| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban America. By David M. P. Freund. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. xii, 514 pp. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-226-26275-8.)
Perhaps no idea has had more effect on racial disparities in wealth in contemporary America than the proposition that African Americans caused property values to decline. David M. P. Freund's incisive new book traces the unfortunate history of this ruinous fiction.	1
After 1910, Freund argues, a "public-private alliance" of real estate brokers, planners, and public officials articulated a theory of land-use economics that "presupposed racial and class difference" as measurable features of real estate markets (pp. 59, 80). Convinced that "certain land uses and ... populations categorically threatened the value of private property and the 'health and welfare' of white property owners" (p. 93), this coalition mobilized over several decades to create institutional structures to protect "white" property. Those structures included modern real estate practice, race restrictive covenants, zoning, and, eventually, New Deal–era housing programs, which coalition members themselves designed and administered. Those efforts not only remade U.S. markets for housing and home finance, Freund claims, but, ironically, they convinced ordinary whites, that it was not government but "the free market that set the rules" (p. 37).	. . .

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