The federal government deliberately excluded black families from postwar homeownership programs

Evidence

The insurance was designed for low-down-payment, low-interest-rate, long-term mortgages, which meant banks had to include those terms if they wanted their mortgages insured—and they did. The FHA worked with developers to ensure that prospective buyers would be eligible for FHA-insured mortgages, but they also required developers to include racially restrictive covenants in their documents. The FHA determined that “economically sound” meant blacks need not apply, such that “by the end of the 1950s, only 2 percent of the homes built with FHA support since World War II were occupied by blacks and other minorities.” — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 322

Categorization

• XREF: This is the federal actor in the saturated-system story — the state itself imposing segregation, not merely tolerating it, which is crucial for the reparations brief. — connects to: Community-led housing commons exclude people through classed and racialised decision-making processes. — Yael Arbell, The Circle of Commoning:…, 88; A federal housing project was deliberately built as a segregation buffer — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of…, 171