Housing #Apartheid, American Style - NYTimes.com
▻http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/17/opinion/sunday/housing-apartheid-american-style.html?_r=0
George Romney served as secretary of Housing and Urban Development under Richard Nixon. He set out to dismantle segregation and what he described as a “high income white noose” formed by the suburbs that surrounded black inner cities. Under his Open Communities initiative, he instructed HUD officials to reject applications for sewer and highway projects from cities and states with segregationist policies. He believed that ending residential segregation was “essential if we are going to keep our nation from being torn apart.”
As Nikole Hannah-Jones reported in a 2012 investigation for ProPublica, #Nixon got wind of Romney’s plan and ordered John Ehrlichman, his domestic policy chief, to shut it down.
In a memo to his aides, Nixon later wrote: “I am convinced that while legal #segregation is totally wrong that forced integration of housing or education is just as wrong.”
He understood the consequences of his decision: “I realize that this position will lead us to a situation in which blacks will continue to live for the most part in black neighborhoods and where there will be predominately black schools and predominately white schools.” Nixon began to ostracize Romney and eventually drove him out of his administration. Over the next several decades, presidents from both parties followed the Nixon example and declined to use federal muscle in a way that meaningfully promoted housing desegregation.
