Racial Residential Segregation in Greater Boston

Race-based 'restrictive covenants' were contracts between sellers and buyers of a property that forbade the sale or lease of the property to non-White people. It is unknown just how common race-based restrictive covenants were in the Boston area. To find this out, one would have to sift through hundreds of thousands of housing deeds from the early 20th century. While no one has done this in Boston, researchers have explored race-based restrictive covenants in other cities, including  Philadelphia ,  Minneapolis , and  Seattle .   

 _{Interestingly, Brookline, MA is often mistakenly named as the location of the first-documented racially restrictive covenant in 1843, including in the original text of this page. You can read more about this common misattribution from the  Brookline Historical Society .} 

Race-based restrictive covenants, whether common or not, were outlawed in Massachusetts with the passing of the 1946 Massachusetts Fair Housing Law. The Fair Housing Law banned housing discrimination on the base of race, color, national origin, ancestry, and religious creed. Housing discrimination was defined as: discriminatory statements, different contract terms/conditions, steering, harassment, intimidation, or denial of services.

At the federal level, the legal process for housing justice was much slower. In 1948, the Supreme Court ruled in Shelley vs. Kraemer that while state-enforced race-based restrictive covenants were unconstitutional, private contracts (without state enforcement) were still allowed. It wasn't until the 1968 Federal Fair Housing Act that housing discrimination, defined broadly as in the earlier Massachusetts law, became illegal.

It is important to note, however, that while housing discrimination on the basis of race became illegal, many structural changes continued to disproportionately harm working class communities of color. Under the guise of supposedly 'race-neutral' progress, racial residential segregation continued, and continues today.

Passed in 1968, the Federal Fair Housing Act (FHA) prohibits housing discrimination by landlords, real estate companies, or other entities (including municipalities) on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin. Sex and familial status were added as protected classes later, in 1988. Despite this landmark legislation, many policies continue to have disparate impact on communities of color, and discrimination is still common in the housing market today.

As suburbs increased in size and population around the US in the postwar years, towns used strict zoning laws to prevent increasing population density, protect green space, and separate residential areas from industry and commercial areas. Through restrictive zoning laws, suburban areas were able to prevent the construction of low-income housing and multi-family homes. The result is that suburbs remained mostly White, middle- and upper-class.

Examples of the effect of such zoning policies in Massachusetts are described in greater detail by the Fair Housing Center of Greater Boston. See:  minimum lot-size requirements ,  limited allowance or complete restriction of multi-family home construction , and  age-restricted housing .

The Metropolitan Area Planning Council (MAPC) created a Zoning Atlas, which collects information about zoning rules in greater Boston. This rich information can be downloaded for free! Explore the Zoning Atlas by clicking on the link below.

Discriminatory lending and renting practices still play an important role in enforcing racial residential segregation today. In a 2020 report titled  Qualified Renters Need Not Apply,  the Boston Foundation outlined how widespread racial discrimination is in the Boston housing market. Using undercover "testers" posing as renters, researchers discovered discrimination based on voucher status in 86% of tests. Even among market-rate testers (those who were not applying with housing vouchers), racial disparities were stark: while White testers without vouchers were able to set up apartment viewings 80% of the time, Black testers were only able to set up viewings 48% of the time.

The findings of this report indicate that despite having legislation in place to protect renters and homeowners from discrimination, Massachusetts still has a long way to go.

Housing discrimination goes beyond interpersonal discrimination between renters and voucher holders. Even when applications are considered by a computer, not a human, discrimination can occur. This discrimination is due to  bias baked in to the algorithm itself , a bias that is particularly difficult to study given  the proprietary nature of many of the algorithms  used to make such decisions.

Today, as always, communities are fighting back against housing discrimination. In greater Boston, several grassroots organizations have come together as the  Boston Tenant Coalition  to advance fair housing and racial justice.

• Pearcy M.  “The Most Insidious Legacy”—Teaching About Redlining and the Impact of Racial Residential Segregation.  The Geography Teacher. 2020 Apr 2;17(2):44–55.
• Learning for Justice,  "Using Primary Sources to Teach About Segregation"  (2018).
• Ursula Wolfe-Rocca, " How Red Lines Built White Wealth " (lesson plan and role-play),  Zinn Education Project .
• Kirsten Delegard and Marguerite Mills, " Educator's Guide: an educator resource for teaching structural racism through online instruction in the era of COVID-19 ."
• Stanford University Science in the City, " Redlining and Urban Heat: A Lesson in Climate Change ."

•  Harvard University's Unequal podcast  interviews Harvard professors Mary Bassett and Nancy Krieger about redlining and health

• Richard Rothstein -  The Color of Law  (2007)
• Kenneth T. Jackson -  Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States  (1987)
• Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton -  American Apartheid  (1998)

• Massachusetts State Advisory Committee to U.S. Commission on Civil Rights -  Route 128: Boston's Road to Segregation.  (1975)
• Boston Fair Housing Commission -  City of Boston Analysis of Impediments to Fair Housing Choice . (2010)
• The Boston Foundation -  Qualified Renters Need Not Apply: Race and Voucher Discrimination in the Metro Boston Rental Housing Market . (2020)
• Metropolitan Area Planning Council (MAPC) -  The State of Zoning for Multi-family Housing in Greater Boston  (2019) and  Crowded In and Priced Out: Why It’s so Hard to Find a Family-Sized Unit in Greater Boston  (2020)