Financing American Inequality: A Conversation with Paige Glotzer

Housing is both a site and source of American inequality, a broken promise starkly evident in suburban neighborhoods. In historian Paige Glotzer’s new book, How the Suburbs Were Segregated: Developers and the Business of Exclusionary Housing, 1890–1960, she looks to the Roland Park Company of Baltimore, Maryland, and the network of suburban developers that followed in their wake. The developers of the first planned suburbs envisioned a controlled environment, where every tree, shopping mall, and resident was carefully selected. But those white picket fences of the suburbs acted as gatekeepers, allowing generations of white American families to build wealth, segregate neighborhoods and schools, and divert public resources from communities that continue to reckon with the consequences of these exclusionary practices today.

Paige Glotzer is Assistant Professor and John W. and Jeanne M. Rowe Chair in the History of American Politics, Institutions, and Political Economy at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. We spoke in early May, as we both sheltered in place in Madison, Wisconsin, about how the legacies of the Roland Park Company and suburban development are part of the global history of American inequality.

Stream or download our conversation here. Interview highlights, edited for clarity, follow.

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Interview highlights:

These highlights have been edited for length and clarity.

Laura Perry: Your new book, How The Suburbs Were Segregated, asks why suburban communities grew to be whiter and wealthier than urban communities. But the book begins earlier than one might expect, not in the 1950s but in the 1890s. Could you talk about why?

Paige Glotzer: While many think of the postwar boom as the suburban moment, I think of it as the culmination of processes that went on for decades and decades. When I started the project, I started in the 1890s because that’s when I saw a certain type of suburban developer starting to gain power. In the case of the book, it was a suburban developer in Baltimore called the Roland Park Company, which formed in 1891. I had never heard of them before I started my research, but it quickly became clear to me that they talked to a bunch of likeminded developers, who were also new at the time. They were planning large communities, larger than their competitors, and this meant that there were new types of spaces in cities like Baltimore that were coming into formation.

There was another thing that connected them, though, that really surprised me. They were getting their money from different sources than their older local competitors. In the case of the Roland Park Company, I follow the money and look at investment that financed Roland Park Company dating back into early in the 19th century. This investment did a few different things for the book. It allowed me to connect the rise of some of the more familiar segregated suburbs in the United States with all different processes around the world, because that money went from place to place to place as investors put their money into a place, made a profit, and then put their money somewhere else. Segregated suburbs are connected to a rise of a global Jim Crow, where segregation was seen as one type of profitable investment. That allowed for big changes in how people were creating communities, and it also allowed for a certain subset of developers to start setting some practices that others wanted to copy. So, by the time we get to the 1950s, you can really see a lot of the echoes of much earlier suburban developments in forming this postwar boom.

LP: You mentioned developers would copy Roland Park, and your book takes that company as emblematic of how suburban development works. Could you talk about this process?

PG: The Roland Park Company was in some ways very typical, but in some ways very atypical of what suburban developers were doing in the United States. This is where you really get in to the story of power. The Roland Park Company was one of just a handful of suburban development companies that were creating planned, large suburbs that were formerly segregated and focusing on single family houses constructed by architects. They were controlling where everything went, all of the pipes and the trees. This took a lot of time, a lot of staff, and a long period in which they didn’t necessarily get a lot of profits. Not many companies were able to do that, especially at the turn of the 20th century. So, why is it, then, I ask in the book, that they became so influential?

It was the small handful of developers that helped to create networks of realtors, planners, and policy makers, where everybody said: what are the best practices for designing and planning cities, for designing and planning even cheaper suburbs, or suburbs that may be for different types of clientele? Because of the Roland Park Company, and some of their peers, setting standards and advertising them heavily as the best things to do, you start to see emulation in all different types of spaces.

This includes municipal policy, where you start to see certain types of segregated spaces make their way into how cities were designed and planned. Zoning is of the major examples of something that’s influenced by a very small, but very influential set of suburban developers. I take this forward, and look at how within real estate networks, realtors tended to know the names of the presidents of these companies. They were discussed like they were celebrities. Because the real estate industry itself was kind of new, in the 1910s and 1920s, the practices of suburban development companies were embedded in what were the best practices of the real estate industry. Ultimately, then, these were also the companies whose officers had the cachet and leadership within these networks to be considered good consultants for federal policymakers. That network aspect is very important to understanding how a small set of developers came to have such an outsized platform to shape the beliefs and practices of so many others in the real estate industry and ultimately in the federal government.

LP: One thing that the current pandemic has underscored is how public health depends on access to resources, because the impact of the pandemic is not being experienced equally across race and class. How are the segregated suburbs part of this larger story of American inequality?

PG: There are many ways in which the pandemic has illuminated existing inequalities in the United States, and also has exacerbated these inequalities. Housing is tied to a whole slew of economic and social relationships that put people at different levels of risk for COVID-19. I’ll go through a couple of those. Where one’s home is will also determine where potentially one goes to school. There are huge disparities in the quality of education and access to good schooling in the United States. That’s very much a legacy of segregated housing. In fact, school districts often map onto other types of racial segregation and they’re usually tied to where people live.

Educational disparities also are tied into employment disparities. Much of the news coverage of COVID-19 looks at how employment has put people at different levels of risk for infection. We now have classifications for “essential” or “nonessential” workers. Many of the frontline workers who have to show up to grocery stores, who are cleaning buildings, are generally doing so with low pay and oftentimes a lack of health care. And that often tracks to these various measures of segregation. One of the reasons why, today, a disproportionate number of victims of COVID-19 are people of color is because of the jobs they’re working in, and the benefits or lack of benefits they get with those jobs.

What that has to do with housing is related to one of the biggest legacies of planned segregated suburbs: property values. Property values, how much one’s house is worth, is tied, to this day, to race. The same house in a neighborhood that’s majority Black or majority white will be assessed by insurance companies, real estate agents, and municipal officials as having two completely different property values. This is part of the legacies of the Homeowners Loan Corporation, during the Great Depression, and later the Federal Housing Administration, which helped to underwrite a segregated suburban development and prioritized large planned suburbs with white people as supposedly the most stable, most successful, and most deserving of federal assistance. How does this relate to jobs and schools? Property values can be used to generate revenues for a city or a suburb to run. When property values are low because of segregation, that means that cities or municipalities turn to various other measures to try and generate revenue. This is where we also see these racial disparities relating to public health. For instance, infrastructure maintenance and basic services are likely to be curtailed. Ambulances might have different response times in Black neighborhoods versus white neighborhoods, and that might make a difference between life or death in an emergency.

Places that are majority Black are subject to a different type of policing than in, say, a place like Roland Park. Policing becomes not a service for residents, but potentially extractive, meaning that it’s not necessarily done to protect, but to generate revenue through arrests, fines, and fees. We’ve been seeing all sorts of stories about how social distancing is being enforced differently by police depending on the race of those who police are encountering.

That ties back to this longer legacy, of course, when you bring in policing, because one of the hotspots of the infection throughout the country is in prisons. Because of the ways that segregated housing ties into other forms of segregated spaces, segregated jobs, segregated schools, and revenue generation, the prison population is disproportionately African American and Latinx, even though there’s not a disparity in the rates at which people of different races and ethnicities commit crime. Once in jail, your chances of being exposed to COVID-19 increase by a lot.

I could go on. The rise of segregated suburbs also patterned the options Americans have to buy food. Supermarkets rose in the 1950s, at the height of the postwar boom, and they often targeted consumers in suburbs where they could have bigger stores, better supplies, and parking. Grocery shopping, and grocery store workers, have become some of the most important people and sites for how inequality is working during the pandemic. And the whole nature of grocery shopping is tied into the history of suburban spaces.

I want to end this long answer with something that’s also really important and is not getting enough coverage. I start the book by mentioning Native American displacement, which was one of the ways that the investors who financed Roland Park got their money. Native American displacement has resulted in situations where Native Americans have some of the highest rates of infection in the United States today. But the data is also really inconsistent in terms of how Native people are counted statistically. This means that there is even more of a crisis, in terms of being able to get supplies and bring attention to the huge ways that the epidemic is impacting Native people in the United States. That very large and long story about Native displacement is also part of how we can think about suburbs and the pandemic too.

Featured image: A 1937 Homeowners Loan Corporation map of Baltimore, Maryland. Image from Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America.

Paige Glotzer is Assistant Professor and John W. and Jeanne M. Rowe Chair in the History of American Politics, Institutions, and Political Economy at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her first book, How the Suburbs Were Segregated: Developers and the Business of Exclusionary Housing, 1890–1960, was published by Columbia University Press in April 2020. Website. Twitter. Contact.

Laura Perry is the outgoing Managing Editor of Edge Effects and recently received her Ph.D. in English from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She will be the 2020-2022 Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Iowa’s Humanities for the Public Good initiative. Her recent contributions to Edge Effects include the interview “Sankofa Farms Is an Education: Five Questions for Kamal Bell” (February 2020). Twitter. Contact.