Black homebuyers needed luck and personal connections to buy homes before 1968.

Evidence

Before the Fair Housing Act was passed in 1968, black homeownership was mostly achieved through a mix of luck and strategy. Take my parents, James and Dottie, who bought a three-family home at 1061 Morris Avenue in the Bronx in 1964. At that time, only 38 percent of black Americans (compared with 64 percent of white Americans) were homeowners, and the Fair Housing Act, which made race discrimination in housing illegal, was still four years away. So how did Daddy, a plumber, and Mommy, a licensed practical nurse, purchase a home? Luck and strategy. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 1223

Categorization

• SEED: The Gelmans standing in for absent governmental credit infrastructure is a concrete instance of how private white patronage substituted for public subsidy withheld from blacks.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations: How Building a…, 1223