St. Louis Housing Market

Racial Discrimination in the Housing Market

The discussion that we had in class about they way that race becomes a marker of “otherness” and how it is used to keep racialized minorities out of certain aspects of American life reminded me of a conversation that I had with my grandmother and my great aunts. My mother’s family has been in St. Louis for generations and the slides that we saw about the discrimination in the housing market here is something that I had just discussed with them the week before.

The church that I attend is in the Ville neighborhood which was historically an area of St. Louis where the well-to-do Black people lived. The Ville was home to its own supermarket, schools, tailors, cleaners, printers and even college at one point. This city within a city arose out of the housing laws in St. Louis that banned Black people from most communities. At our church, there is a copy of one such document that clearly forbids the sale of any houses in that particular neighborhood to “colored” people.

My aunt told me that when she first went to buy her house back in the 1960´s she had a similar experience with realtors. They would only show her houses in certain areas of St. Louis regardless of where she requested. She also said that when she finally found the house that she wanted, she went to make the down payment which she paid cash for and the banker hassled her about where she got the money from and warned that they didn’t take drug money. If she had been a White woman, the banker would have happily taken her payment and welcomed her business.

Something so essential to achieving the American Dream has been taken away from many Americans through housing discrimination. As the market starts to stabilize and people begin to buy homes again, one can only hope that this type of discrimination will be outweighed by the need for the market to go up again.