The story of the rise of the segregated suburb often begins during
the New Deal and the Second World War, when sweeping federal policies
hollowed out cities, pushed rapid suburbanization, and created a
white homeowner class intent on defending racial barriers. Paige
Glotzer offers a new understanding of the deeper roots of suburban
segregation. The mid-twentieth-century policies that favored
exclusionary housing were not simply the inevitable result of popular
and elite prejudice, she reveals, but the culmination of a long-term
effort by developers to use racism to structure suburban real estate
markets.
Glotzer charts how
the real estate industry shaped residential segregation, from the
emergence of large-scale suburban development in the 1890s to the
postwar housing boom. Focusing on the Roland Park Company as it
developed Baltimore’s wealthiest, whitest neighborhoods, she
follows the money that financed early segregated suburbs, including
the role of transnational capital, mostly British, in the U.S.
housing market. She also scrutinizes the business practices of real
estate developers, from vetting homebuyers to negotiating with
municipal governments for services. She examines how they sold the
idea of the suburbs to consumers and analyzes their influence in
shaping local and federal housing policies. Glotzer then details how
Baltimore’s experience informed the creation of a national real
estate industry with professional organizations that lobbied for
planned segregated suburbs. How the Suburbs Were Segregated
sheds new light on the power of real estate developers in shaping the
origins and mechanisms of a housing market in which racial exclusion
and profit are still inextricably intertwined.