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Not in My Neighborhood: How Bigotry Shaped a Great American City
Baltimore is the setting for (and typifies) one of the most penetrating examinations of bigotry and residential segregation ever published in the United States. Antero Pietila shows how continued discrimination practices toward African Americans and Jews have shaped the cities in which we now live. Eugenics, racial thinking, and white supremacist attitudes influenced even the federal government's actions toward housing in the 20th century, dooming American cities to ghettoization. This all-American tale is told through the prism of Baltimore, from its early suburbanization in the 1880s to the consequences of "white flight" after World War II, and into the first decade of the twenty-first century. The events are real, and so are the heroes and villains. Mr. Pietila's engrossing story is an eye-opening journey into city blocks and neighborhoods, shady practices, and ruthless promoters.
336 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2010
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 137 reviews
August 1, 2013
I moved to Baltimore 13 years ago, and have always been fascinated by the neighborhood complexities. I settled in East Baltimore (which Pietila grossly labelled a "slum") and marveled how the smallest houses I had ever seen were now the most popular neighborhoods to be in (easy to renovate, close to the endless strings of corner bars, I guess). I recall going to Franklin Square to look at a rental listing and being confused how any area with such magnificent houses could EVER have hit the skids quite like that. I wondered why the ethnic churches of the East side were still plugging on as usual while some churches had the Star of David on the building. Why did Locust Point remain white? What existed before the newer buildings downtown (guess who)? I'd talk to suburbanites who remember blockbusting and the riots, and they remained dumbfounded why anyone would choose to live in Baltimore. Lately I became one of those whites described in the final chapter who moved to the West side of town in search of great architecture and cheap prices. I was completely engrossed in the first few chapters of this book - I would've given 6 stars if I could - mainly because the older history was so unfamiliar to me compared to the more familiar, nationwide cause-and-effect of industrial economy and policy following WW-II, but also because my current street is located 1 block East of the old legal black-white demarcation line and 1 block West of the premier upper-crust street in the old part of the city. I absolutely loved learning about the patterns and reactions that shaped the surrounding West side neighborhoods, and I haven't been able to shut up about the things I learned. Many of my casual conversations about where I live have been tinged with an unspoken prejudice and all too typical assumptions, and I relish these new facts I've learned about and can't help but explain certain things that happened _TO_ black residents.
So yeah, I loved the book. Why only 4 stars? Mainly because I wanted much more on the subject. Subjects like bus company collusion, citizens' efforts to thwart highway construction, and the specifics of the 1968 riots were so minimally covered that I couldn't help but feel shorted. I don't want to suggest that a retired newspaper columnist using English as a second language _should_ have pumped out a more scholarly, exhaustive tome, because I appreciated the easy style of the book (composed significantly from interviews, we learn at the end, which may explain why some people get significant coverage while others less so) but I wanted a bigger picture once we got into the true downfall of the city following the war.
I suppose this book would register with anybody curious about other cities with insidious and long-lasting segregation patterns (Chicago, Detroit), and I'd recommend it to anybody interested in why our older cities are the way they are, but the local insight truly made this a special read for me.
So yeah, I loved the book. Why only 4 stars? Mainly because I wanted much more on the subject. Subjects like bus company collusion, citizens' efforts to thwart highway construction, and the specifics of the 1968 riots were so minimally covered that I couldn't help but feel shorted. I don't want to suggest that a retired newspaper columnist using English as a second language _should_ have pumped out a more scholarly, exhaustive tome, because I appreciated the easy style of the book (composed significantly from interviews, we learn at the end, which may explain why some people get significant coverage while others less so) but I wanted a bigger picture once we got into the true downfall of the city following the war.
I suppose this book would register with anybody curious about other cities with insidious and long-lasting segregation patterns (Chicago, Detroit), and I'd recommend it to anybody interested in why our older cities are the way they are, but the local insight truly made this a special read for me.
May 6, 2013
After I visited Baltimore last month, this book soared to the top of my queue. I had to know more about why the streets and highways were like barriers and standards of living varied so drastically between places such a short distance from each other. In this meticulously researched yet readable and compelling history, Mr. Pietila confirmed my suspicions and then some, showing how the dystopia was not the result of a few evil men but rather the consequence of a system everyone participated in and contributed to. That he does this with a light touch and optimism for the future is even more praiseworthy.
The author made things like FHA discrimination and blockbusting easy to understand and brought things to life with personal anecdotes of the era's biggest figures. His accounting of intraracial conflicts in response to external stress, for example certain Jewish developers refusing to sell or rent to other Jews because they didn't want to lose their business with Gentiles, was superb. He also unearthed some fascinating and frankly destabilizing forgotten facts, such as the working relationship between Pope Paul VI and Saul Alinsky, which prefigured the Church's work with community organizers throughout the U.S. in the '60s and '70s but which is now forgotten in the hue and cry of the culture war.
Mr. Pietila has acknowledged that a description of the public housing projects would have rounded out the picture but says that's such a mammoth story in itself it would have swallowed up the rest of the book - and after seeing how well he researches what he wrote, I'm inclined to believe him and hope another journalist will finish the magnum opus he's created here. Besides that, my biggest quibble is that there should have been (even) more maps. Fortunately, this is also the era of Google Maps, so I was able to easily look up every place described and put a mental picture together myself.
That said, the culmination of Mr. Pietila's excellent career is a work which puts the world in which we live today in context and is worth a read by everyone who wants to know how our cities got to be the way they are...and by extension, why they don't have to be that way forever.
The author made things like FHA discrimination and blockbusting easy to understand and brought things to life with personal anecdotes of the era's biggest figures. His accounting of intraracial conflicts in response to external stress, for example certain Jewish developers refusing to sell or rent to other Jews because they didn't want to lose their business with Gentiles, was superb. He also unearthed some fascinating and frankly destabilizing forgotten facts, such as the working relationship between Pope Paul VI and Saul Alinsky, which prefigured the Church's work with community organizers throughout the U.S. in the '60s and '70s but which is now forgotten in the hue and cry of the culture war.
Mr. Pietila has acknowledged that a description of the public housing projects would have rounded out the picture but says that's such a mammoth story in itself it would have swallowed up the rest of the book - and after seeing how well he researches what he wrote, I'm inclined to believe him and hope another journalist will finish the magnum opus he's created here. Besides that, my biggest quibble is that there should have been (even) more maps. Fortunately, this is also the era of Google Maps, so I was able to easily look up every place described and put a mental picture together myself.
That said, the culmination of Mr. Pietila's excellent career is a work which puts the world in which we live today in context and is worth a read by everyone who wants to know how our cities got to be the way they are...and by extension, why they don't have to be that way forever.
July 21, 2011
Really interesting read, particularly when you're familiar with Baltimore neighborhoods and can reference the current conditions. Completely changed my understanding of Baltimore communities and the years of racism and bigotry that have continued to shape its development. I only wish the historical accuracy had left me feeling a little more hopeful than this did.
While really interesting and informative, the text occasionally jumped around illogically, making it difficult to follow. It also could have used more maps so that I wasn't always turning to Google Maps to orient myself.
While really interesting and informative, the text occasionally jumped around illogically, making it difficult to follow. It also could have used more maps so that I wasn't always turning to Google Maps to orient myself.
July 18, 2021
This book had a lot of info. A lot. And most of it was good information that I would have liked to retain, but the book was just so dense with so many people, that I had a hard time absorbing any of the details. It also needed more maps and maybe more pictures. I also was not a fan of Pietila's writing style.
Now that that is out of the way, the info in this book is important. How property, real estate, and city planning factored in to why so many people are struggling within or struggling to escape poverty are important things to understand in light of what is happening today. Loss of or gain of wealth from these practices affects multiple future generations. It also greatly affects the prosperity of neighborhoods within cities. And while I had a hard time with the small details presented, the overarching themes that I was able to follow really helped me understand urban problems that are rooted so strongly in past and present bigotry. I really wish that this had been written a bit better because I got a lot out of the book club discussion on this and would have liked to have gotten more out of the text itself.
I really wish this had been a documentary.
Now that that is out of the way, the info in this book is important. How property, real estate, and city planning factored in to why so many people are struggling within or struggling to escape poverty are important things to understand in light of what is happening today. Loss of or gain of wealth from these practices affects multiple future generations. It also greatly affects the prosperity of neighborhoods within cities. And while I had a hard time with the small details presented, the overarching themes that I was able to follow really helped me understand urban problems that are rooted so strongly in past and present bigotry. I really wish that this had been written a bit better because I got a lot out of the book club discussion on this and would have liked to have gotten more out of the text itself.
I really wish this had been a documentary.
August 7, 2020
An engaging and fascinating look at how racism and anti-semitism shaped the landscapes of Baltimore. As a native to the Baltimore region it was a valuable way to explore how the communities around me were shaped and ‘maintained’ through discrimination. Credit to the author for a more nuanced approach to the subject of blockbusting, which for me is one of the strongest points of the book. I felt the book would have benefited from more maps; for those unfamiliar with the streets and neighborhoods of Baltimore, it may be difficult to visualize the patterns of racial change. If you’re interested in racial change in neighborhoods, the history of Baltimore, or how real estate practices shape the communities around us, this is an excellent and approachable read.
January 11, 2021
Important, eye opening read— especially if you live in Baltimore. Why is Baltimore the way that it is? A LOT of it has to do with how bigotry truly shaped our city —and state. The book was a slow read, but honestly, so important.
August 12, 2024
Questioning some University of Maryland building name decisions 🤔 kind of dense to get through but really valuable information for someone who had grown up in Maryland! Definitely would recommend to people passionate about Baltimore and/or housing justice, but maybe skip otherwise
January 18, 2019
Well researched and informative text of how the history of Baltimore City impacts Baltimore today.
August 28, 2016
I’ve lived in Baltimore for 26 years. It is full of beautiful neighborhoods, many of which are organized around the greenways and streams that run through the city. I’ve always been struck by how segregated the city is, and knew that some history of housing policy and practices both legal and illegal shaped this. I didn’t know how comprehensive and overwhelming this history is until reading Pietela’s book.
In his thorough review of Baltimore’s bigoted housing practices in the late 19th and throughout the 20th century, Antero Pietela brings up this question: How much of this was neutrally intended, as opposed to malicious? He’s not excusing the damaging, unfair, and destructive practices as much as reminding the reader that this is how people thought at the time. They believed they were doing what’s best for their constituents.
Much like Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow,” this book tells the story of how we got where we are, how entrenched and enshrined in the laws these racist policies are. Even something as laughable and far afield as eugenics was applied to federal housing policy. The hot buttons of fear, self preservation and protection of family are as ever present today as they were in shaping neighborhoods in decades past. And the layers of public and private instruments and racism are all piled up, one on top of another. Covenants, segregation policy passed by City Council, redlining, tiers of financing based upon race, the HOLC’s eugenics, GI Bill discrimination, FHA policy, and today with shaky, predatory lending and mortgage-backed securities. How on earth can we ever get out from under all of this?
The stories are presented much like newspaper articles, one after another, revealing connections I never knew before. Some neighborhoods, like Roland Park with its strict racial and religious covenants, were even worse than I thought. And city luminaries whose names now grace foundations and university buildings were leaders in the redlining and racial discrimination. The dynasties of Baltimore have dirty hands. The greed, exploitation and corruption make a stunning history that is probably not unique to this city.
A few bright spots appear, like Mayor McKeldin, who saw the bigger picture, the dire need for housing for black war workers. As mayor, he was legally powerless to do anything, but he could advocate for equal rights. In his first term, 1943-1947, he hired black staff members, including a black secretary for himself, and named the first black assistant city solicitor and school board member. He also advocated that race be removed from applications for city jobs and even tried to secure jobs for freed convicts.
I was blown away by the sheer number of barriers to blacks having equal and fair access to good housing. Even when had the means to buy a house, they had to pay usurious interest rates or enter into rent-to-buy schemes. Since much of the housing was in a deteriorated state, the city passed laws requiring repairs and upgrades, which the seller (after years or decades of neglect) then rolled into the contract, increasing the cost to the buyer.
We have not figured out a way to profit from helping poor people, but there are any number of ways to make money by taking advantage of them. This is where policy is needed, to prevent people from acting on our baser instincts. Change will have to come at a cost to the most privileged, and that is not easy to sell. But when does the cost of maintaining the status quo become too high or painful to bear? It will likely take a lot of sustained heat to melt this ice.
What rules could have been in place to keep the city from being so segregated? Even today, a neighborhood like Roland Park is astonishingly homogeneous. What could have been done differently? And what, if anything, can we do now? What can any city do to slow the accumulation of white privilege?
As an architect, I’ve been used to asking these kinds of questions related to physical infrastructure and financial instruments. But until we address the beliefs, assumptions, privilege, power, and bigotries that underlie all of this, we will never change it.
In his thorough review of Baltimore’s bigoted housing practices in the late 19th and throughout the 20th century, Antero Pietela brings up this question: How much of this was neutrally intended, as opposed to malicious? He’s not excusing the damaging, unfair, and destructive practices as much as reminding the reader that this is how people thought at the time. They believed they were doing what’s best for their constituents.
Much like Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow,” this book tells the story of how we got where we are, how entrenched and enshrined in the laws these racist policies are. Even something as laughable and far afield as eugenics was applied to federal housing policy. The hot buttons of fear, self preservation and protection of family are as ever present today as they were in shaping neighborhoods in decades past. And the layers of public and private instruments and racism are all piled up, one on top of another. Covenants, segregation policy passed by City Council, redlining, tiers of financing based upon race, the HOLC’s eugenics, GI Bill discrimination, FHA policy, and today with shaky, predatory lending and mortgage-backed securities. How on earth can we ever get out from under all of this?
The stories are presented much like newspaper articles, one after another, revealing connections I never knew before. Some neighborhoods, like Roland Park with its strict racial and religious covenants, were even worse than I thought. And city luminaries whose names now grace foundations and university buildings were leaders in the redlining and racial discrimination. The dynasties of Baltimore have dirty hands. The greed, exploitation and corruption make a stunning history that is probably not unique to this city.
A few bright spots appear, like Mayor McKeldin, who saw the bigger picture, the dire need for housing for black war workers. As mayor, he was legally powerless to do anything, but he could advocate for equal rights. In his first term, 1943-1947, he hired black staff members, including a black secretary for himself, and named the first black assistant city solicitor and school board member. He also advocated that race be removed from applications for city jobs and even tried to secure jobs for freed convicts.
I was blown away by the sheer number of barriers to blacks having equal and fair access to good housing. Even when had the means to buy a house, they had to pay usurious interest rates or enter into rent-to-buy schemes. Since much of the housing was in a deteriorated state, the city passed laws requiring repairs and upgrades, which the seller (after years or decades of neglect) then rolled into the contract, increasing the cost to the buyer.
We have not figured out a way to profit from helping poor people, but there are any number of ways to make money by taking advantage of them. This is where policy is needed, to prevent people from acting on our baser instincts. Change will have to come at a cost to the most privileged, and that is not easy to sell. But when does the cost of maintaining the status quo become too high or painful to bear? It will likely take a lot of sustained heat to melt this ice.
What rules could have been in place to keep the city from being so segregated? Even today, a neighborhood like Roland Park is astonishingly homogeneous. What could have been done differently? And what, if anything, can we do now? What can any city do to slow the accumulation of white privilege?
As an architect, I’ve been used to asking these kinds of questions related to physical infrastructure and financial instruments. But until we address the beliefs, assumptions, privilege, power, and bigotries that underlie all of this, we will never change it.
January 11, 2011
I used this book as the core text in a class I team-taught this past fall. Pietila is a great storyteller and he really makes the subject come alive. I particularly enjoyed reading about how a garden street was purposefully turned into a truck route in order to inhibit the ability of African American residents to easily cross the street...to the white side of the neighborhood. While most people know the broad outlines of housing discrimination in Baltimore Pietila captures the petty indignities faced by folks who wanted to move out of slum or rental housing but were effectively blocked at nearly every turn. I recommend this book to anyone who wants to better understand how Baltimore became the city that is today.
September 22, 2017
for when you move to Baltimore and can't figure out what the fuck happened here
June 16, 2010
great storytelling that provides a detailed history of race, religion and real estate in Baltimore
February 20, 2018
This book was really interesting, both as a history of Twentieth Century Baltimore and as a study of white flight and mid-Twentieth Century housing turnover and failed integration in an American city. I will say that it would've helped a lot if I was more familiar with Baltimore before reading the book, especially its geography. I am too much of a Washington-focused Marylander who really doesn't know Baltimore well.
The degree of terror that seemed to motivate white homeowners to move when the first blacks moved into a neighborhood was a bit incomprehensible to me. I really don't understand why the presence of black kids in a school was considered so terrifying. That said, the one part of it that made sense was the fear that all their savings was tied up in their homes, and they couldn't risk the value of them dropping. This seems like just one more example of how private home-ownership creates perverse incentives that have messed up American cities in the last century.
The degree of terror that seemed to motivate white homeowners to move when the first blacks moved into a neighborhood was a bit incomprehensible to me. I really don't understand why the presence of black kids in a school was considered so terrifying. That said, the one part of it that made sense was the fear that all their savings was tied up in their homes, and they couldn't risk the value of them dropping. This seems like just one more example of how private home-ownership creates perverse incentives that have messed up American cities in the last century.
May 8, 2021
I thought I knew a bit about how the inability to buy a house and live in a neighborhood of one’s choosing affected many African-Americans’ (and other minorities’) abilities to accumulate wealth and move into the middle class. It turns out I didn’t know anything. This book is shocking and eye-opening. The blatant, in-your-face racism employed by past generations is breath-taking. Unfortunately, we are left with the impression that while the overt language has changed, the actions and net results are much the same.
I have ties to Baltimore but I’m not very familiar with its history or its geography. That didn’t matter. I’m sure this same scenario played out in any large city in the US, and, indeed, in many neighborhoods outside of well-known cities.
I have ties to Baltimore but I’m not very familiar with its history or its geography. That didn’t matter. I’m sure this same scenario played out in any large city in the US, and, indeed, in many neighborhoods outside of well-known cities.
October 28, 2019
An absolute must for those new and old to Baltimore. Provides incredible insight as to how west and northwest Baltimore formed through the years. Bravo to Antero! Tuhannet Kiitokset. Stealing a Finnish saying.
September 16, 2024
Outstanding history of Baltimore's neighborhoods and housing from 19th century to 21st.
My family lived in Baltimore City and County since 1906, so the streets, neighborhoods, politicians, and events described were in my memory and family experience
Explains the pervasive 20th century racial and antisemitism discrimitism and housing segregation imposed by law and practice
My family lived in Baltimore City and County since 1906, so the streets, neighborhoods, politicians, and events described were in my memory and family experience
Explains the pervasive 20th century racial and antisemitism discrimitism and housing segregation imposed by law and practice
January 15, 2023
3.5 stars. A fascinating history of institutionalized racism in Baltimore housing policy and how that has created the city as it currently exists. A horrifying story, told with compassion.
June 26, 2020
Definitely a good reading. I think being from Baltimore made it easier to understand! Strongly recommend it.
September 25, 2023
Excellent book that explains many of the root causes of systemic racism through the lens of Baltimore. Highly readable.
April 10, 2021
An amazing history of Baltimore. Will be on my reread list.
December 30, 2023
"Harlem exemplifies succession, which is the sociologists' term for ethnic, racial, and economic change. In the space of four decades between the 1870s and 1910s, that section of New York City went from a white upper-class community of American-born residents to one populated by recent Irish, Jewish, German, Italian, and Scandinavian immigrants. Soon thereafter, as a result of white abandonment, Harlem became African American and Puerto Rican, as Gilbert Osofsky chronicled in his 1971 classic Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto. Racial succession is not over, either. Beginning in the late 1990s, Manhattan's overheated real estate market made Harlem's values so irresistible that whites began returning to live on some streets north of Central Park."
"Unlike New York, Chicago, Detroit, Boston, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles, Baltimore is not usually a prominent part of the American urban narrative. It should be. In the 1910 the city enacted the first law in American history that prohibited blacks from moving to white residential blocks, and vice versa."
"In its early history Baltimore had expanded without much racial fuss. Main streets and alleys were racially, ethnically, and economically mixed. By 1835, however, whites had taken over the main streets. Blacks remained scattered throughout the city's twenty wards, but most of them lived in alley dwellings behind the whites' houses. After the Civil War, surging European immigrants produced ethnic enclaves, many anchored by Roman Catholic parishes created for specific nationalities. Even so, borders between Germans, historically the largest immigrant group in Baltimore, and Bohemians generally shifted without discord, as did dividing lines among the Irish, Hungarians, Poles, and Lithuanians. Jews too participated in this ethnic recycling, replacing other whites-and sometimes blacks-in east Baltimore's slums, only to be succeeded by a more recent immigrant group, Italians."
"In just three decades between 1880 and 1910, Baltimore's population nearly doubled to 558,485 residents, of whom 88,065 were black."
"A City Council's residential segregation push was a continuation of a campaign against African Americans that Democrats had been conducting for fifteen years. Maryland, as a border state, frequently exhibited racial attitudes that separated it from both the North and the South."
"The Northern victory in the Civil War ended slavery in Maryland but not Southern attitudes and sympathies."
"Borrowing from the so-called Mississippi Plan that defeated Confederate states had so successfully used to emasculate Reconstruction reforms, Maryland Democrats tried three times through referendums to take away blacks' voting rights. After voters rejected the first attempt in 1905, another referendum was held in 1909."
"Covenants became the new instrument of race separation after the U.S. Supreme Court abolished residential segregation laws in 1917. If municipalities or states could not constitutionally inhibit the purchase and occupancy of property solely because of the color of the proposed resident, what would prevent private parties from doing so voluntarily? Absolutely nothing. Communities in various parts of the country enacted restrictive covenants that barred a long list of ethnic and religious groups from buying or occupying real estate property."
"To make sure the development remained isolated, Baltimore County ordered streets built so that they all dead-ended and did not connect to surrounding white farms."
"Most of Baltimore's blacks lived caged inside three main districts. One, on the west side, was slowly expanding to marginal white blocks, like a smaller one on the east side. In addition to a third
district, in south Baltimore, some twenty tiny "black spots" were scattered elsewhere."
"The government's Home Owner's' Loan Corporation (HOLC) surreptitiously mapped 239 cities, dividing neighborhoods into various real estate risk categories. From Norfolk to San Diego, Miami to Seattle, Galveston to Duluth, HOLC assembled local working groups that rated every residential area, determining its market value and future prospects. While age and conditions of housing were prime considerations, also factored in were the race, ethnicity, class, religion, and economic status of residents, and their homogeneity. These maps added a new cartographic dimension to the pathology of race in America, promoting residential segregation and fostering economic discrimination, which had been widely practiced by the lending and real estate industries for decades."
"Home Owners' Loan Corporation grew out of the House Owners' Refinancing Act of 1933, a major piece of New Deal legislation that President Roosevelt introduced to bring the tottering nation's housing market back from the abyss of the depression. Mapping was just one of HOLC's tasks. In a few years of existence, the agency achieved two remarkable feats. It standardized an appraisal system for making mortgage loans, and it bailed out one million homeowners who faced losing their properties to foreclosure in the midst of the worsening economy."
"The university of Maryland professor Steven Seldon, who surveyed high school and college biology texts from 1914 to 1948, found most of them carrying the eugenics message of selective breeding and racial betterment. "It is important to repeat that none of those texts reflected over racial bias. The arguments were never made in terms of race. They were always made only in terms of biological merit," Seldon writes."
"Most of Baltimore's city core-stretching a mile and a half north and south of City Hall and some two miles east and west-was redlined as too "hazardous" for conventional lending. The determining criteria were the age and condition of housing, along with residents' race, national origin, religion, and economic and immigration status."
"Much of Baltimore's subsequent urban decay can be traced to the exploitative practices that blockbusters introduced along Fulton Avenue."
"Since the mid-1930s eugenics-influenced government policies had promoted racially restrictive covenants as necessary bulwarks against "inharmonious elements."
"While most other cities dragged their feet, Baltimore became the first major city not only to desegregate schools promptly but citywide. Because schools reflected their segregated neighborhoods, little racial change was recorded in classrooms that September."
"After World War I, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton were among the schools that adopted quotas to limit Jewish admissions. World War II intensified anti-Semitism on Ivy League campuses, despite gruesome revelations about Hitler's Final Solutions. Even though it was not Ivy League, Johns Hopkins University entertained pretensions to elite status. As the flood of applications from Jews swelled after the war, officials expressed concern that if action were not taken, Hopkins would soon be viewed as another City College of New York, a school bursting with Eastern European Jews."
"If Blacks wanted better housing, they had to buy from whites. That was the only way. While the home-building industry was working overtime to create new neighborhoods for whites whose trek to the suburbs was being subsidized by taxpayer-backed FHA loans and guarantees, hardly anyone was constructing housing for blacks."
"The 1968 riots ushered Baltimore into a new political age. To be sure, whites retained the decisive majority on the City Council, thanks to a long tradition of racial gerrymandering. All citywide elected offices-from mayor to state's attorney, the top prosecutor-were in white hands. But Baltimore's population was now 46 percent black, restless and aching for power."
"The removals of blacks in Towson and Catonsville were not isolated incidents but part of a pattern. Using their zoning powers, the County Council and the zoning commissioner decimated at least twenty old African-American settlements throughout the county. Yale Rabin, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor, coined the term "expulsive zoning" to describe the Baltimore County government's actions. His studies identified similar zoning practices in fifty-four other localities around the nation....In Norfolk, Virginia, one of every four black families was displaced to make way for highways and urban renewal that would lessen the need for school desegregation."
"Unlike New York, Chicago, Detroit, Boston, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles, Baltimore is not usually a prominent part of the American urban narrative. It should be. In the 1910 the city enacted the first law in American history that prohibited blacks from moving to white residential blocks, and vice versa."
"In its early history Baltimore had expanded without much racial fuss. Main streets and alleys were racially, ethnically, and economically mixed. By 1835, however, whites had taken over the main streets. Blacks remained scattered throughout the city's twenty wards, but most of them lived in alley dwellings behind the whites' houses. After the Civil War, surging European immigrants produced ethnic enclaves, many anchored by Roman Catholic parishes created for specific nationalities. Even so, borders between Germans, historically the largest immigrant group in Baltimore, and Bohemians generally shifted without discord, as did dividing lines among the Irish, Hungarians, Poles, and Lithuanians. Jews too participated in this ethnic recycling, replacing other whites-and sometimes blacks-in east Baltimore's slums, only to be succeeded by a more recent immigrant group, Italians."
"In just three decades between 1880 and 1910, Baltimore's population nearly doubled to 558,485 residents, of whom 88,065 were black."
"A City Council's residential segregation push was a continuation of a campaign against African Americans that Democrats had been conducting for fifteen years. Maryland, as a border state, frequently exhibited racial attitudes that separated it from both the North and the South."
"The Northern victory in the Civil War ended slavery in Maryland but not Southern attitudes and sympathies."
"Borrowing from the so-called Mississippi Plan that defeated Confederate states had so successfully used to emasculate Reconstruction reforms, Maryland Democrats tried three times through referendums to take away blacks' voting rights. After voters rejected the first attempt in 1905, another referendum was held in 1909."
"Covenants became the new instrument of race separation after the U.S. Supreme Court abolished residential segregation laws in 1917. If municipalities or states could not constitutionally inhibit the purchase and occupancy of property solely because of the color of the proposed resident, what would prevent private parties from doing so voluntarily? Absolutely nothing. Communities in various parts of the country enacted restrictive covenants that barred a long list of ethnic and religious groups from buying or occupying real estate property."
"To make sure the development remained isolated, Baltimore County ordered streets built so that they all dead-ended and did not connect to surrounding white farms."
"Most of Baltimore's blacks lived caged inside three main districts. One, on the west side, was slowly expanding to marginal white blocks, like a smaller one on the east side. In addition to a third
district, in south Baltimore, some twenty tiny "black spots" were scattered elsewhere."
"The government's Home Owner's' Loan Corporation (HOLC) surreptitiously mapped 239 cities, dividing neighborhoods into various real estate risk categories. From Norfolk to San Diego, Miami to Seattle, Galveston to Duluth, HOLC assembled local working groups that rated every residential area, determining its market value and future prospects. While age and conditions of housing were prime considerations, also factored in were the race, ethnicity, class, religion, and economic status of residents, and their homogeneity. These maps added a new cartographic dimension to the pathology of race in America, promoting residential segregation and fostering economic discrimination, which had been widely practiced by the lending and real estate industries for decades."
"Home Owners' Loan Corporation grew out of the House Owners' Refinancing Act of 1933, a major piece of New Deal legislation that President Roosevelt introduced to bring the tottering nation's housing market back from the abyss of the depression. Mapping was just one of HOLC's tasks. In a few years of existence, the agency achieved two remarkable feats. It standardized an appraisal system for making mortgage loans, and it bailed out one million homeowners who faced losing their properties to foreclosure in the midst of the worsening economy."
"The university of Maryland professor Steven Seldon, who surveyed high school and college biology texts from 1914 to 1948, found most of them carrying the eugenics message of selective breeding and racial betterment. "It is important to repeat that none of those texts reflected over racial bias. The arguments were never made in terms of race. They were always made only in terms of biological merit," Seldon writes."
"Most of Baltimore's city core-stretching a mile and a half north and south of City Hall and some two miles east and west-was redlined as too "hazardous" for conventional lending. The determining criteria were the age and condition of housing, along with residents' race, national origin, religion, and economic and immigration status."
"Much of Baltimore's subsequent urban decay can be traced to the exploitative practices that blockbusters introduced along Fulton Avenue."
"Since the mid-1930s eugenics-influenced government policies had promoted racially restrictive covenants as necessary bulwarks against "inharmonious elements."
"While most other cities dragged their feet, Baltimore became the first major city not only to desegregate schools promptly but citywide. Because schools reflected their segregated neighborhoods, little racial change was recorded in classrooms that September."
"After World War I, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton were among the schools that adopted quotas to limit Jewish admissions. World War II intensified anti-Semitism on Ivy League campuses, despite gruesome revelations about Hitler's Final Solutions. Even though it was not Ivy League, Johns Hopkins University entertained pretensions to elite status. As the flood of applications from Jews swelled after the war, officials expressed concern that if action were not taken, Hopkins would soon be viewed as another City College of New York, a school bursting with Eastern European Jews."
"If Blacks wanted better housing, they had to buy from whites. That was the only way. While the home-building industry was working overtime to create new neighborhoods for whites whose trek to the suburbs was being subsidized by taxpayer-backed FHA loans and guarantees, hardly anyone was constructing housing for blacks."
"The 1968 riots ushered Baltimore into a new political age. To be sure, whites retained the decisive majority on the City Council, thanks to a long tradition of racial gerrymandering. All citywide elected offices-from mayor to state's attorney, the top prosecutor-were in white hands. But Baltimore's population was now 46 percent black, restless and aching for power."
"The removals of blacks in Towson and Catonsville were not isolated incidents but part of a pattern. Using their zoning powers, the County Council and the zoning commissioner decimated at least twenty old African-American settlements throughout the county. Yale Rabin, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor, coined the term "expulsive zoning" to describe the Baltimore County government's actions. His studies identified similar zoning practices in fifty-four other localities around the nation....In Norfolk, Virginia, one of every four black families was displaced to make way for highways and urban renewal that would lessen the need for school desegregation."
July 28, 2019
This is an interesting look back at the history of housing segregation in one city. Baltimore makes a fascinating study because it operated a three tier system: white, Jewish, and black, and because of its history as a border city with a complicated history of segregation.
Pietila walks you through the history of Baltimore's attempt to segregate itself via means both official and unofficial--from attempts at legislating segregation via ordinance to restrictive covenants and the existence of multiple MLS services (that continued through the 1970s). Neighborhoods were integrated via blockbusting, speculators, and through individual homeowners seeking better places to live. White flight, too, was both organized or prompted by speculators, and spontaneously generated through fear of financial loss.
The nature of Baltimore segregation ultimately pitted Jews against blacks--both because of the actions of non-Jewish white politicians and developers, and because Jews themselves took part in blockbusting, in discriminating against black homebuyers (and sometimes other Jews), and through the part Jewish middlemen played in enabling black homeowners to bypass banks and government institutions that would not help them buy.
The book isn't flawless--you can tell it was published by a small press and would have benefited from more editorial attention. However, Pietila spent 35 years at the Baltimore Sun, and does a good job of telling the story.
Pietila walks you through the history of Baltimore's attempt to segregate itself via means both official and unofficial--from attempts at legislating segregation via ordinance to restrictive covenants and the existence of multiple MLS services (that continued through the 1970s). Neighborhoods were integrated via blockbusting, speculators, and through individual homeowners seeking better places to live. White flight, too, was both organized or prompted by speculators, and spontaneously generated through fear of financial loss.
The nature of Baltimore segregation ultimately pitted Jews against blacks--both because of the actions of non-Jewish white politicians and developers, and because Jews themselves took part in blockbusting, in discriminating against black homebuyers (and sometimes other Jews), and through the part Jewish middlemen played in enabling black homeowners to bypass banks and government institutions that would not help them buy.
The book isn't flawless--you can tell it was published by a small press and would have benefited from more editorial attention. However, Pietila spent 35 years at the Baltimore Sun, and does a good job of telling the story.
December 3, 2010
I read this book as part of one of Loyola's diversity reading groups for faculty and staff. The book is about the development of housing in Baltimore and how race and bigotry affected the way the city has developed. As I've mentioned many times before in my reviews I'm kind of sociology geek, so I found this book endlessly fascinating. The discussions we had surrounding it over the course of 6 weeks were also wonderful. I was trying to pace myself with the discussion, but found it really difficult to limiting myself to reading only three chapters at a time. The author actually sat in on one of our meetings, which was really neat. He gave us a greater perspective on why he wrote the book and the information he included. The author actually mentioned he had a hard time publishing the book because although the publishers thought it was an excellent book they thought it only had regional appeal. Although the book is obviously about Baltimore giving Marylanders a greater interest in the subject matter I think it is a topic that anyone interested in this sort of thing would enjoy even if they aren't familiar with the city.
June 1, 2015
No real startling revelations here, though things started much earlier than I had realized and the pervasiveness, severity and ferocity of some of the discriminatory practices were more extreme than I had realized. Nor was the writing particularly noteworthy--in fact, the book could have used some help in its organization in places. But the details were interesting, particularly the parts about the Jewish community, both as being discriminated against and as discriminators (even against other Jews--both Gentiles and German Jews considered Eastern European Jews as less desirable neighbors than German Jews) was new information to me. Plus it's always fun to read books about an area you know well--the neighborhoods, even most of the streets discussed are familiar to me. Similarly, names like Meyerhoff (not such a great guy, it turns out) and Mitchell that are part of everyday currency in Baltimore crop up with regularity. So, not the best book I've read all year, but I'm glad to have read it.
May 5, 2016
Pietila's research is eye-opening. It is amazing to see how officials, government, and political powers that rose to influence manipulated the housing situation in Baltimore to reflect racism and discrimination. There are direct correlations to how segregated and "separate" the city feels today. I think for any resident of Baltimore past, present, or future this should be reading material. I also think anyone trying to understand the racial, economic, and social situations of American cities should pay close attention to Pietila's Not in My Neighborhood.
To be sure, Pietila could have done more and I was left wanting him to connect to present day. I also found his style is very anecdotal, which makes perfect sense with his journalism background, so be prepared for short quips and quotes from individuals who might not resurface in the book. He does an excellent job though of identifying key Baltimore figures and bringing their personalities to life through archival sources.
To be sure, Pietila could have done more and I was left wanting him to connect to present day. I also found his style is very anecdotal, which makes perfect sense with his journalism background, so be prepared for short quips and quotes from individuals who might not resurface in the book. He does an excellent job though of identifying key Baltimore figures and bringing their personalities to life through archival sources.
August 16, 2015
I'm not a big non-fiction fan, but I "needed" to read this book. It certainly gave me an introspective to how my grandfather probably thought. Being born in 1910 in Baltimore, this is how he grew up experiencing blacks and Jews - in a manner dictate by "civil gentile society" at the time. I don't excuse his bigotry, but feel I understand how it evolved. I only wish he were still alive so I could discuss the book with someone who lived this era in B-more.
The author takes a long, hard look at the system that allowed corruption and greed in block-busting neighborhoods, using fear to send gentile whites further into the county. It is long and drawn out in places, but essentially, all those details were building the foundation of the movement. What shocked me most were some of the practices in lending and renting that went on into the 1980s - aka, MY LIFE.
The author takes a long, hard look at the system that allowed corruption and greed in block-busting neighborhoods, using fear to send gentile whites further into the county. It is long and drawn out in places, but essentially, all those details were building the foundation of the movement. What shocked me most were some of the practices in lending and renting that went on into the 1980s - aka, MY LIFE.
August 7, 2016
This book discuss housing segregation in Baltimore. Outside the limits of Jim Crow it explains how northern cities, similar to Philly, NYC, Chicago, used more clever methods to impose segregation policies. It also includes social theories and beliefs such as Eugenics, and how they promoted these policies. For this reason it is a good read.
However, where it falls short , it did not following the title. It doesn't explain how these policies ultimately "shaped baltimore" such as crime, poverty , schooling issues. It goes into details on the architecture design of richer neighborhood, but misses the mark on development of rowhouses, which eventually fell apart and are a major source of lead poisoning. I read the book twice, I plan to read once more now that I live in Baltimore and have more background information but there is definitely a missing piece.
However, where it falls short , it did not following the title. It doesn't explain how these policies ultimately "shaped baltimore" such as crime, poverty , schooling issues. It goes into details on the architecture design of richer neighborhood, but misses the mark on development of rowhouses, which eventually fell apart and are a major source of lead poisoning. I read the book twice, I plan to read once more now that I live in Baltimore and have more background information but there is definitely a missing piece.
June 18, 2019
This was a fascinating read that helped me further understand how racism and bigotry has shaped Baltimore's development, as well as that of other U.S. cities. My only concern is that it is a bit disjointed in the storytelling, often making it difficult to tell exactly when certain events are occurring. Nonetheless, I was riveted and am glad to have read this book/while also now being motivated to push back further against the remnants of redlining and other tactics that repress racial minorities.
June 27, 2015
This book was written in a very piecemeal fashion - and perhaps it was too disjointed for me. Instead of telling one over-arching the story, the author elected to tell a million tiny stories. He would introduce a character, talk about that character for one paragraph (or less), and then that character would disappear into oblivion. There has to be a better way to tell this story. It was a struggle for me to finish this book.
August 13, 2024
Where THE COLOR OF LAW has a national focus this book covers the same topics scoped to Baltimore city/county. This book strengthened my connection to my family’s history because it gave me a better understanding of the racial and political dynamics that my family experienced living there.
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