The history of housing discrimination in KC (not a thread for race baiting/etc.)

[kcmo]

Originally Posted by Garethe

KCMO, I am glad your back, we really need your excellent knowledge and insight in this forum. Like you I am a former resident and there is a good chance I'm moving back, so I have a vested interest in the city.

I think this is a good thread and I wanted to add that many cities have some sort of cutoff that the locals know unofficially exists. For a long time here in Seattle it was "don't go south of denny" and when I lived in Atlanta it was "don't go south of ponce".

I have a couple other points I want to make, I will go back and quote, forgive the multiple posting, I am on a phone, cd is still working on a mobile app.

Thanks. I never left, but I do get frustrated with this forum or really the KC mentality in general that people simply can not or will not discuss any real issues. They are swept under the rug or often simply justified as "that's just how it is here". I have always thought that when metro KC actually looks its problems in the face and attempts to address them, the city could become a phenomenal city and metro to live in erasing many of the negatives about the area. Like every metro, the KC area has problems and I am one of the few people that will brag about the positives in post post and then rip on the negatives in another. People don't like that.

As far as cities having racial lines. All cities have them. In Washington dc it's east of the Anacostia. But in DC, like KC, it really depends on who you talk to. Clueless suburbanites wouldn't even recognize some areas of DC today that they probably still think is ghetto when now these areas are filled with dozens of apartment towers etc.

Originally Posted by Garethe

Seattle has their very own JC Nichols, he is the real estate billionaire who owns much of downtown Bellevue, an affluent suburb, and he strongly opposed the expansion on light rail for what many suspected to be the same reason in the absence of any other credible reasons. He had so many politicians in his pocket they had to put it on the ballot and it passed.

This just goes to show racism is alive and well in America, albeit less overt or even obvious.

Bellevue reminds me of Clayton, MO to some degree although I don't think Clayton tries to be quite as independent as Bellevue and Downtown Seattle is thriving and can generally deal with competition like Bellevue and far flung suburbs such as where the Microsoft camps is located. You take a smaller city like KC which does not have a thriving downtown (economically) where competing areas like the Plaza and Johnson County can and do have a much bigger impact on Downtown and the overall health and attractiveness of the metro. So working together in KC is much more important, yet the area has not figured that out yet. Way off topic, so I will stop with that. Seattle has really gone to the next level with transit and downtown growth in just the past decade. KC is not in that tier of cities anymore. But hopefully things will continue to get better.

[Garethe]

Well as I said in other posts, the potential is there, I have always been in full agreement with you regarding poaching and that ghastly airport (an ongoing debate between myself and real life friend who of course just adores that place).

I know Seattle is in another class but we have something here termed the "seattle process". The two cities put off progression, albeit for different reasons, but the similarities are enough to provide some comparison.

Back to the topic: when I lived in the plaza I enjoyed the diversity, but I was surprised at how little of it there was, I know for a fact my building did not discriminate, but I can't speak for others. I bring this up because the individual housing discrimation acts can look more collective when added together and that could be what is at play now.

[kcmo]

Originally Posted by Garethe

Back to the topic: when I lived in the plaza I enjoyed the diversity, but I was surprised at how little of it there was, I know for a fact my building did not discriminate, but I can't speak for others. I bring this up because the individual housing discrimation acts can look more collective when added together and that could be what is at play now.

Living in DC has probably changed my opinion of KC some because the city is so diverse. While it has similar problems with racial lines (southest DC, PG County etc), the thriving areas of central DC and its urban suburbs are VERY diverse. The plaza and really all of the urban KCMO corridor is literally blocks from KC's largest african american population yet, you rarely see black people on the plaza, crown center etc unless they show up in large groups of youth and create problems.

KC seems to lack the professional or middle class black population that tends to thrive in the DC area despite it having a rather large black population.

Maybe one thing about kc is that it's mostly just a black and white city where most large cities on the coast are far more diverse than just black and white. No matter where you are in dc (city or suburbs), you are always around people of many races. In KC you are basically in a white or black part of town (with pockets of hispanic) still today although some areas are in transition from one to the other making them more diverse at least temporarily (ie raytown etc).

[MidWestCityNative]

Originally Posted by kcmo

The plaza and really all of the urban KCMO corridor is literally blocks from KC's largest african american population yet, you rarely see black people on the plaza, crown center etc unless they show up in large groups of youth and create problems.

So you're saying the Plaza is for WASPs? I don't know, I've seen my share of black, hispanic, and asian folks around the Plaza, especially around Christmastime. Not as much as I would see at Westport, or even PNL, but still.

KC seems to lack the professional or middle class black population that tends to thrive in the DC area despite it having a rather large black population.

I agree, but keep in mind most cities of our size don't tend to have professional black communities of that ubiquity. It's mostly the great big cities like NY, LA, DC, Chicago, and Atlanta.

[ScrappyLeMonte]

I'd like to reply to KCMO, comment #10: Thanks for a really interesting comment! I'd like to know what you are quoting.

[Leslie4283]

Troost has been a dividing since 1890. Troost was the eastern most edge of the city at the time with several large homes having been built on the west side of the street. Investors saw the future of the city moving outward and they built homes to the east on speculation. The economy crashed in 1890 and the investors, afraid of losing money, lowered the cost of housing. The lower costs and the expanding streetcar line opened up the area for African-American families to be able to afford homes that were better than the shacks where they'd be living in the West Bottoms.
A lot of stuff happened after that, including zoning ordinances and school district lines being redrawn, all that reinforced the idea of the "Troost Wall." But the problem only got bigger through the middle part of the 20th century when "blockbusting" became common practice. Real estate agents would basically scare white homeowners into selling their homes east of Troost by telling them that a black family was moving in nearby and that it may lower their property value if they didn't act quickly. The family would sell and move. Then the same agent would sell the home to a black family. That black family being there would scare the next family into selling and moving and perpetuating the situation.

[MarketStEl]

Originally Posted by TabulaRasa

Those housing covenants had legal teeth up into the 1960s.

The Supreme Court ruled them unenforceable in the 1948 case Shelley v. Kramer, which, perhaps ironically, involved the sale of a home with such a covenant in Ferguson, Mo., to an African-American buyer.

But just as Brown v. Board of Education six years later did not end school segregation, this did not end housing segregation. What it did do was open the floodgates for a bunch of other unsavory practices like blockbusting and panic selling. Those were outlawed by the 1968 Fair Housing Act, which also outlawed racial steering on the part of real estate agents.

Forgive me if what follows repeats material already posted here, but as I was in a sense a "beneficiary" of Shelley, I'd like to add to this conversation.

Prior to Shelley, the area where blacks were allowed to buy homes in Kansas City was bounded on the north by Independence Boulevard, on the west by Troost Avenue, on the east by Indiana Avenue and on the south by 31st Street. (There was also a small area bounded on the north by 53d, on the south by 55th, on the west by Prospect Avenue and on the east by Town Fork Creek whose owner deeded it for black settlement upon his death; the only black school in the city south of 31st was in this area. My paternal grandparents' home is located in this district too.) The immediate aftermath of Shelley was to open up a southward path for the expansion of the black district, which took place over several years. When my parents bought 4138 Bellefontaine Ave. in 1954, they were one of the first black families in the Oak Park neighborhood; the last white families didn't leave until about a decade later, when I was four.

During my teen years, residents of a narrow band of homes located between Troost and The Paseo from 49th to 63d streets formed a community coalition that, much like in the northwest Philadelphia neighborhood of Mt. Airy, sought to keep the neighborhood integrated. Unlike in Mt. Airy, the effort failed.