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.
