05 February 2020 at 05:00PM
Housing History in Rochester - Democrat and Chronicle Subscribers Article
The Democrat and Chronicle recently published an article about how Rochester’s growing city and suburbs excluded black residents. We've covered this topic in previous blog posts. Here we provide a review of the article.
The article, How Rochester’s growing city and suburbs excluded black residents, is written by Justin Murphy. It opens with a story about Clarence Ingram who faced housing discrimination in 1953 when he first moved to Rochester. As the author points out, the issues went beyond personal racism:
As tens of thousands of black people arrived in Rochester from the South in the 1950s and 1960s, they were met with a sophisticated, far-reaching, government-sponsored infrastructure dedicated solely to keeping them out of “respectable” white neighborhoods, both in the city and the suburbs.
The Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) and Federal Housing Administration, established in the 1930s, discouraged home loans to “adverse influences". Home purchasing and renting were both challenging as rentals were overpriced and poorly maintained for African Americans
The houses surveyed were in large part damp, overcrowded and under-served with gas and electricity. Many people lacked furnaces and relied on their cooking stoves for heat. Damp earthen cellars, leaky roofs and communal toilets for a dozen people or more were common, particularly in the Seventh and Eighth wards.
At the same time, the federal programs were helping whites with housing, resulting in a significant wealth gap that has not been overcome. A 2015 studied showed that black people were much more more likely to be denied a loan than white people at the same income level. In that same year, Five Star Bank settled a case that they had been redlining in the Rochester area.
The result is that the majority of white Monroe County residents have an investment in the form of their home, while the majority of black Monroe County residents are paying a landlord rather than building equity to pass on to a future generation.
To learn more, look for future articles from Justin Murphy. Subscribers can read the entire article discussed here, published on February 5, 2020, at https://www.democratandchronicle.com/in-depth/news/2020/02/05/rochester-ny-kept-black-residents-out-suburbs-decades/2750049001/.
