Introduction
In Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. depicts U.S. society and modern civilization as a great “world house,” a household that must “learn somehow to live together in peace,”Footnote 1 despite the peril of racism.Footnote 2
Behind King’s world house metaphor is a prophetic vision and dream—the realization of the beloved community. King envisioned a “deeply integrated, loving community rather than segregated chaos.”Footnote 3 Racism and segregation are antithetical to the beloved community yet operate pervasively throughout the U.S. housing sector. King decried segregated housing and the race-driven laws and practices that encouraged it.Footnote 4 And he forewarned the catastrophic costs to human community when “profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people.”Footnote 5
King transposed liberation discourse into an ideal of integration as shared power at every level of U.S. society, of shared living in every neighborhood.Footnote 6 He also believed housing was essential to realizing racial justice. Indeed, it seems more than coincidence that King uses a housing metaphor in the culminating chapter of Where Do We Go from Here, which concludes with an indictment of structural racism and a bold vision of housing justice in the United States.Footnote 7 And civil rights history, affirmed by King’s own account, reports that in 1965–1966, housing became a central theme as King led the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to shift its focus and resources from community organizing in the U.S. South to housing advocacy and demonstrations in the U.S. North, notably in Chicago.Footnote 8
King’s world house is more than a literary ornament. Rather, the metaphor functions as an apologetic for integrated community. As an apologetic, the world house metaphorically contends for ultimate realities while subverting then-dominant approaches to race and social peace. The metaphor rationalizes integration and models agape love in ways that encourage us to imagine human freedom, solidarity, and engaged social action. It is prophetic speech that upholds eschatological hopes. And the world house instantiates biblical language that conveys democratic values and defends democratic possibilities.
In this way, the world house metaphor offers a significant means to expand understandings of the beloved community. It reveals that beloved community combines moral and political commitments, prophetic and pragmatic concerns, and social and spatial dimensions that can be realized through racial justice in the housing sector. And it elevates housing as a moral-ethical concern that engenders radical structural solutions.
King reminded the nation that “the stability of the large world house which is ours will involve a revolution of values” and a reordering of priorities.Footnote 9 And he urged Americans to “boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores”Footnote 10 and with determination “to break down the unjust systems we find in our society, so it will be possible to realize the American dream.”Footnote 11
This profound need remains evident and urgent today, as the U.S. housing sector continues to evidence among the nation’s deepest forms of racial injustice, such as the exclusion of racial minorities and low-income families from high opportunity neighborhoods, economic exploitation, and wealth extraction from households and communities least able to afford it. Such radical reform also is needed because the mechanisms that generate and reinforce racism and separatism have become so ingrained over time that they seem natural, necessary, even inevitable.Footnote 12 These racialized intellectual and social habits have been naturalized spatially through private property rights and racially designated spatial patterns.Footnote 13 Over time, what is aptly called racial capitalism Footnote 14 and residential segregation have normalized racial housing and wealth disparities and continue to exert re-segregating influence throughout the housing sector and broader economy.
The realization of the beloved community in lived reality requires tandem moral and legal mechanisms that can shape the narratives, aspirations, and commitments that drive community social and spatial habits. King’s moral tenets are both relevant and useful to reimagine and remodel the U.S. housing sector without structural racism. A moral architecture centered on equality, equity, and empowerment, and a civic infrastructure that concretizes loveFootnote 15 through racially just housing laws, institutional practices, and policy-making can foster integrated neighborhoods. Concretizing love as justice demands both new ways of seeing those whom racism and segregation persistently dehumanize and exploit and new modes of contact, care, and empowered participation.Footnote 16
The U.S. housing sector—particularly local neighborhoods—is where beloved community can find tangible expression in lived experience and serve as a gauge for progress on racial justice. As King observed—and research confirms—the primary barriers that affect a household of color’s ability to safely attain and afford apartment rental or homeownership in a self-chosen neighborhood include exclusionary land use laws and planning approaches; unimplemented or poorly enforced fair housing and fair share mandates;Footnote 17 racial bias among housing industry professionals and institutions; and asymmetries in accessing capital, information, and power between owners and renters and among racial groups. Those barriers can be redressed or removed through fuller commitments to strengthen the federal role in land management; redesign or redirect race-motivated mechanisms and institutional practices that create and exploit racial disparities in housing opportunity and credit access; and formalize, fund, and expand tenant protections and representation in housing policy-making and budgets.
Focusing on integrating neighborhoods matters in part because of the importance of housing and high-opportunity neighborhoods to family well-being and economic mobility.Footnote 18 It also matters because, shortly after the passage of the federal Fair Housing ActFootnote 19 and the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Jones v. Mayer,Footnote 20 efforts to integrate neighborhoods became stalled nationally and locally.Footnote 21 Since then, local neighborhoods have remained a proverbial battleground for both the siting and sighting of racial (in)justice in housing across the United States. And the decades-old national goal of “a decent home for every American” remains unfulfilled.Footnote 22
Like beloved community, King’s world house concept has significance beyond the United States. King regarded the American freedom movement as part of a global liberation movement “to end the exploitation of … races and [their] lands.”Footnote 23 Further, the concept of the world house also has global applicability because recent technology innovations have made capital and housing markets transnational. Consequently, private equity and housing investors are driving housing markets and outcomes simultaneously in the United States and globally. In response, vast information networks now enable cities to share impacts, lessons, and strategies beyond national borders and cultural boundaries.Footnote 24 Witness recent global convenings on housing and homelessness and national and global movements working to implement international treaties and conventions that affirm a human right to “adequate housing.”Footnote 25
The Beloved Community and the World House
The phrase beloved community epitomizes King’s moral ideal for U.S. society and modern civilization. Dr. King popularized the term beloved community,Footnote 26 using descriptions that emphasized the state, dynamics, and nature of human relations and conditions when beloved community is—or is not—operative in lived experience. King believed that “God is interested in the freedom of the whole human race and in the creation of a society where all men can live together as brothers [and] respect the dignity and the worth of human personality.”Footnote 27 Such community manifests as the peaceable reign of God expressed in genuine interpersonal, intergroup living, economic freedom, and shared political power.Footnote 28
King’s beloved community also reflects his deeply held belief in the availability and immanence of agape love that can be “concretely conceived in human nature and human history.”Footnote 29 As King historian Charles Marsh observes, “[the] beloved community enables the ‘real history’ of the world to be glimpsed and touched.”Footnote 30 The future that King envisioned was a place free from racial discrimination and segregation, a “new world … of geographic togetherness.”Footnote 31 King spoke of a “new order of integration emerging on the horizon,” an integrated society where African Americans and whites of different classes shared political and economic power.Footnote 32
Beloved community is not yet fully realized in the United States because of persistent racism and residential segregation, especially in the housing sector. At the time King wrote Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, he saw the U.S. economy as a deeply flawed system that those living in poverty and minority communities experienced as amazingly complex systems of deprivation and constraint.Footnote 33
Racism and segregation pervaded the U.S. economy. African Americans and other minorities were considered undeserving or incapable of being housed, owning property, learning, or earning commensurate with their white counterparts. Consequently, African Americans often were relegated to low-wage, low-status jobs in overcrowded, deteriorated neighborhoods that typically offered only costly, substandard housing and underperforming schools.Footnote 34 These premises were used to justify restrictions or exclusions of African Americans in local housing and credit markets, which resulted in their further economic disadvantage, exploitation, and political disempowerment.
Such negative racial stereotypes and presuppositions were acted on and used to justify categorical exclusions in the housing sector, primarily from public housing, suburban neighborhoods, affordable mortgage lending programs, and certain federal housing programs and subsidies.Footnote 35
The mere presence of African American residents often was conflated with so-called neighborhood blight that threatened to depress property values and became a pretense for the systematic demolition and forced displacement of formerly stable African American families and neighborhoods.Footnote 36 This created a severe shortage of housing available and affordable to racial minorities, leaving them at the mercy of private landlords who then charged exorbitant housing prices for lesser locations, quality, and conditions.Footnote 37 Urban ghettoes became captive tenant pools for landlords,Footnote 38 who could then charge aggressive rents while neglecting repairs to yield greater profits.Footnote 39 Historians have detailed the predatory methods of slumlords and other private real estate and financial interests that capitalized on the dual housing market to profit from African Americans and other racial minorities who could not access mainstream credit programs or move into many public housing projects or white-majority neighborhoods.Footnote 40
King viewed residential segregation as a moral malady and national tragedy,Footnote 41 and he denounced the more subtle northern forms that racism assumed, especially segregated and unequal housing.Footnote 42 Even after ten years operating under court-ordered desegregation, U.S. housing law at that time contradicted the housing reality for millions of African Americans and low-income householdsFootnote 43 largely due to the legacy of legal and planning tools lawmakers and local citizens deployed during the Progressive Era (1890s–1920s) to create racially separate communities.Footnote 44 Recent scholarship has demonstrated that federal policies from the 1930s through the 1960s subsidized private-sector segregation and created a comprehensive and nationwide Jim Crow system that enabled and even encouraged financial institutions and real estate speculators to exploit and profit from the containment of nonwhite communities.Footnote 45 King decried institutional racism in the form of racial covenants,Footnote 46 zoning,Footnote 47 redliningFootnote 48, and other de jure segregation tactics encoded in housing and finance laws—most notably, the National Housing acts of 1949Footnote 49 and 1954, the 1956 Interstate Highway Act, and the Model Cities Act of 1966.Footnote 50
Indeed, the federal government’s New Deal and postwar housing programs “revolutionized both municipal land-use politics and the market for private homes” and therefore structured “urban and suburban development patterns that systematically segregated populations by race.”Footnote 51 According to Massey and Denton, “by 1970, after two decades of urban renewal[Footnote 52], public housing projects in most large cities had become Black reservations, highly segregated from the rest of society … the direct result of an unprecedented collaboration between local and national government.”Footnote 53 These housing realities contradicted King’s beloved community ideal and the nation’s espoused democratic values.
The World House: An Apologetic for Integrated Community
Through the metaphor of the world house, King envisioned a different housing worldview and future—one that befits the beloved community. King likened U.S. society and modern civilization to a great house that is inherited, inhabited, and imperiled: “A widely separated family inherits a house in which they have to live together … a family unduly separated in ideas, culture and interest, who, because we can never again live apart, must learn somehow to live with each other in peace.”Footnote 54
As an apologetic,Footnote 55 the world house metaphor contends for integrated community and for the ultimate realities that underlie it. King held a liberative conception of integration that in practice was evidenced by “genuine, interpersonal, intergroup living” and the mutual sharing of economic and political power.Footnote 56 Integration was a creative, liberative force that carried the moral-ethical demandsFootnote 57 to recognize the sacredness of human personalityFootnote 58 and the solidarity of the human family.Footnote 59 Genuine commitment to integration also meant recognizing that to deny certain human freedoms denies life itself.Footnote 60 Meeting these moral demands, said King, involves certain inner attitudes and interpersonal relations that Americans still avoided and—often violently—resisted. King recounts that the mere call for open housing legislation triggered unprecedented white backlash and violence “rooted in the fear that the alleged depravity or defective nature of the out-race will infiltrate the neighborhood of the in-race.”Footnote 61
The world house contends for King’s conception of integration while subverting then-dominant misconceptions and approaches to race and peace. Integrated community is evidenced by the imagery of household members who hold different ideas, culture, and interests now cohabitating socially and physically. Differences based on certain human traits no longer define or divide the community—the family. Love defines the community, and shared inheritance brings the community together.
Instead of inferior and superior races accorded disparate freedoms and rights, beloved community’s world house reifies a human race equal in dignity and worth.Footnote 62 Instead of negative peace sought through racial separatism protected through violence, beloved community’s world house portrays and admonishes positive peace gained through racial justice.Footnote 63 In this world house, peace is also simultaneously an outcome and a cooperative, creative learning process, the results of the constructive and collective agency of household members.
King’s beloved community centers his moral philosophy on the nature of human personhood and life in a community mediated by agape love. Says King, “At the heart of all that civilization has meant and developed is ‘community’—the mutually cooperative and voluntary venture of man to assume a semblance of responsibility for his brother.”Footnote 64 King believed God is “the supreme unifying principle of life”Footnote 65 that transcends other affinities.Footnote 66 This agape love operates on a register above that of race, class, gender, nationality, and tribal distinction. “It means understanding, redeeming good will for all men.Footnote 67 Agape does not begin by discriminating between worthy and unworthy people or any qualities people possess.Footnote 68 It begins by loving others for their sakes.Footnote 69 Such love unifies instead of divides community.Footnote 70 For King, such “love, at its best, is justice concretized.”Footnote 71
King’s beloved community can also be described as political theology. According to King historian Charles Marsh, King’s political theology sought to “inject a new dimension of agape love into the veins of civilization.”Footnote 72 It envisions “democratic possibilities through the lens of biblical hope.”Footnote 73 King employed theological language to subvert the racial status quo and deploy “a potent arsenal for imagining freedom, energizing social reform and forging solidarity with the poor.”Footnote 74 Beloved community, as political theology, also represents “ways of understanding redemptive social relations and … reconciling spaces where divine love overflows in interdependence and mutual sharing toward the peaceable reign of God.”Footnote 75
As an apologetic, the world house functions as political-theological discourse that rationalizes integration and models agape love. The metaphor affirms King’s liberation-integration dialectic and conception of integration as distinct from and yet continuous with desegregation in stating that the household members can no longer live apart but also must somehow learn to live together. Says King, “desegregation is eliminative and prohibitive in that it only removes legal barriers and social prohibitions and only the first phase of a good society, while integration is creative and more far-reaching.” It involves the positive acceptance and welcome of African Americans into the total range of human activities—“integration is the ultimate goal of our national community.”Footnote 76 King admonished that as the nation pursued compliance with court desegregation orders, Americans must be equally concerned with “commitment to the democratic dream of integration.”Footnote 77 In this way, the metaphor captures King’s longing for the day when the nation would “see integration not as an obstacle, but as an opportunity.”Footnote 78
And the metaphor also mirrors the idea of injecting civilization with new dimensions of agape love—that is, neighbor-love—where past separations and even present differences do not preclude the prospects of shared community. By implication, it is agape love that enables the members to freely choose to treat each other as family. And it is agape love that makes those accustomed to living apart open and willing to dwell together and cooperate toward a common goal (peace).
As an apologetic, the world house symbolism represents prophetic speech that upholds eschatological hopes. Prophetic speech uses “the language of imagination” to “invite us to envision the new day God intends and to discern how God would creatively use us to help bring that day to completion,” says theologian Dawn Ottoni-Wilhelm.Footnote 79 The world house metaphor functions as prophetic speech with its image of equality and togetherness that challenge the worldview in which racial hierarchy and residential segregation are normative. For instance, the image of a diverse family in the same house echoes the eschatological hope of the redeemed community of persons gathered from “every nation, tribe, people, and language” pictured in biblical prophecy (Revelations 7:9).Footnote 80 Similarly, the biblical hope idea from King’s political theology invokes the Christian concept of inaugurated eschatology, where, humanity lives in the tension between the “already” of this present world and the “not yet” of the world to come, as both present reality and future reality.Footnote 81 In this logic, King’s world house depiction of formerly and widely separated household members sharing social and physical space also represents prophetic speech that shows the beloved community’s “already-not yet” unity in diversity.Footnote 82
As an apologetic, the world house terminology also uses biblical language and concepts to contend for democratic values and defend democratic possibilities. The term world house itself can be understood as biblical language. Judeo-Christian writings associate the term world (kosmos in Greek, tĕbĕl in Hebrew) both with humanity or human culture and inhabitants of the world or civilization, while also using the term to mean the inhabited world or place where people live.Footnote 83 This term can be applied to any group of persons, community, or affinity group, whether global, national, regional, local, tribal, or ethnic.Footnote 84 Similarly, house (oikos in Greek, bayit in Hebrew) is a versatile term aptly applied biblically to various units of reference, such as, a family unit,Footnote 85 a civil authority, legal entity, or jurisdiction, or a spiritual or social unit.Footnote 86 A review of the Greek-English transliteration and New Testament semantic range for house,Footnote 87 when paired with world, yields multiple plausible translations that support King’s use of the term world house to contend for democratic norms, particularly in the housing sector.Footnote 88 For instance, the translation of world house as “a house of, by, and for people,”Footnote 89 can be interpreted to address democratic practices in the housing arena. The translation of world house as “people’s people” or “people’s world”Footnote 90 can be interpreted to mean treating both people (“world of people”) and their neighborhoods (“people’s world or habitat”) according to democratic values. This interpretation can be understood as stressing the full personhood of the people and the full value of the places where they live. A translation of world house as “all the people’s house” connotes upholding the democratic norm that a polity (house) by the people must serve all the people (world).Footnote 91 As such, this translation contends for governing and administering in a manner that benefits all its citizens, not merely some citizens. Similarly, this interpretation implies that the house be used for all the people’s well-being instead of housing that sacrifices some peoples’ well-being for other people’s profits.
When King demanded that the Model Cities and Urban Renewal programs be administered “of, by, and for the people,”Footnote 92 he was calling attention to a mayoral patronage system that hoarded federal antipoverty resources and apprenticeships, and disproportionately allocated housing subsidies and infrastructure benefits to real estate developers and affluent suburban homeowners.Footnote 93 He also sought correction of the conspiratorial alliances among federal and local governments, private lenders, and real estate developers and brokers that displaced minority residents, and demolished their homes and neighborhoods without rebuilding promised replacement housing while refusing those families occupancy or homeownership in suburban neighborhoods and all but the worst public housing.Footnote 94 In the context of such race-driven exclusions, housing disparities and discrimination, the term world house can be understood as symbolically contending for the administration and distribution of housing opportunity and housing resources democratically—that is “housing of, by, and for the people.”Footnote 95
World House Expands Understanding of Beloved Community
The world house metaphor reveals and foregrounds fuller dimensions of the beloved community. The metaphor reveals that beloved community combines moral and political commitments, conveys prophetic and pragmatic concerns, and integrally relates social and spatial dimensions, even as it contextualizes beloved community in the U.S. housing sector.
When King states that a family inherits a house, it reifies and reveals important understandings about the beloved community. His use of family shows beloved community as combining moral and political commitments through the moral and political significance the metaphor confers on representations of what family means, who it includes, and how the family acts and interacts. By deploying the symbol of family to represent the household members as humanity or American society, the metaphor affirms all persons shared parentage, equal human dignity, and interrelatedness and reinforces King’s critiques of racism as being dehumanizing and immoral in its denial and affronts to human equality, shared dignity, and the sacredness of human personality.
What the family must do (live together), what the family must not do (again live apart), and what the family may do (somehow learn to live together) also express human interdependence and freedom to choose peaceful coexistence. This directive (learn to live with each other) also portrays democratic possibility and energizing social action in its inference that the input and participation of each household member is welcomed and expected in decision making that affects each person’s interest. Indeed, the very act of learning to live with each other in peace uses language of solidarity that conveys that the community’s peace is something learned or spurned, forged, or forfeited—together. The language describing whom family includes expresses inclusivity and neighbor-love in that past and present differences (in ideas, culture, and interest) do not impair mutuality or the prospects for cooperation. This familial language serves to challenge Western civilization’s long dalliance with white supremacist ideas that attributed subhuman status to African Americans and other racial groups for political purposes, in part to justify their substandard living conditions. In this way, the metaphor combines and amplifies moral and political commitments to the shared dignity, equal worth, interrelatedness, and innate freedom of all the family members. Through these depictions of shared being, shared status, and shared agency the metaphor signals the beloved community’s true inheritance.
Relatedly, the metaphor declares that the family inherits a house. Its depictions of inheritance reveal certain of the beloved community’s prophetic and pragmatic concerns. The symbolism of inheritance depicts human solidarity in that all the family members inherit the house. The bequest is a shared resource where the Grantor (not the heirs) determine who belongs and receives an interest in the bequest. The imagery also suggests that, by virtue of their inheritance, each member has rights and responsibilities toward both the other family members and the house. That the inheritance is gained by bequest rather than by coercion, cooption, or conquest is also notable and reminds us that the beloved community seeks and displays the peaceable reign of God in human relations and systems.
Prophetically, the image of the world house speaks to the worldview in which the earth ultimately belongs to the Lord, such that land and real property are resources whose wealth is to be shared. In this worldview, poverty can be understood as a moral failure of human community and a political failure of American democracy. In this way, the metaphor can reorient one’s worldview to the reality of beloved community as involving the sharing of resources and implies the absurdity and abnormality of poverty in a community formed in neighbor-love and justice. In contrast, the world house imagery signals that the beloved community is where agape love’s inheritance creates new conditions of wealth and community for the benefit of all.
The imagery of inheritance also speaks a prophetic critique against racialized property and the residential segregation it propagates by widening the wealth gap between racial minorities and whites and creating a “source of reactionary fears, stereotypes, and political divisions.”Footnote 96 The imagery of the family jointly sharing its inheritance as co-owners and co-inhabitants pragmatically serves to summon the nation to a “radical reorientation of its worldview”Footnote 97 away from racialized human hierarchy and racial separatism to an integrated community worldview, where shared community, shared dwelling, and shared ownership are all essential parts of the family’s inheritance.
Additionally, the emphasis that the family inherits a house reveals how beloved community integrally relates social and spatial dimensions. As discussed, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, house is a versatile term with a wide semantic rangeFootnote 98 that carries dual social and spatial meanings and connotations. The term house describes both a gathering of people and a physical space where the people gather.
King’s metaphor of the world house also reflects this duality: the house is a redemptive and reconciling space. The household members, formerly widely and unduly separated, are brought back together into right relations as family—redeemed—and back together to a shared location—reconciled—in the house. Also, the symbolism of the implied grantor’s death facilitating a homecoming through the inheritance of the house strongly echoes the biblical motif of God’s redemptive action in Jesus Christ.Footnote 99 Similarly, that the house functions as a reconciling physical space where all are expected—and welcomed—to return and dwell together (because they can no longer live apart) implies a type of reconciling contact.
And the metaphor indicates that the family inherits a house—the same house—standing in stark contrast to the grossly unequal ghetto housing and metropolitan racial apartheid that King vigorously denounced, and that residential segregation invariably creates. The unitary connotation in this language also challenges racial capitalism’s dual market dynamics, which unjustly value more highly spaces owned or rented by whites while devaluing those of nonwhites.
Socially, the metaphor represents the beloved community as a social space where love can transcend and bridge wide and varied kinds of difference. Spatially, the world house reminds that whether, where, and how the human family dwells together in a local context matters and affects the lived reality of beloved community—what beloved community means, whom it includes, and what it requires of us all. In this way, the metaphor of the world house reveals and commends the transformative power of neighbor-love to overcome both social and spatial divides and to normalize shared society and shared dwelling as indicia of the beloved community.
The World House Ratifies the Importance of Housing in Racial Justice
Foregrounding the spatial dimension and localizing the world in a house serves to ratify housing as a significant expression and enabler of beloved community. Localizing community in this house helps us perceive ourselves socially as neighbors and spatially as part of the same community despite our separate cultures, ideas, interests. And it prods us to allow our dwelling arrangements to reflect that reality. It signals that the housing sector—particularly local neighborhoods—are where beloved community finds tangible expression in lived experience and helps enable—or thwart—the nation’s progress on racial justice. Notably, King’s aspirations for the world house also resemble the New Testament portrayal of the “Father’s House,”Footnote 100 an inherited, peaceful, and capacious house with room for all and a good place for each person.
The World House Elevates Housing as a Moral-Ethical Concern
The metaphor’s combined emphases on the spatial component (house) of integrated community and as family inheritance also function to elevate housing as a central moral concern. For King, racism and segregation are moral issues. By foregrounding the spatial dimension of beloved community, he underscored that housing market dynamics and outcomes are important indicia that reflect moral decisions and behaviors that expose and express the nation’s progress on race relations. Says King, “Nothing more clearly indicates the residue of racism still lodging in our society than the response of white America to integrated housing. Here the tides of prejudice, fear, and irrationality rise to flood proportions.”Footnote 101
What happens in the housing sector also has moral-ethical significance because housing sector actors, dynamics, and spatial arrangements affect whether and how housing laws, markets, and systems support or degrade human dignity and worth; whether they engender or endanger human interrelatedness and interdependence; and whether and how they improve or impede human solidarity and community in lived experience. For example, the image of localizing—that is, housing—the entire household (world) together in this common, shared space undifferentiated as to location, quality, and conditions resonates with King’s conviction that human beings are human equals to be treated as housing equals. That the house is shown accommodating the entire family affirms the equal worth of all the members and intimates King’s belief in a human right to housing.Footnote 102
The World House Depicts Housing as Central to Racial Justice
The metaphor of the world house also foregrounds housing as central to racial justice. King correlated peace with racial justice, arguing that “[t]rue peace is not merely the absence of tensions; it is the presence of justice.”Footnote 103 He stressed the centrality of housing to racial justice when he called inadequate housing “the crux of the race problem” in the cities.Footnote 104 It was “the most tragic expression of discrimination.”Footnote 105
The idea that a house constitutes the family’s inheritance not only resonates with the significance King accorded to housing and the housing sector, but also echoes King’s expressed concern for racial injustice against the personhood and wealth of racial minorities.Footnote 106 For example, this symbolism coincides with King’s denunciation of large-scale local and federal slum clearance and redevelopment efforts, such as Urban Renewal and Model Cities, that resulted in the loss of African American wealth through the uncompensated condemnation, confiscation, and demolition of minority-occupied or minority-owned homes and neighborhoods.Footnote 107 Similarly, the image of all the household members sharing this inherited house, in this context, can be viewed as a way of contending for Black wealth-building through homeownership while contending against public policies and private practices that unjustly exploit and extract African Americans wealth or impair racial minorities’ ability to build or preserve housing-related wealth.Footnote 108
The World House Engenders Radical Structural Reforms
This moral concern for racial injustice engenders radical structural reforms in the U.S. housing sector. For King, the world house community held great promise but also faced grave perils. He uses the metaphor of the world house to diagnose its dire and dual perils. Relational conflict jeopardized the social integrity (peaceful coexistence) of the household, while a faulty foundation threatened its structural integrity. From King’s perspective, modern society and American democracy were standing on the faulty foundation of white supremacy, an economy that values profits more than people,Footnote 109 and coercive, violent materialism instead of peace.
Considering two words of the metaphor, world house, individually and together, they direct attention to the foundation on which the house rests, its architecture, and design origin. Biblically, foundation symbolizes values, truths, or virtues and emphasizes that the firmness and strength of a foundation determines the stability of the house.Footnote 110 Biblical wisdom literature also reminds that God founded the world on “wisdom and understanding,”Footnote 111 a phrase the scriptures associate with God, the good life, and peacemakers.Footnote 112 And these foundations, though a plurality, also function as a mutually reinforcing unity.Footnote 113 Like the biblical conception of foundations as a plurality, in housing the foundations of poverty, residential segregation, and racial capitalism likewise function as a unity.Footnote 114 King observed this dynamic when he referred to the triple evils of the ghetto economy as a “triple ghetto—a ghetto of poverty, a ghetto of race, and ghetto of human misery.”Footnote 115
King’s diagnosis of the dual and dire perils facing human society and the nation justifies tandem moral and legal structural solutions that drive U.S. housing outcomes. King’s analysis stressed the constructed nature of the world house. That he calls attention to the house’s faulty, destabilized foundations invites structural interventions.Footnote 116 According to historian Thomas Jackson, “gradualism, tokenism, deference to powerful private interests, and piecemeal remedies were all unacceptable to King.”Footnote 117 Instead, to eradicate racial injustice, redistribute wealth, and abolish poverty—King advocated the “radical restructure of the architecture of American society,”Footnote 118 and stressed the need for “‘structural changes’ not sprinklers, and ‘massive programs’ driven by moral urgency, not political expediency.”Footnote 119
Through the metaphor of the world house, King described a better housing future by constructing dual approaches to resolve dual (relational and structural) problems.Footnote 120 King envisioned a housing sector stabilized and maintained—founded—on equality and justice. Instead of a world house depersonalized by racism, demoralized by segregation, and destabilized by the violence of poverty, the beloved community’s world house can rest on foundations that can stably support and safeguard its inheritance through wisdom and understanding, the augments of love’s peaceful power. In this way, those diverse, formerly separated family members can become an integrated community of willing cohabitants, who together own, share—and repair—the world house.
The World House Reimagined: A New Moral Architecture
Nearly five decades after prohibitions on legal segregation and housing discrimination and the passage of landmark federal and state civil rights, fair housing, fair lending, and consumer protection laws, the U.S. housing sector remains characterized by worsening racial segregation and by racially unequal housing opportunities, benefits, and outcomes. These factors and dynamics led King to call for a revolution of values and reordering of national priorities.Footnote 121 This need remains evident and urgent today.
Meanwhile, the continuing influence of segregation-era laws and planning tools, and the entry of exploitative new housing sector actors and business models has entrenched and continues to promote and reward racial separatism and racially homogenous neighborhoods. As Sheryll Cashin explains, “The past is not the past. Racial steering in real estate markets, discrimination in mortgage lending, exclusionary zoning, a government-subsidized affordable housing industrial complex that concentrates poverty … plus continued resistance to integration by many but not all whites—all contribute to enduring segregation.”Footnote 122
Indeed, today’s U.S. housing landscape is defined by a severe shortage of available and affordable housing for low-income renters, low-wealth households, and communities of color; skyrocketing home prices and rents that outpace wages;Footnote 123 the deregulation of housing finance institutions; the absence of minimal entitlements to adequate shelter;Footnote 124 and the ascendency of private property rights.Footnote 125 The ascendant values of racialized private property and separatism; and narrow conceptions of inheritance based on an exclusive, suburban, single-family ideal that privileges white culture and spaces and devalues those of racial minoritiesFootnote 126—all stand in stark contrast to the vision and values of King’s beloved community. Additionally, new actors have undertaken a homebuying spree that targets and disrupts stable minority neighborhoods.Footnote 127 The growing dominance and aggressive homebuying tactics and management models of these actors are displacing thousands of households and making it difficult for traditional homebuyers and community-based nonprofits to compete for housing inventory.Footnote 128 Their activity also is shrinking the geography of opportunity for racial minorities in the United States.Footnote 129
Meanwhile, disjointed and poorly coordinated federal, state, and municipal housing law regimes create regulatory voids that leave unwary housing consumers vulnerable to predatory actors, with little or no legal recourse and few housing alternatives. And the growing use of artificial intelligence and other new technologies in real estate is spawning new modes of racial profiling; facilitating insider tradingFootnote 130 and remote bulk home purchases;Footnote 131 encouraging collusive pricing;Footnote 132 and perpetuating aggressive investor-driven pricing methodologies and algorithms that ignore local community need and interests, and skew local market conditions.Footnote 133
These and other housing market dynamics and trends evidence the urgent need to reimagine and remodel the U.S. housing sector without structural racism.
Translating and Applying King’s Moral Tenets to Housing
King’s moral tenets are relevant and useful for constructing this new moral architecture. As shown in table 1, the core themes from King’s moral philosophies and political theologies can be distilled into several moral tenets.Footnote 134 Translating these moral tenets into a framework tailored to the U.S. housing context yields guiding principles of equality, equity, and empowerment.
Table 1. King’s moral philosophy applied to the U.S. housing sector
For King, the sacredness of human personality expresses itself in the full personhood and equal worth and dignity of all persons, including freedom to exercise liberty with responsibility and what King called brotherhood. Sacredness of human personality implies and engenders equality. In the housing context, the principle of equality implies that regardless of a person’s race, gender, or other descriptors, persons should be treated as housing equals who can freely attain housing in a self-chosen neighborhood, and who equally deserve decent, safe, and accessible housing quality and conditions.Footnote 135
Equality privileges and promotes inclusive housing and communities. It helps to resolve racially motivated exclusionary mechanisms and approaches, unequal housing opportunity, substandard housing conditions, hazardous locations, restrictions on (multifamily and special needs) housing modalities, housing discrimination, and under- and disinvestment in occupied neighborhoods.Footnote 136
The moral tenet of interrelatedness expresses itself in mutuality and cooperation. This tenet implies interdependence and concerns the practice and provisions of equity. In the housing context, the principle of equity implies ensuring equitable and non-discriminatory treatment and procedures and outcomes that support housing attainability for all housing consumers. It helps resolve institutional racism that manifests in exploitative practices such as race-driven or race-motivated home pricing, surcharges, or discounts in housing asset valuations for tax or transactional (sales and refinancing) purposes, and institutional bias or procedural barriers to accessing housing, mortgage, and insurance products on terms that are affordable and consistent across racial groups. This principle helps explains King’s stern criticism of ghetto profiteers and housing industry professionals who act as enforcers and gatekeepers of racial homogeneity and residential segregation, such as realtors, mortgage brokers, insurers, and appraisers.Footnote 137
The solidarity of the human family moral tenet expresses itself in relational peace and participation. This tenet engenders empowerment. In the housing context, the principle of empowerment implies assuring secure tenure for those facing precarious housing situations that leave them vulnerable to forced displacement due to exploitation, retaliatory or no-cause eviction, or foreclosure. It privileges housing user involvement in the planning and housing policies that affect their daily lives and economic mobility. It concerns advocacy and the content and configuration of property and housing rights and entitlements. This principle helps to resolve extractive policies, programs, and practices that coerce, manipulate, or misdirect resources away from needy and vulnerable residents toward affluent residents and communities, with or without due process. This principle helps to minimize unannounced or unjustified displacement of households and disruptions to community life. It seeks to preserve peace and protect representation of all members’ interests in the community’s decision forums and resource allocations. King stressed the importance of equality in housing when he advocated for a “Wagner Act for Tenants,” citizen participation in city economic development planning, and grassroots coalition-building for tenant and community empowerment.Footnote 138
Even King’s reference to a prophetic vision of the day when “every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain” (Isaiah 40:4–5 KJV; Luke 3:4)—that is, the day when the beloved community is actualized in human society—suggests the type of equalizing, equitable, and empowering actions that accord with this guiding framework.Footnote 139 “Salvation” in the context of racial justice in housing can be found in “sharing culture and political power within a just economic order,” not in residential separatism.Footnote 140
A moral architecture grounded and guided by equality, equity, and empowerment sees and safeguards the dignity of all persons. It equalizes access to opportunities, equitably shares resources,Footnote 141 and administers and enforces justice without partiality among community members.Footnote 142
In this new moral architecture, taking a tandem moral-structural approach to housing sector reform entails interrogating then replacing the mental and moral narratives and roles that reward racism, along with the legal (and extralegal) mechanisms and processes that enact or enforce housing discrimination and residential segregation. It also means deploying integrative processes to transform the inherited norms and forms of community and real property from constrainers into conductors of integrated community.
Agape Love Concretized and Localized in Housing Justice
Guided by these moral framework principles, agape love can be concretized through integrative processes that generate racially just housing laws, policies, and practices for integrating local neighborhoods. King commended agape love as an essential and powerful antidote in personal and political transformation. He insisted that solving the nation’s problem of housing injustice implicates power.Footnote 143 Says King, “Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love.”Footnote 144 In this logic of agapism, the act of radical restructure is an act of love.
Agape Love as Practical for Policy-Making
Like King, legal scholars, theologians, and activists affirm and attest the transformative power of agape love as relevant and necessary for racial justice in a political context.Footnote 145 For instance, Timothy Jackson frames agape as the “first political virtue” and “primary social value.”Footnote 146 “Love,” says Jackson, “is the foundational norm that ought to structure political principles and policies.”Footnote 147 As bell hooks explains, a lens of love enable persons to perceive and resist the ethic and language of domination. Says hooks, “Without an ethic of love shaping the direction of our political vision and our radical aspirations … interven[ing] in our self-centered longing for change … we not only remain attached to the status quo but act in complicity with it, nurturing and maintaining those very systems of domination.”Footnote 148 According to Cashin, this love ethic facilitates a better, more humane relationship between the state and disinvested neighborhoods “seeing them as assets and investing directly in them.”Footnote 149 For this reason, “other-regarding agape love is the only sustainable basis for political communities.”Footnote 150
Rather than quaint or naive sentimentality, such an ethic of love expands one’s awareness and concern about politics of domination and enlarges one’s capacity to care about the oppression and exploitation of others. A love ethic disrupts the politics of division and applies a lens of care in policy-making.Footnote 151 For agapism to be “plausible as an ethical system,” says Nicholas Wolterstorff, requires “an understanding of love as seeking both to promote the good in a person’s life and to secure that they be treated as befits their worth”—both as ends in themselves.Footnote 152 And as a mode of justice, such care combines seeking to enhance persons’ flourishing with seeking to secure their just treatment.Footnote 153 In this reimagined housing sector, housing systems undergo a values shift to become more person-centered than profit-centered or asset-centered.
Love can be concretized in housing justice through laws, policies, and institutional practices that have integrative instead of segregative influence and outcomes. Broadly speaking, the transformative power of agape love can be harnessed and directed in the development, regulation, and administration of housing-related laws and policies. Approaching housing from the perspective of agape love minimally involves designing policies and sizing programs and budgets at a scale commensurate with community need rather than political expediency. It also would require applying authority and resources at strategic points of leverage sufficient to counteract and overcome market dynamics and actors who protect the unjust status quo. As the highest good and a potent tool for personal and socio-political transformation,Footnote 154 agape love empowers participation and upholds democratic forms and norms for the community’s benefit.
Integrative Processes
King stressed the importance of supplementing court desegregation orders with “integration processes.”Footnote 155 Some scholars emphasize the importance of a “stable integrative process” over achieving particular racially-integrated spatial outcomes.Footnote 156 As Casey Dawkins explains, “[s]uch a process assumes that individuals are not denied (or awarded) housing on the basis of their race or ethnicity nor financially penalized (or rewarded) because they happen to live in neighborhoods where certain racial or ethnic groups are in the majority.”Footnote 157
Applying integrative processes in the housing context describes a world where all residents choose their neighborhoods freely and without race- or class-motivated restrictions that make occupancy or ownership unattainable or unsustainable.Footnote 158 Integrative processes enable or facilitate racially just housing outcomes by removing arbitrary or race-motivated barriers or disparities in housing information, networks and the processes by which consumers may gain awareness and access to housing opportunities and housing resources; by disrupting and overriding processes and practices that steer or redirect those consumers toward or enforce racially homogenous or segregated neighborhoods; and by welcoming the participation and equitably balancing the interests of all stakeholders affected by housing policies and budget decisions.
Integrative processes essentially democratize housing. For King, “[d]emocracy in housing means integrated housing” across race and class lines.Footnote 159 And integration of housing requires full and open access to housing and credit markets—starting at the neighborhood level.Footnote 160 This focus on integrating neighborhoods is warranted because racial justice in housing still relies heavily on legal frameworks and tools designed when racial discrimination was legal in the United States. Additionally, influential court precedents still permit forms of economic (class) discriminationFootnote 161 that strongly correlate with race discrimination.
Historians report that shortly after passage of the Fair Housing Act in 1968,Footnote 162 actions by the Nixon Administration to forestall the “forced integration of the suburbs”Footnote 163 effectively created an artificial distinction between racial and economic discrimination and signaled that suburbs could maintain prevailing patterns of residential segregation through policies of exclusionary zoning.Footnote 164 Even today, fearmongering persists and empirically disproven myths that causally link minority residency with decreased property values provoke suburban backlash against proposed rezonings to allow increased development of low-cost multifamily housing.
The World House Remodeled: A New Civic Infrastructure
A civic architecture that revolutionizes housing systems toward integrated neighborhoods will depend on structural solutions to address the problems of structural racism reflected in property law and land management processes; industry professionals and capital markets that reinforce residential segregation, and exploit and devalue racial minorities and their dwellings while limiting their housing options; and policy-making and regulatory approaches that disproportionately cater to affluent homeowners to the detriment of low-wealth or minority residents. Remodeling the world house with the new moral architecture and the kind of needed structural solutions can start with (1) strengthening the federal role and integrating land management for housing across all levels of government through an inclusionary zoning mandate and overlay framework; (2) redesigning and redirecting race-motivated mechanisms that create and exploit housing inequality and racial disparities in credit access; and (3) formalizing and funding tenant protections and representation in housing policy-making and budgets.
Strengthen the Federal Role in Land Management for Housing through an Inclusionary Zoning Mandate and Overlay Framework
King recognized the limitations of laws and stressed the need to “take hold of laws and transform them into effective mandates.”Footnote 165 Given that “power has become increasingly suburban, and neither political party puts the needs of poor people or minorities at the top of its agenda,”Footnote 166 King also called for metropolitan solutions that can “directly challenge the historic alliance of class privilege, racial exclusion, and independent political power in the suburbs.”Footnote 167
An estimated 70 percent of all land in the United States that is zoned for residential use allows only single-family homes to be legally built and occupied.Footnote 168 Most local jurisdictions have large numbers of zoning districts (for example, New York City alone has 105) that are carefully designed to segregate land uses and employ highly prescriptive use restrictions.Footnote 169 Local land use laws and zoning regulations often are developed and implemented to reify boundaries that perpetuate historical patterns of residential segregation and constrain housing supply.Footnote 170 Truly opening and integrating communities will take federal leadership and active oversight to persuade state and local governments to coordinate land use at the metropolitan level; decriminalize smaller housing units and multifamily and rental housing types; and equalize local government control over land use so as to permit their fair share of housing.Footnote 171 To accelerate the development of integrated neighborhoods, the federal government should mandate inclusionary zoning in tandem with a new national zoning overlay district.
The adoption of exclusionary zoning ordinances reportedly was modest in the United States until the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the Village of Euclid v. Amber Realty Company (1926) that affirmed racial zoning, even as it paved the way for nationwide expansion of exclusionary zoning. After that time, the federal government imposed a nationwide exclusionary zoning mandate through a series of zoning standard acts that conditioned future federal funding on state compliance with the zoning mandate.Footnote 172
Ever since the U.S. Supreme Court in Shelley v. Kramer (1948) banned explicit anti-Black racial covenants, discriminatory zoning and land use practices have become more subtle.Footnote 173 Since then, federal courts often have upheld exclusionary zoning as permissible economic discrimination.Footnote 174
While some planning experts believe a combination of federal incentives and state preemption tools could fundamentally change the politics that shape local zoning,Footnote 175 history counsels otherwise. Inclusionary zoning as practiced in the United States today has yielded mixed results,Footnote 176 even in cities that mandate inclusionary zoning.Footnote 177
Despite the numerous promising zoning reform efforts underway across the United States, in many localities progress on zoning reform remains optional, tentative, or challenged.Footnote 178 These efforts generally focus on legalizing very low-density (so-called missing middle) housing.Footnote 179 While such efforts are helpful, their small scale is not sufficient to disrupt historic development patterns, change social habits or address the severe housing supply shortfalls.Footnote 180
Today’s fragmented, incremental approach to zoning reform has helped spawn an estimated 30,000 zoning districts nationally and intensified a worsening housing affordability crisis. Instead, the same type of mandate that created and spurred the adoption of exclusionary zoning is needed to reverse this entrenched form of racial and class exclusion.
Like the federal mandate that proliferated exclusionary zoning nationwide in the 1920s, a federal inclusionary zoning mandate could similarly condition all future federal transportation, housing, infrastructure funding (competitive and formula grant programs) on verified state or local adoption or implementation of an inclusionary zoning ordinance or statute. And already there is growing consensus on the need to condition major federal formula (entitlement) grants, such as the Community Development Block Grant, Surface Transportation Block Grant, and Federal Transportation Administration funding on evidence that state and municipal governments have adopted and maintain meaningful zoning reforms within reasonable timeframes.Footnote 181
Such a federal mandate could be combined with competitive grants and technical assistance. The mandate could also provide for sizeable noncompliance penalties that would be applied on a metropolitan or regional basis—to all the cities and counties in a region found to be persistently non-compliant. Among its other benefits, this approach also could help to eliminate the stigma of rentership by legalizing non-single-family housing modes in areas currently zoned for residential use.
The proposed mandate and overlay also would build on early progressFootnote 182 in such jurisdictions as Houston,Footnote 183 New Rochelle, New York; and Tysons Corner, Virginia; and Minneapolis,Footnote 184 along with numerous other cities that in recent years have discarded their exclusionary single-family home zoning and parking requirements.Footnote 185
Meanwhile, nationally, in 2023, the federal government began engaging municipal governments more actively on land use planning through its Pathways to Removing Obstacles to Housing program, which incentivizes local governments and communities to identify and remove barriers to higher-density zoning and rezoning for multifamily and commercial-to-residential property conversions and reduce other land use restrictions that impede affordable housing production and preservation.Footnote 186
Currently, Japan provides an interesting model for how a national zoning overlay might work.Footnote 187 Already, academic centers of practice and policy think-tanks are pioneering innovative mapping technologies, such as the Connecticut Zoning Atlas,Footnote 188 and the National Zoning Atlas,Footnote 189 which provide data analytics to direct federal, state, and local policies for housing justice through zoning reform. Absent the kind of mandate and federal involvement proposed above, zoning will continue to allow municipalities to pursue racial and economic segregation often without ever mentioning race or class.Footnote 190
A federal inclusionary zoning mandate and overlay framework would advance neighborhood integration by creating an equitable overlay standard that forces disclosure and accountability for local zoning laws and policies and promotes fair allocation of land for housing.Footnote 191 It would help to counteract the continued use of zoning as a tool of racial and economic exclusion and help rebalance the overwhelming power of suburban homeowners to prohibit entirely or disproportionately permit low-cost or federally assisted housing only in low-income, poorly serviced majority-minority neighborhoods. This approach also would support more equitable land uses within and across metropolitan areas.Footnote 192
Redesign or Redirect Mechanisms that Create Housing Inequality and Racial Disparities in Credit Access
King believed housing industry professionals—especially realtors—played a vital role in turning the “neighborhood into a brotherhood.”Footnote 193 The kind of structural solutions needed to combat racial capitalism and residential segregation involves new regulatory tools and authority to retrain, monitor, and sanction the racial boundary keepers, as well as lessen the profitability and increase the costs and reputational risk that industry professionals incur for brokering race. Establishing a gatekeeping mechanism for the gatekeepers of racially homogenous neighborhoods may also prove beneficial to housing consumers, along with providing full and open access to suitable affordable mortgage credit opportunities.
Empirical studies show that racial capitalism and residential segregation persist and entrench localized poverty partly because housing market professionals act as gatekeepers and boundary enforcers that exclude low-income and working-class minority families from white-majority suburban communities.Footnote 194 These professionals—so-called race brokers—exert outsized influence in how systemic racial inequalities are reproduced or challenged.Footnote 195 They do so by accommodating and anticipating their white clients’ negative bias or racial prejudices against nonwhite groups.Footnote 196
At the neighborhood level, a family’s ability to know about, access, finance, and maintain housing depends on a network of local relationships that drive and reward certain behaviors with financial incentives, commissions, brand (reputation) enhancements and repeat business. In many but not all cases, local lore, and biological and cultural myths about racial minoritiesFootnote 197 pervade and reify the culture in local housing markets that promote and reward racial homogeneity in local neighborhoods.Footnote 198
Today’s housing market dynamics also affect the information available to different racial groups seeking homeownership opportunity and mortgage credit, and their access to informal networks that influence where and how they search for housing.Footnote 199 Even where housing is available and affordable to minority households in high opportunity areas, steering and informal so-called pocket listingsFootnote 200 prevent minority homebuyers from being shown or competing to purchase available properties in those neighborhoods.Footnote 201
In addition to these exclusionary behaviors minority home seekers and homeowners face racial bias in appraisals that undervalue their home valuation for sale and refinancing purposes, inflates their annual property tax liability,Footnote 202 and upon (re)financing, increases their downpayment from equity needed to make up the valuation gap between their target loan amount and the depressed appraised home value.Footnote 203
Numerous initiatives now underway are working to diversify these industries and to retrain the sensibilities of housing market professionals.Footnote 204 In 2022, the federal government convened an interagency task force, which developed an action plan and committed federal resources to advance racial equity in property appraisal and valuation practices.Footnote 205
However, these efforts typically lack significant negative consequences for industry professionals who fail to change their behaviors. Eliminating the institutional practices and processes in the housing market that translate racial prejudice into housing market inequalities requires more aggressive and concerted effort to both understand when and how certain behaviors occur. There is also a need to ensure that procedural reforms and corrective actions carry meaningful consequences or deterrents. For state registered professions, such as appraisers, real estate brokers, and insurers, these programs can be accelerated by adding potential revocation of professional licenses for proven repeat offenders.Footnote 206 Lenders and municipalities also can play a larger role in eliminating valuation and appraisal bias by routinely and randomly testing appraisal results for surrounding properties and auditing appraiser methodologies for racial bias and consistency.
Reforming standards and retraining housing industry professionals would help integrate neighborhoods by tackling the primary obstacles minority households face when accessing the knowledge, networks, and funding that makes it possible for minority housing consumers to pursue and attain rental and ownership housing in their chosen neighborhoods. It would also help to reset standards, making fair housing law violations more costly for violators. And it would make violations easier to identify and redress among those who abuse their taxing and appraisal authority to deprive minority homeowners of equity.
In addition to addressing the challenge of race-brokers, it is imperative to expand open and equitable credit access.Footnote 207 As discussed earlier, federal agencies such as the Federal Housing Administration, Veterans Administration, Housing and Urban Development, and the Federal Home Loan Banks, historically approved and enforced explicit racial segregation in U.S. housing and mortgage lending markets. Their active partnership with state and local governments, private lenders and financiers, and others in the real estate industry deliberately deprived African Americans and other racial minorities of home mortgage credit and concentrated them in poor, segregated city neighborhoods.Footnote 208
Absent safe, traditional mortgage products, racial minorities historically have turned to alternative seller financing products that often result in those borrowers not achieving their goal of homeownership while also harming their credit rating and future homeownership and wealth-building prospects.Footnote 209 Today, an estimated 36 million mostly racial minority borrowers rely on riskier and more costly alternative financing arrangements, such as installment land contracts, seller-financed mortgages, and personal property loans, because traditional mortgage loans are not available or affordable to them.Footnote 210 Expanding federal incentives and the use of special credit and small balance lending programs would promote integrated neighborhoods by redressing the lack of affordable and equitable credit access that makes minority homeownership opportunity and preservation attainable. The Special Purpose Credit Program is one of the few lending programs that allows explicit racial preference for groups or communities historically excluded from mortgage lending opportunities.Footnote 211 To date, these programs have been underutilized due to past concerns about the potential for violating fair housing law. However, regulators recently issued legal guidance that resolved ambiguities, which helped pave the way for the wider use of these tools.Footnote 212
In recent years, the equitable housing finance plans for both government-sponsored entities (Fannie MaeFootnote 213 and Freddie MacFootnote 214) contemplated only modest use of special purpose credit programs.Footnote 215 However, municipalities, lenders, and nonprofits in a number of communities have implemented special-purpose credit programs designed to redress homeownership disparities racial minorities and other disadvantaged communities face in credit access.Footnote 216 The continuation and aggressive expansion of such programs would help integrate neighborhoods by providing an important resource for previously disinvested communities and for minority households seeking to attain homeownership in high-opportunity neighborhoods or to invest and remain in their current neighborhoods.Footnote 217 Such capital sources could also help long-time minority residents potentially withstand displacement pressures in neighborhoods experiencing gentrification due to the influx of higher income homeowners and renters.
A federal small loan demonstration program would address another challenge for those in lease-purchase contracts. Informal surveys conducted by consumer protection lawyers suggest that an estimated 60–84 percent of residential land contracts and rent-to-own transactions fail to convert their lease option to a successful home purchase due to eviction or voluntary move-out.Footnote 218 In other cases, these loan-conversion failures are the result of the tenants’ difficulty in finding lenders willing to make small-balance loans that lessee-borrowers typically need for the final balloon payment and related closing cost that would help them transition into homeownership. In either scenario, the lessee-buyers’ failure to convert their rental to ownership on the expected timeframe risks the loss of some or all the accumulated funds (forced savings from equity) that the seller is holding for the lessee-buyer’s mortgage downpayment. The dearth of small-balance mortgages is said to be driven more by the high fixed costs and unfavorable profit margins for the lenders originating these loans than with any deficiencies in the lessee-buyers’ financial resources or creditworthiness.Footnote 219
Authorizing and appropriating funding for a federal demonstration program for small balance lease conversion loans or home preservation loans could enable lessee-buyers to transition more easily from renting to homeownership, while avoiding the forfeiture of “forced savings” that reportedly occurs with growing frequency in seller-friendly credit and rent-to-own markets. Such a program could help spur innovative, cost-effective models, test new loan structures, and build a network of qualified lenders committed to offering small-balance lending programs on affordable terms.
Meanwhile, companies like Blackstar Stability, a boutique real estate investment management company, have stepped into the gap in small-balance (less than $100,000) mortgage lending.Footnote 220 The company helps stabilize families and communities by expanding equitable ownership of affordable single-family homes in a process where ownership is transferred to families in transactions that converts their predatory land contracts into real mortgages on terms that allow the housing consumer to build home equity.Footnote 221 The Blackstar business model entails using private equity funding to purchase pools of homes encumbered by predatory alternative seller financing, convert the financing to traditional mortgages on fair market terms, eventually sell these mortgages, then recycle the capital for use by other prospective home purchasers.
A federal preservation lending demonstration program would help integrate neighborhoods by making more suitable and affordable mortgage financing available as housing consumers transition from renting to ownership. The availability of this type of financing also supports the likelihood those prospective homebuyers’ can close on their chosen home purchase and neighborhood choice and begin to build home equity more quickly than would otherwise be possible. Such a program also could make it easier for companies like Blackstar Stability to scale up their operations, more easily identify and acquire homes for their clients, and better capitalize business models that provide safe, affordable, and equitable financing alternatives, especially for minority homebuyers.
Formalize Tenant Representation and Protections in Housing Budgets and Programs
King regarded bad housing policies and conditions as a “problem of power.”Footnote 222 He explains that “power is not only desirable but necessary to implement the demands of love and justice.”Footnote 223 Structural solutions that begin to remedy imbalances of power, information networks, and representation in housing decisions can begin by enhancing the legal protections and representation afforded residential tenants.Footnote 224
Roughly 44 million households, or roughly 35 percent of all U.S. households, live in rental housing.Footnote 225 Yet there is no comprehensive set of federal laws that protect renters and only a patchwork of federal, state, and local laws and legal processes define the U.S. rental housing market.Footnote 226 And the U.S. Supreme Court to date has declined to find an explicit constitutional basis for a legal right to “adequate housing” or a guarantee to “dwellings of a particular quality.”Footnote 227
Poor dwelling conditions or other landlord actions motivate tenants to organize, often under threat of eviction or harassment by the landlord.Footnote 228 And third parties who may be helping tenants understand and exercise their contractual or statutory rights face the risk of being forcibly removed from the property or arrested for criminal trespass.
Currently, federal regulations protect tenants’ right to organize in only limited circumstances and with little funding support.Footnote 229 Although some states prohibit retaliatory landlord behaviors, their minimal fines or enforcement efforts seldom deter such behaviors. Previous periods of robust tenant activism and organizing through national tenant unions gained significant tenant benefits until the 1990s, when private funding diminished.Footnote 230 And just as in King’s day, today business elites and suburban homeowners—so-called homevoters—wield tremendous power over state and local policy agendas and budget priorities, often leaving tenant interests under-represented.
A federal law that universalizes and protects tenants’ right to organize in private and public housing, and that recognizes and funds tenant unions could go far toward balancing the interests between landlords and tenants. Unlike the past, today’s local tenant unions operate beyond a single property or neighborhood to include citywide organizing and innovative partnerships with local government.Footnote 231 For example, citywide tenant unions are gaining momentum, cooperation, and concessions in Louisville, Portland (Oregon), Kansas City, and Baltimore.Footnote 232 Concurrently, a national housing justice coalition anchored by the Alliance for Housing Justice is galvanizing support and raising public awareness of renter rights and for a federal “homes guarantee.”Footnote 233
Despite these developments, tenants and their advocates currently still lack protections like what the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, widely known as the Wagner Act,Footnote 234 provides to labor and labor unions: the rights to form unions and to bargain collectively and without coercion, harassment, or retaliation.Footnote 235 Federal recognition of tenant rights would also help balance the power dynamics with the increasingly dominant investor-landlords that are amassing large, low-cost rental housing portfolios in the United States.
Ideally, this legal framework would universalize both tenants’ bargaining rights and their consumer protections, including a private right of action, aggregation of claims, or fee shifting.Footnote 236 At a minimum, the law would strengthen prohibitions and consequences for landlords who seek to interfere with, prevent, or retaliate against the those who organize or participate in a tenant union. Authorizing and protecting tenant unions also helps secure other tenant rights that may be unprotected or unenforced at the state or local level, such as “the right to habitable conditions and compliance with local health and safety regulations, protection against bad faith evictions, or a right to counsel in eviction proceedings.”Footnote 237
Researchers acknowledge the vital role law plays in helping local residents to build organizations “capable of countervailing the political power of the wealthy.”Footnote 238 Such protection could be structured to include a national tenant relations board, modeled after the National Labor Relations Board, to perform similar functions in the housing context.
Additionally, federal incentives could be applied to establish tenant-at-large appointments on local city councils or planning commissions or state or local tenant ombudsman positions in municipal governments, like those implemented in Sacramento,Footnote 239 Lansing,Footnote 240 and Washington, D.C.Footnote 241 Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom, London offers a useful housing ombudsman model that is statutorily authorized and administered under the Secretary of State to mediate and settle disputes between landlords and tenants in “social housing.”Footnote 242
Recognizing and empowering tenant interests in the ways proposed matters not only to the consistency in legal standards and principles by which municipal governments define and regulate property and housing rights. It also could positively affect how state courts adjudicate landlord-tenant disputes. And history has shown that with a strong federal commitment and authorization, some states likely would supplement federal legislation with a tailored state statute.
Federally authorizing and funding tenant unions and organizing promotes integrated neighborhoods by housing tenure. It does so by empowering tenants to advocate for housing or homeownership on comparable cost, locations, and conditions as majority households enjoy. And these proposals aim to supplement and normalize procedural expectations and mechanisms for mediating landlord-tenant disputes, which supports tenants’ ability to remain in their chosen community without harassment or coerced displacement.
Conclusion
Recognizing the importance of housing to racial justice, King’s world house cautions against continuing to build a society, democracy, or housing sector founded on the unstable and devastating pillars of racism, materialism, and violence. It counsels instead a profound, enduring need to “learn to live together in peace.”Footnote 243
History has taught that despite past religious justifications, racism and segregation have proven their inadequacy as continuing bases for a shared social and economic life in the United States. Present racial wealth disparities and housing inequalities teach us that this legacy lives on today both in the nation’s social imagination and in its spatial relations through the unjust housing systems and institutional practices that daily affect millions of households.
Instead, we can remodel the U.S. housing sector—our world house—according to principles and processes that befit the beloved community. Admittedly, structural housing reform alone cannot solve the problem of racial injustice.Footnote 244 However, without reforms to housing systems, social progress will continue to be undermined by processes and practices that still exert strong segregating influence across the U.S. housing sector and broader economy.Footnote 245 The principles and conceptual proposals I offer provide a constructive and credible starting point.
Given the complexity of the U.S. housing sector, the further development and implementation of such proposals and recommendations undoubtedly will meet resistance and involve significant costs—monetary and otherwise.Footnote 246 Meanwhile, housing inequality and inequity continues to exact costs in civility and trustFootnote 247 that take their toll on the nation’s economic growthFootnote 248 and global influence.Footnote 249
Ultimately, King’s world house helps us to recognize our shared inheritance—our shared humanity, shared resources, shared agency—to peacefully co-inhabit shared dwelling communities. It stands for the proposition that within an agapic framework, people from different geographies, different cultures, different (even divergent) ideas and interests may still forge common cause and cooperate toward common goals. It signals that despite past and present racially motivated laws, policies, and practices, here and now, we can perceive ourselves—and become—part of the same community. Together, we can make King’s beloved community a living reality through housing justice.
Acknowledgements and Citation Guide
The author has no competing interests to declare. This article is cited according to The Bluebook, 21st edition. Unless otherwise noted, all biblical quotations are from the New International Version.
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