Patchwork apartheid : private restriction, racial segregation, and urban inequality

"Private restrictions on racial occupancy are a critical element and episode in the history of American inequality. This study draws on newly available full count (parcel-level) data on racial restriction for five Midwestern counties. The research makes four important and overlapping contributions to our understanding of the history of the American city, and to the patterns and processes of segregation and stratification that are so central to that history. First, it elevates and clarifies the role of private restriction in the history and architecture of racial segregation in the United States. Second, it documents the astonishing scale and reach of private racial restriction. Third, this record of private restriction offers a compelling documentary catalogue of both local and individual acts of discrimination or segregation, and of the racial assumptions and racial categories that animated them. Finally, the importance of private restriction to our account of racial segregation shifts our attention from public to private actors, and from the local and federal housing polices of the 1940s to the patchwork apartheid of private restriction that those policies accommodated, emulated and, over time, locked down. The trajectory of racial residential segregation in most settings simply does not support the conclusion that it was primarily or overwhelmingly a product of public policy. Public policies did not segregate America; they failed to challenge that segregation when confronted with it, and routinely deferred to the private actors who were responsible."