the 1960s, peaked at 254,000 in 1970s, and now sits at just over 150,000. “White flight,” in this respect was dramatic—and followed a generation later by substantial black flight as well. The City now claims just a third of its 1950 population.

All of this—the early establishment of the African-American population, the intensity of local segregation, a single dominant racial boundary (black/white), and dramatic demographic transition and decline—make St. Louis an ideal and stark setting in which to investigate the sources, and the trajectory, of the racial wealth gap.

Data and Methods

In order to examine trends in homeownership, home value, and tenure, we first identified homeowners in the 1940 full count census. The full count census is a 100% count microdata set, comprising all individual and household entries from the 1940 enumeration, made possible through a collaboration between the genealogical organizations Ancestry.com and FamilySearch

(who digitized the raw data) and IPUMS-USA at the Minnesota Population Center (who have

12 cleaned, coded, and harmonized the data for researchers) (Ruggles et al 2015). Excluding group quarters and farms, there were 237,859 households in St. Louis in 1940, 208,849 with a white head of household and 28,230 with a black household head. Of these, 60,067 were homeowners,

58,579 white and 2,003 black.

Because we know that racial occupancy, home ownership, and home value are shaped by underlying patterns of segregation and residential development, we divided the City into four residential areas. Using a set of harmonized and adjusted census tracts from 1930 to 2010,4 each of these areas is defined by a particular pattern of racial occupancy and transition over the post-1940 era.

The “White” tracts (Figure 1), making up much of the southwest quadrant of the City, remained at least 75% white over the full era from 1940 to 2010. This area was the last to develop in the City, with most original subdivision and residential development dating to the

1910s and 1920s (Wayman 1967). The railroad corridor, running southwest from the Central

Business District to Forest Park at the City’s western border, effectively cordoned these tracts off from the working class (and increasingly African-American) northside. This area peaked in population at about 150,000 in 1960, and is now a little under 100,000.5

[Figure 1: Demographic Areas and Housing Sample about here]

“Black” tracts (Figure 1), clustered on the near northside and extending east to the riverfront, were at least 75% black each year from 1940 to 2000. This area including “the Ville,”

4 This involved combining some decennial tracts, and their underlying data, where the tract geography changed over time—an adjustment made largely in non-residential central city and riverfront tracts. We also edited tract boundaries to exclude large parks and other undeveloped areas, to minimize the “cemetery effect” of mapping population across uninhabited pace. 5 Population trajectories for the four areas based on decennial census data, author calculations for harmonized tracts. 13 the historic center of African-American occupancy, and a swath of rental housing—much of it displaced by urban renewal in the 1950s—on the fringes of downtown. Racial occupancy here was shaped by the reach of race restrictive deed-covenants, which surrounded the Ville to the north and west. This was a neighborhood in which, as the HOLC surveyors worried, the “large brick and better appearing homes” were “occupied by colored people . . . slowly pressing the white people for more space . . . it is logical to conclude that deeper infiltration is only a matter of time.”6 Over the postwar era, this area went from about 75% black to over 95% black and lost population steadily, peaking at over 120,000 in 1950 and falling to less than 14,000 by 2010.

“Transitional” tracts, taking up most of the rest of the City’s northside, flipped from majority white to majority black between 1950 and 1970. Transition was driven in part by the

Shelley v Kraemer decision in 1948 prohibiting the enforcement of race-restrictive deed covenants. While the St. Louis Urban League noted “all sorts of devices and practices” aimed at circumventing the ruling,7 Shelley did begin to move the boundary between black and white housing. The City’s dual housing market, after 1948, rested less on neighborhood restrictions than on the north-south and City-suburb divides sustained by realtors and local zoning (Darden

1995; Kucheva and Sanders 2014). Transition was driven in part by continued in-migration and the displacement of African-Americans from urban renewal and public housing sites downtown

(Author, 2008). In the ensuing arbitrage, white homeowners responded to both the opportunity proffered by federally-subsidized suburbanization and the threat posed by black “infiltration;” while black homeowners (and buyers) responded to the legal opportunity opened by Shelley and

6 Home Owners’ Loan Corporation area descriptions (St. Louis D-15), 1940, in Record Group 195.3, Records of the HOLC, Records of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, National Archives, College Park, MD. 7 “Housing for Minorities in St. Louis” (1955), folder 1, box 12A, Urban League of St. Louis Records (WUA00368), 1923-1969, Washington University Special Collections, University City, Missouri 14 the market opportunity opened by white flight (Kucheva and Sanders 2014; Leven et al 1976).

Transition was further hastened in the 1960s and 1970s when new federal programs designed to subsidize homeownership instead bankrolled speculation and block-busting across north St.

Louis (Orfield 1981; Nourse and Phares 1975). This area also saw dramatic population loss— from a peak of over 250,000 in 1950 to about 76,000 in 2010.

“Integrated” tracts (Figure 1) take up much of the City’s southwest quadrant, as well as a couple of non-residential stretches of riverfront north of downtown and the blocks between

Delmar and north border of Forest Park. These tracts were nominally integrated across this era, the black share of the population hovering between 25 and 75 percent, but are perhaps better characterized as an area of mixed and changing land-use, encompassing the footprint of the

City’s major urban highways, and much of the rail corridor extending southwest from downtown. Here, integration was driven largely by the collapse of the area’s white population, which fell from 342,000 in 1930 to just 61,000 by 2010. Unlike the “transitional” area, whose decline in population was driven by vacancy and abandonment, residential use in the

“integrated” area was crowded out by commercial and institutional redevelopment.

We use these four tract-based areas as the basis for examining trends in homeownership and home value over time, and for stratifying the sample of 1940 homeowners. Using the universe of homeowners from the 1940 full count census, we drew a random sample, 20 black and 20 white, from each of the four residential areas described above. Because census tracts are not included in the full-count census file, we assigned tracts and demographic areas based on a crosswalk from the enumeration district recorded for each household. We dropped 9 records for which the address was incomplete or could not be matched to a current address. The resulting

15 sample included all the black homeowners in the white area—of which there were only 17 in the full count census. The final sample was comprised of 138 homeowners.

For this stratified sample of homeowners, we then collected detailed transaction records for each address from the records of the St. Louis Assessor’s Office. To administer the local property tax, the City Assessor maintains a running record of property assessments, tax appraisals, changes in ownership, and regulatory actions (fines, liens) for each property in the

City. For each address, we began with the current record (a pencil notation on a plat map of the city block) and traced the “book and daily” numbers, transaction-by-transaction, back to the

1940 owner. At each transaction, we noted the new owner, the nature of the transaction (a sale, a

“quit claim” transfer to a family member, the settlement of an estate), any record of value or sale price, and any administrative actions (such as rezoning, a rental permit, or a tax lien). This resulted in further attrition in the sample, as the chain of transactions was sometimes broken by clerical error (in 11 cases, the daily number led to the wrong property) or by redevelopment (in another 27 cases, parcels were combined or assigned new addresses before we could trace them back to 1940). In the end, our sample consisted of 99 properties for which we had full demographic information in 1940, and a complete transaction history—from the purchase by the

1940 owner to the present.

To obtain the housing value at the start of the period, we draw on the 1930 and 1940 full- count census self-reported values. To obtain housing values between 1930/40 and the 1980s and later values, we rely on four sources. First, while the Assessor’s office did not consistently record home values or sales prices, some transactions list sales price (or the value for an estate) and, from 1980, changes in ownership are sometimes accompanied by a certificate of value. The value of a mortgage is often listed at transaction and we assumed (based on typical loan-value

16 ratios8) these to represent 80 percent of the sale price. Second, we use archival real estate sales records and appraisals for sample (or neighboring) properties.9 Third, we drew house values from the 1940 “area descriptions” compiled by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation: these list sales trends and values, by area, based on recent transactions. Finally, for the closing (2016) value, we use the current appraised value as reported by the Assessor. Recognizing the unevenness of appraised values, particularly across racial lines (Rothstein 2017; Squires 2007), we calculated an appraisal “discount” for each area by comparing appraised values and actual sales values, and adjusted the 2016 values accordingly.

Using this data, we are able to describe patterns of black and white homeownership, home value, home tenure, and their implications for wealth, across the city from 1940 to the present.

Results

Race and Homeownership in St. Louis, General Patterns

A description of housing and homeownership in 1940 is provided in Table 1. Of the 237,859 households in St. Louis in 1940, about one-quarter were owner-occupied. The homeownership rate for white households was 28 percent overall, and over 40 percent in the white tracts. The homeownership rate for black households was just 7 percent, a rate that held across the demographic areas (the 19.54% black homeownership rate in the white tracts is an anomaly;

8 Loan-value ratios, or the share of the market value represented by the mortgage, are based on Snowden, Kenneth A., “Terms on nonfarm home mortgages, by type of mortgage and holder: 1920–1967.” Table Dc1192-1209 in Historical Statistics of the United States, Earliest Times to the Present: Millennial Edition, edited by Susan B. Carter, Scott Sigmund Gartner, Michael R. Haines, Alan L. Olmstead, Richard Sutch, and Gavin Wright. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/ISBN-9780511132971.Dc903-1288 9 These appraisals are drawn from Rolls 1-8 (“Sales Statements”) Albert Wenzlick Real Estate Co. Records, 1924-1960, S0190; and Series 3, Boxes 3 and 4 (“Real Estate Records”), James T. Bush Papers, S0658, both in the Western Historical Manuscript Collections, University of Missouri-St. Louis. 17 there were only 87 black households in these tracts, 17 of them homeowners). White median home values are about 20 percent higher citywide, with most of this value in the City’s white tracts.

[Table 1: Descriptive Housing Statistics, 1940]

As to homeowner characteristics, white owners were slightly older and reported a higher median income, although the racial income gap for homeowners was narrower than that for all households (Table 2). The gap in occupational status (the Duncan SEI scores occupations based on education and income) is wide, although here the African-American score is likely depressed by underemployment as the gap in median years of schooling is quite modest (Social Planning

Council 1954). Just over two-thirds of white homeowners and just over half of black homeowners had lived in the same house in five years earlier, and almost all (97.9% of white homeowners and 98.3% of black homeowners) were living in St. Louis in 1935.

[Table 2: Homeowner Characteristics, 1940 about here]

After 1940, housing patterns were shaped by both the boost to homeownership provided by postwar prosperity and new federal programs, and by the steady decline in the City’s population (Table 3). Between 1940 and 2010, St. Louis lost over 40 percent of its occupied housing units, and more than two-thirds of its white-occupied housing units. The net loss of just over 18,000 white owner-occupied units over that span was matched by a gain of over 19,000 black owner-occupied units. Nationally, the black homeownership rate (metropolitan) more than doubled from 19 percent in 1940 to 46 percent in 1980 (Boustan and Margo 2013); in St. Louis it grew from 7.1 percent to 38.6 percent over the same span—slipping back to 34 percent in 2010.

White flight, in St. Louis as elsewhere, both opened up the housing supply and depressed prices;

(Boustan and Margo 2013).

Yet, even as the number and rate of black homeowners grew, the racial gap persisted: the difference between black and white homeownership rates in St. Louis closed to just over 10 points in 1980, but by 2010 was wider than it had been in 1940. As white flight increased the supply of housing in some neighborhoods, segregation, discrimination, and redevelopment simultaneously narrowed the market (Collins and Margo 2000; Kain and Quigley 1972). “Slum clearance, highway construction, and the transforming of residential plats into business and industrial sites,” as the St. Louis Urban League noted, lead to steady loss of units.10 Between

1950 and 2000, the City lost over 2,200 housing units each year—vacancy, abandonment, and redevelopment far outpacing any new construction (United States Commission on Civil Rights

1970). Finally, the increase in black homeownership occurred largely in an aging and substandard housing stock. As of 1950, fully half of all housing units (rental and owner- occupied) in majority-black census tracts lacked a private bathroom, and a third had no running water.11

[Table 3: Homeownership Patterns After 1940 about here]

For the 1940 owners, the boundaries between white and black occupancy were sustained by a patchwork of race-restrictive deed covenants, explicit redlining by both local banks and federal housing programs, and the determination of local realtors to defend “homogenous neighborhoods” (Orfield 1981; Author 2008). Indeed, homeowners in our sample are distributed across the near northside according to the reach of race-restrictive deed covenants—white homeowners in “protected” blocks; black homeowners inside that ragged half-circle of restriction. The Delmar Divide between north and south St. Louis largely held after 1940, while the restrictions to the north and west collapsed. As both the African-American population and

10 “Notes for School Integration” (n.d.), Box 9, folder 2, Urban League Papers. 11 “Negro Housing Conditions in St. Louis,” Box 12A, folder 1, Urban League Papers,

19 the African-American homeownership rate grew, owner-occupancy spread into the transitional tracts north and west of The Ville. As early as 1940, the HOLC concluded that “poor sales demand, age, congestion, general spottiness and presence of a colored settlement make this a third grade area.”12 After 1940, for a number of reasons, the expansion of that “colored settlement” proceeded quickly.

The scattering of homes owned and occupied by African-Americans on the City’s southside were segregated in very different ways. In 1940, there were only 208 African-

American homeowners south of the Delmar Divide; 191 in the “integrated tracts” south of downtown and 17 in the “white” tracts to the southwest. In both integrated and white tracts,

African-American housing (and the owners in our sample) are clustered along the rail bed running southwest through the City core. In the integrated tracts, much of this housing was in mixed-used areas and—as we examine below—in the process of being displaced by redevelopment, code enforcement, and rezoning. In the white tracts, African-American homes were clustered in enclaves defined by hard physical boundaries: railways, arterial streets, and drainage canals. In these isolated pockets, median values were scarcely a quarter of those found in the surrounding neighborhoods. Housing here was marked off as “black” housing as early as the short-lived racial zoning ordinance of 1916, and was scarcely noted by the HOLC surveyors a generation later.

As of 1940, African-American homeownership in St. Louis was firmly established in the near northside tracts comprising “the Ville,” but also largely confined—by deed covenants and other restrictions—to those neighborhoods. After 1940, African-American homeownership increased, and spread into the transitional neighborhoods (opened up by white flight) to the north

12 Area description of St. Louis C-48, Records of the HOLC. 20 and west, while the line between north and south St. Louis held firm. The result, as we shall see, was a stark segregation of opportunity—not only for housing but for housing wealth.

Housing Value

One consequence of this pattern and history of local segregation was a striking divergence of housing value (and with this household wealth) across the City’s black, white, transitional, and integrated neighborhoods (see Table 4). Over this long span, the black and transitional tracts show substantial declines in value; a median loss of over $60,000 in real value in the transitional tracts, and nearly $40,000 in the black tracts. Values in the white and integrated tracts are essentially flat. The starting (1940) values are based on those reported by sample households on the 1940 census, adjusted to 2016 dollars. The closing (2016) values are the assessor’s appraised values, adjusted (using post-recession sales data) to correct for the fact that City appraisals typically understate home values.

[Table 4: Housing Values by Area, 1940-2016]

In order to examine the implications for black and white homeowners, and for their ability to accumulate wealth, we need to consider the timing of home purchases and sales against a broader background of home prices and demographic change. The 1940 owners in our sample bought their homes as early as 1895 and as late as 1940, with a median purchase date of 1928.

Although we do not have enough pre-1940 transactions to pin this down locally, we can infer from national housing indices (Wheelock 2008) that home values rose through the 1920s and then lost ground during the Depression of the 1930s. As segregation tightened and in-migration continued in the late 1930s and early 1940s, values in segregated tracts rose, reflecting artificial constraints on supply. Indeed, black buyers typically paid more, for housing of lesser quality,

21 than similarly-situated white buyers (Cutler et al 1999; Kain and Quigley 1972; Rapkin 1966;

Horton 1992; Boustan 2016). In 1955, the St. Louis Urban League noted that arrivals to the City had to “purchase at exorbitant prices” for the opportunity to live in “the most expensively cheap residential areas,” and often doubled up with other families to do so.13

This “segregation tax” (Rusk 2001) lasted into the early 1950s, by which time white flight had both increased the supply of available units (especially in transitional areas) and undercut the demand (Schnare and Struyk 1977: Chambers 1992; Kain and Quigley 1972). The implications for wealth are clear. Much of the increase in African-American homeownership took place in a dual housing market in which segregation artificially inflated prices. African-

American buyers paid more for less, and housing values fell as black occupancy increased.

Alongside the market impact of segregation, housing values across the four zones in St.

Louis were also shaped by policy interventions such as zoning. Local zoning sustained the exclusive intent of deed covenants and other forms of restriction, especially in newly-developed suburbs where exclusive low-density single-family zones sorted local populations by race and class (Author 2008; Pendall 2000; Rothwell and Massey 2010; Orfield 1981). Within older urban areas, where development preceded local zoning, land use regulations had a subtler impact. Here, changes in the zone plan invited or limited density and created commercial or industrial boundaries between neighborhoods.

In St. Louis, industrial or commercial buffers sustained both Citywide and block-by- block segregation. In turn, “downzoning” of black and transitional neighborhoods—from single- family to multi-family, or from residential to commercial—facilitated segregation and

13 Quotes from “Housing for Minorities in St. Louis” (1955), folder 1, box 12, Urban League Papers; “Integration and Housing in St. Louis” (1961), folder 12, box 12A, Urban League Papers

22 undermined housing values (Shertzer et al 2014). The Urban League reported a “constant fight to keep City planners from rezoning [black] areas from residence to business districts.”14 The

USCCR report on St. Louis in 1970 viewed underzoning of black residential areas as a powerful damper on housing values (United States Commission on Civil Rights 1970, 533-9). Table 6 summarizes this pattern for 1938 and 2016. Among the sample properties in the black tracts, none were zoned single-family in 1938 and only two were in 2016. In the transitional tracts, we see significant downzoning; in the area of the City which saw the largest increase in black homeownership, the protection of single-family zoning largely disappears.

[Table 5: Housing Sample and Zoning, 1938 and 2016]

In Figure 2, we offer a stylized estimate of this trend in the City’s black tracts, based on transactions and owner-reported values in our housing sample, supplemented by housing values gleaned from archival real estate appraisals and HOLC area descriptions. The trendline suggests the spike in values through the early 1950s (the median reported value for 1935-1955 is $47,962 in 2016 dollars), followed by a long decline—the latter shaped as much by abandonment and vacancy as by falling prices (the median reported value for post 1980 transactions is only

$2,685). For African-Americans in St. Louis and elsewhere, post-Shelley white flight opened opportunities for home ownership, but also ensured that those assets would appreciate little, and offer little security or opportunity for the accumulation of wealth (Rapkin and Grigsby 1960;

Rusk 1981; Kim 2000; Lake 1979: Horton 1992; Anacker 2010; Shapiro 2004). By some estimates, segregation cut the wealth returns to homeownership for African-Americans to half the rate for white owners (Killewald and Bryan 2016; Krivo and Kauffman 2004). Flippen

14 Leo Bohanon, “Negro Housing Problem vs Discriminatory Public Housing Policy (the St. Louis Situation)” December 1951, Box 12A folder 1, Urban League Papers.

(2004), working from the 1992 Health and Retirement Survey found that median appreciation for black-owned homes was in fact negative, a source of “the devastating effect of ghetto residence on housing wealth” (Flippen 2004, 1546).

[Figure 2 Trajectory of Housing Value in Black Tracts, 1940-2016]

This is a striking collapse in housing value, and of the prospects for housing wealth for the homeowners. In effect, segregation inflated purchased prices (and purchase terms) in the early postwar era, and then dramatically slowed the appreciation of those properties over the ensuing decades. This evaporation of housing value—especially in the black and transitional areas—was abetted by both the failure of local zoning to protect single family homes, and by the spillover effects of vacancy and abandonment as neighborhood stress undervalued those homes still standing.

Tenure and Disposition

Thus far we have considered the broad trajectory of values in the four demographic zones, underscoring the virtual collapse of home value, and some of the contributing factors, in the black and transitional zones north of Delmar. To sketch the implications for wealth accumulation, we need to consider the underlying patterns of ownership, including the tenure of each owner and the disposition of the property. We begin with the 1940s owners for each sampled property.

In each of the demographic zones (Figure 3), African-American owners in the 1940 sample claimed longer tenure, a median of 35 years citywide—almost double the median tenure of white owners (18 years). Much of this gap was opened by white flight; the median post-1940 tenure of black owners in the black and transitional zones (19.5 and 21 years respectively) is

24 nearly three times that of white owners (6 and 6.5 years). Black owners, in other words, were not disadvantaged by shorter spells of homeownership or by more volatile patterns of entry and exit. They were simply locked into depreciating assets. Those African-Americans that owned homes in 1940 saw a brief spike in values and then a long decline; those who sought housing between 1940 and 1960 (over which time the number of black homeowners grew from 2,108 to

16,138) paid top dollar for often substandard units. Meanwhile, whites who owned homes in black and transitional zones moved within 6 years at the median—selling near the top of the market and reinvesting in suburban properties

[Figure 3: Housing Tenure by Zone]

The implications for wealth also depend upon the conditions and terms under which homes change hands. Of our full sample, there are 93 properties for which we can establish purchase, tenure, and disposition by the 1940 owner (Table 6). Of the 40 black-owned homes,

27 were sold, 9 were passed on at death via an estate, 3 were vacated or abandoned, and one was redeveloped for non-residential use. Of the 53 white-owned homes, all but one (an estate transfer) were sold. This suggests the ability of white-owners to sell strategically, to move equity from the 1940 home to another (often suburban) investment. Black owners, by contrast, were more likely to stay in their homes until they died, at which point a depreciated asset was either bequeathed to heirs or abandoned. Such inheritances were often more a liability than an asset. Values had collapsed in neighborhoods scarred by disinvestment and flight. Inherited properties often carried with them liens for unpaid taxes or sewer bills. And City policies, including the banking of tax-delinquent properties and concentrated code enforcement in neighborhoods designated as “depletion areas” (Cooper-McCann 2016), discouraged refinancing or renovation by heirs.

[Table 6: Disposition of 1940 housing sample, by Area]

The dismal contribution of homeownership to wealth for African-Americans in St. Louis is suggested by the prevalence of vacancy and abandonment in the final (2016) disposition of properties. The decades after 1940 in St. Louis were marked by sustained population flight, urban highway construction, and extensive redevelopment. Many of the properties on the City’s tax rolls in 1940 no longer exist today. Of the 138 properties in the full 1940 sample (Figure 4), less than half (61) are still single-family homes; 34 have been redeveloped for other use, and 44 are vacated. The racial breakdown is even starker. For black owners, and for all parcels in black and transitional tracts, the single most common fate of the 1940 home is abandonment.

[Figure 4: Final Disposition of 1940 Properties]

By considering patterns of housing tenure (for the 1940 owners and subsequent owners) alongside the estimates of value discussed earlier, we can offer a stylized sketch of housing in St.

Louis, and its implications for wealth across the four areas. To do so, we tally all the transactions for each parcel, from the purchase by the 1940 owner forward (Table 7). This yields median and average measures of the number of owners, the tenure per owner, and the years that parcels were vacated and owned by the City’s Land Reclamation Authority. Black and transitional parcels, in this sketch, have fewer owners, longer tenure-per-owner, and significant stretches of vacancy.

[Table 7: Housing Tenure by Area, 1940-2016]

Next, we combine these tenure estimates with the trajectory of housing values for each area. In Table 8, median values (all in 2016 dollars) are drawn from the transaction, appraisal, and census values for the parcels in the housing sample. We assume a modest appreciation from

1940-1950, and then distribute the subsequent loss or gain across the 1950-2016 period. These

26 changes in value (1940-1950 and 1950-2016) are then aligned with the median tenure of the

1940 owner and the median tenure of the post-1940 owners for each zone. This yields estimates of the loss or gain experienced by the 1940 owner, and of the loss or gain experienced by the next owner. For the black 1940 owners, gains—considering the length of tenure—are modest: any increase in value since purchase largely erased by depreciation after 1950. For the white

1940 owners, gains are much higher, especially in those areas (black, white, and transitional) where post-1940 tenure does not extend past 1950. For the subsequent owners, the gap is even more dramatic. Black owners suffer steep losses, especially in black and transitional areas.

Subsequent white owners see small gains in the white tracts, small losses in the integrated tracts, and are—after 1950—no longer a presence in the black and transitional tracts.

[Table 8 Housing and Wealth, 1940-2016]

Discussion and Conclusion

Our findings for St. Louis are striking and suggestive. This local study, drawing on both the full count 1940 census and the St. Louis Assessor’s records, fills in much of the gap left by data sources which tell either a national story or one that picks up the plot only after the 1980s. And it captures the distinct local housing patterns, mechanisms of segregation, and local housing policies that are so important to the nexus of race, housing, and wealth.

Following our sample of homeowners (and addresses) across the post-1940 era underscores the starkly divergent trajectories of black and white homeownership, and the implications for the racial wealth gap. With regard to housing location, value, and tenure, we see the deep imprint of segregation—both in areas where it was sustained (those tracts that remained overwhelmingly black or white), and in areas where it collapsed (especially the transitional

27 northside). In none of the four residential areas were housing markets particularly strong— hardly surprising in a setting marked by ongoing economic troubles, an aging housing stock, and dramatic population flight.

The link between homeownership and household wealth—across a life cycle or across generations—rests on the opportunity to own a home, the financial terms of that ownership, and the appreciation of housing value during the tenure of ownership. Those housing values, in turn, are shaped by the age and condition of the housing stock, the market (supply and demand) for available units, constraints on that market (such as segregation or redlining), and neighborhood amenities such as parks or schools or access to transit. In St. Louis, is in many other urban settings, African-American homeownership was curtailed and confined by the City’s longstanding and elaborate mechanisms of segregation. In turn, white homeowners and realtors operated on the assumption that African-American occupancy (or the expectation of African-

American occupancy) threatened neighborhood stability and property values.

The net result, for the African-American homeowners in our sample, was that home prices in St. Louis were inflated as they entered the market but collapsed during their tenure.

This not only eroded opportunities to create wealth through homeownership, it destroyed wealth for those caught in the cycle. This was especially true in the black tracts, where intense demand in a deeply-segregated market put enormous stress on the single-family housing stock; and in transitional tracts, where values fell precipitously with the advent of white flight.

In St. Louis, the risk was not just slow appreciation but the collapse of value and equity as vacancy overtook much of the housing stock in the black and transitional areas north of

Delmar. African-American wealth rested heavily on home ownership—an asset for which

African-American borrowers paid more, leveraged more of their incomes, and realized less in

28 return (Keister 2000). The combination of falling home values, high-ratio mortgages, and often dismal mortgage terms meant that housing investments were not just disappointing but precarious (Dwyer and Lassus 2015), especially during recessionary blows to credit or home value (Grinnstein 2013). A too-common scenario, as the St. Louis Urban League, observed in

1962, was a trajectory of local disinvestment or an economic shock that meant “years of savings

– in home purchase – gone.”15 African-American homeowners in St. Louis, as one respondent confided to Thomas Shapiro (2004, 57-8), worried less about slow returns on housing investments than about the prospect of being “wiped out.” Indeed, as we show based on a robust sample of 100 properties, the prospect of building wealth through homeownership was undermined by high rates of vacancy and abandonment, by long tenure in declining neighborhoods, and by local zoning and redevelopment policies.

These dismal prospects were attenuated by other disadvantages not captured directly by our data. African-American homeowners have historically found it harder to access credit and insurance, and paid higher rates when they are approved (Chiteji 2010). Measures of such

“redlining” in St. Louis since 1940 are fragmentary but suggestive. As in other settings

(Michney 2017; Hillier 2003), private mortgage discrimination and HOLC redlining did not preclude lending in St. Louis’ black and transitional neighborhoods, but they did worsen its terms. Average interest rates, under 5 percent in many southside and central county neighborhoods, were over half a point higher in the predominantly black tracts on the northside.16 Investigations in the 1970s and 1990s confirm a pattern of dramatic

15 HHFA conference with Urban League (November 1962), Box 13, folder 2, Urban League Papers 16 The 1940 census includes a detailed breakdown of mortgage source and terms. These are not included in the full-count data (and hence cannot be matched with the housing sample), but do establish a clear pattern.

29 underinvestment in the City relative to its suburbs, and mortgage and insurance terms that climbed steeply in majority-black areas (United States Commission on Civil Rights 1970, 545;

ACORN Missouri 1993).17 Across the last decade, disparate terms are reflected in both persistent underinvestment in black neighborhoods (National Community Reinvestment

Coalition 2016) and rates of subprime lending for African-American borrowers and in African-

American neighborhoods (American Housing Survey 2015).

The data sources used here, the full count census through 1940 and local assessor’s records, offer new insights into racial disparities in homeownership and wealth—and suggest avenues for future research. Our findings, confined to the City of St. Louis, certainly understate the role of housing in creating and sustaining wealth inequality because we do not “follow” those who sell and leave the City to their new investments—often in the St. Louis suburbs (Jackson

1980). Release of the 1950 full-count census data (after 2022) will make it possible to do this, at least for the first decade of white flight. Replication of this approach—leveraging full-count census data, local property records, and close examination of local conditions and patterns—in other settings promises to deepen our understanding (while teasing out important regional or local differences) of this crucial era of housing patterns and policies, and their implications for sustained and stubborn racial inequalities in home equity and family wealth.

17 See also Missouri ACORN, “Mortgages in St. Louis: A Study of Mortgage Lending and ‘Redlining’ by Savings and Loans Associations” (1976), in Box 2, Series 2, Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) Records, 1972-1980, S0040, Western Historical Manuscripts Collection, University of Missouri-St. Louis. 30

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Table 1

Table 1: Summary Housing Statistics by Area, 1940

whole city neighborhood types black transitional integrated white households 237,859 30,529 68,180 106,315 32,835 white households 208,849 9,793 65,082 101,237 32,737 black households 28,230 20,608 3,027 4,508 87 owner-occupied 60,667 3,060 21,143 23,200 13,264 white owner occupied 58,579 1,530 20,862 22,944 13,243 black owner occupied 2,003 1,529 266 191 17 white homeownership rate (%) 28.1 15.6 32.1 22.7 40.5 black homeownership rate (%) 7.1 7.4 8.8 4.2 19.5 median home value, white ($) 3,100 2,000 3,000 1,500 4,200 median home value, black ($) 2,500 2,500 2,000 3,000 1,100

Source: 1940 Full Count Data; Steven Ruggles, Katie Genadek, Ronald Goeken, Josiah Grover, and Matthew Sobek. Integrated Public Use Microdata Series: Version 6.0 [Machine-readable database]. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2015.

Table 2

Table 2: Homeowner Characteristics, 1940

household heads homeowners white black white black median age 46 43 54 53 median income ($) 846 520 750 600 Duncan SEI 33 8 41 15 same house 5 years ago (%) 35.9 16.3 68.0 56.0 moved within City, last 5 years (%) 57.1 79.3 29.9 42.3

Table 3

Table 3: Homeownership Patterns After 1940

1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 change occupied housing units 237,859 258,412 248,651 215,479 178,048 164,931 147,076 142,057 -95,802 white 208,849 218,002 188,510 141,290 109,257 95,899 74,574 71,822 -137,027 black 28,230 40,134 60,141 73,230 67,264 66,850 66,474 62,585 34,355 owner occupied units 60,667 89,811 94,880 87,291 80,415 74,352 68,939 64,425 3,758 white 58,579 82,527 78,742 64,142 53,974 49,155 41,086 40,552 -18,027 black 2,003 7,284 16,138 22,915 25,960 24,633 25,778 21,306 19,303 homeownership rate 25.5% 34.8% 38.2% 40.5% 45.2% 45.1% 46.9% 45.4% 19.8% white 28.0% 37.9% 41.8% 45.4% 49.4% 51.3% 55.1% 56.5% 28.4% black 7.1% 18.1% 26.8% 31.3% 38.6% 36.8% 38.8% 34.0% 26.9% gap (white-black) 21.0% 19.7% 14.9% 14.1% 10.8% 14.4% 16.3% 22.4%

Source: Decennial Census data via Minnesota Population Center. National Historical Geographic Information System: Version 11.0 [Database]. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. 2016.

Table 4

Table 4: Change in Housing Values by Area, 1940-2016

TRACTS 1940 value (2016$) 2016 value ($) change, 1940-2016 ($) median average median average median average black 49,706 51,757 4,940 7,644 (39,075) (44,112) transitional 77,130 79,148 13,715 15,264 (60,685) (63,883) integrated 51,420 81,511 40,300 79,374 (4,082) 6,570 white 85,700 92,400 94,185 100,342 3,433 7,942 whole city 59,990 72,741 16,900 46,892 (27,968) (25,849)

Source: St. Louis Assessor; and 1940 Full Count Data; Steven Ruggles, Katie Genadek, Ronald Goeken, Josiah Grover, and Matthew Sobek. Integrated Public Use Microdata Series: Version 6.0 [Machine-readable database]. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2015.

Table 5

Table 5: Housing Sample and Zoning, 1938 and 2016

black transitional integrated white 1938 2016 1938 2016 1938 2016 1938 2016 single family 0 2 21 7 4 4 18 24 mulifamily 29 26 13 27 20 18 11 5 commercial 0 1 1 1 0 4 0 4 industrial 5 3 0 0 11 9 5 1

Source:; St. Louis Assessor for 2016 zoning; and 1940 Full Count Data; Steven Ruggles, Katie Genadek, Ronald Goeken, Josiah Grover, and Matthew Sobek. Integrated Public Use Microdata Series: Version 6.0 [Machine- readable database]. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2015.

Table 6

Table 6: Disposition of 1940 Housing Sample, by area

black transitional integrated white total BWBWBWBWBW sale 6 11 6 16 7 11 8 14 27 52 estate 4 0 2 0 2 1 1 0 9 1 redevelopment 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 0 vacancy 1 0 1 0 1 0 0 0 3 0 Source: St. Louis Assessor; and 1940 Full Count Data; Steven Ruggles, Katie Genadek, Ronald Goeken, Josiah Grover, and Matthew Sobek. Integrated Public Use Microdata Series: Version 6.0 [Machine-readable database]. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2015.

Table 7

Table 7: Housing Tenure by Area, 1940-2016

TRACT MEASURE MED AVG tenure 19 18.3 black owners per parcel 3 3.1 (25) years vacant (LRA) 6 11.0 tenure 10 18.4 transitional owners per parcel 3.5 3.7 (27) years vacant (LRA) 5.5 10.5 tenure 12 17.5 integrated owners per parcel 4 4.1 (24) years vacant (LRA) 0 1.4 tenure 12 16.2 white owners per parcel 4 4.7 (21) years vacant (LRA) 0 1.0

Table 8

Table 8: Housing and Wealth, 1940-2016

Black owners median values (2016$) 1950-2016 (loss or gain) 1940 owner next owner TRACTS 1940 1950 2016 total per year tenure gain or loss tenure gain or loss black 51,420 64,275 2,015 (62,260) (943) 19.5 3,893 19.0 (17,923) transitional 47,135 58,919 2,470 (56,449) (855) 21.0 2,376 10.0 (8,553) integrated 35,137 43,921 25,350 (18,571) (281) 24.0 4,845 12.0 (3,377) white 20,568 25,710 16,900 (8,810) (133) 14.0 4,608 12.0 (1,602) White owners median values (2016$) 1950-2016 (loss or gain) 1940 owner next owner TRACTS 1940 1950 2016 total per year tenure gain or loss tenure gain or loss black 41,993 52,491 6,630 (45,861) (695) 6.0 10,498 19.0 n/a transitional 102,840 128,550 16,900 (111,650) (1,692) 6.5 25,710 10.0 n/a integrated 55,705 69,631 58,500 (11,131) (169) 17.0 12,746 12.0 (2,024) white 101,554 126,943 145,860 18,918 287 8.0 25,389 12.0 3,440

Figure 1 Click here to download Figures Home Inequity (Figure 1).docx

Figure 1: Demographic Areas and Housing Sample

Figure 2 Click here to download Figures Home Inequity (Figure 2).docx

Figure 2: Trajectory of Housing in Black Tracts, 1940-2016

Figure 3 Click here to download Figures Home Inequity (Figure 3).docx

Figure 3: Housing Tenure by Zone

White owner properties, in lighter shades, are at the top of each panel. The bars are centered on 1940: negative numbers indicate years of ownership before 1940; positive numbers indicate years of ownership after 1940.

Figure 4 Click here to download Figures Home Inequity (Figure 4).docx

Figure 4: Final Disposition of 1940 Properties