The Myth of the White Suburb and “Suburban Invasion”

 https://nlihc.org/resource/myth-white-suburb-and-suburban-invasion

To appeal to suburban voters in late summer 2020, President Trump tweeted that “people living their Suburban Lifestyle Dream” would “no longer be bothered or financially hurt by having low income housing built in your neighborhood.” The tweet referred to the president’s gutting of the Affirmatively Furthering, which required local governments to affirmatively address racial segregation as required by the 1968 Fair Housing Act. He continued, “Your housing prices will go up based on the market, and crime will go down. I have rescinded the Obama-Biden AFFH Rule. Enjoy!”

President Trump’s HUD Secretary Ben Carson concurred with President Trump’s desire to roll back fair housing enforcement at HUD. In an op-ed shortly after President Trump’s tweet, then Secretary Carson affirmed the president’s abhorrent rhetoric by stating that fair housing practices could lead suburbs to become dens of “crime and chaos,” suggesting that low-income people are inherently criminal. This type of comment has obvious racist elements, as a disproportionate number of low-income people in this country are Black or Hispanic. 

While President Trump’s and Secretary Carson’s words played to deplorable racist perceptions of people living in affordable housing, the vision of the suburbs they paint is also incorrect. The exclusive, white, middle-class vision of the suburbs is rapidly changing. Whites fled cities to move to outlying majority white middle-class enclaves in the mid-1900s, a phenomenon known as “white flight.” The federal government encouraged whites to move to suburbs by constructing federal highways and providing white families low-interest mortgages for homes in car-centric, less dense neighborhoods. Racist residential segregation policies, like redlining, housing discrimination, and racially restrictive covenants, limited opportunities for people of color to follow the same path.