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Sep 21

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Shane Phillips 0:04
Hello, this is the UCLA Housing Voice Podcast, and I'm your host, Shane Phillips. Joining this week is Professor Laura Redford of BYU to talk with us about the intertwined history of class-based and race-based housing segregation. through the lens of early 1900s Los Angeles. We've been making a point to do more episodes with a historical focus, in part because knowing our history helps us understand why the world looks the way it does today. And that includes a lot of policies that have profound impacts on our lives but don't really make much sense if you're unfamiliar with the context in which they were developed. Selfishly, I always just learned so much from these interviews. This one focuses on class segregation, the less studied but very important co-conspirator to racial segregation. Class segregation in LA is an interesting case study because the city was growing up at exactly the time when the tools of class segregation came into fashion. So it was here that they were tested and honed. LA became a model for similar efforts all over the country, and the tools of class and race segregation are still with us today in subtler forms like single-family-only zoning, large minimum lot sizes, and other policies that explicitly or implicitly limit housing opportunities for poor or middle class households, and by extension, disproportionately impact households of color as well. The Housing Voice Podcast is a production of the UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies, with the production support of Claudia Bustamante and Jason Sutedja. As always, feedback and show ideas can go to me at Shanephillips@ucla.edu. If there's something you've been wanting to learn more about in the history of housing and land use, let me know. With that, let's talk to Professor Redford. Laura Redford is Assistant Visiting Professor of History at BYU, and she got her doctorate right here at UCLA, and we're excited to have her here to talk with us about the historical intersection of race and class segregation in Los Angeles. Regular listeners will not be surprised to learn that LA's history offers a lot of insights into the ways that housing discrimination and segregation has been carried out all over the country. Laura, welcome to the Housing Voice podcast.
Laura Redford 2:28
Thanks for having me.
Shane Phillips 2:30
Paavo is my co-host today. Welcome, Paavo.
Paavo Monkkonen 2:33
Hey, thanks Shane, and hi Laura. I'm so glad you're here to talk about this important historical research.
Shane Phillips 2:38
All right, so we always start by asking for a tour from our guest somewhere they grew up or spent a fair amount of time and the places and things they like to show family, friends, colleagues when they visit. If you got a good urban history angle or anything for this tour, that's even better but what is that place for you?
Laura Redford 2:57
Um, I had a really hard time with this question. And it's the first one so it shouldn't have been that difficult but I thought maybe a little bit of background would be helpful. So I grew up in Irvine, California, a suburban community. I came here to Brigham Young University for college, which is also really, it was once a small town and now it's part of the suburban sprawl of the Wasatch Front. I did do a study abroad in Vienna, and I did live in South Korea, in two of their largest cities, Pusan, and Wusan which is an industrial city. I graduated and moved to New York City so I discovered that I loved cities, which was a great thing. But after living in New York for six years, I moved to Los Angeles to start my doctoral work at UCLA. And I tried to make sense of what it meant that Los Angeles was also a city. It definitely felt different than the suburbs I lived in, and it definitely felt a lot different than cities I've lived in. And there are places in all of those specific places I've mentioned that I would love to revisit and love to show people. But I have spent a lot of time wandering about Los Angeles, trying to figure it out, both in an archival sense and in a physical sense. And I would say probably one of the best ways I think you can get an understanding of what Los Angeles is like, is an assignment that my advisor and mentor, the late John Rife at UCLA, made for a class that is for freshmen at UCLA. And then the assignment was to take a bus line from a starting point to its terminus point and back, and just to observe - observe what the street looked like, what the buildings look like, who got on and who got off the bus and where and when and, and just to kind of soak it in. And I think that is actually one of the best ways to start figuring out a city. That's not a specific place, but it's a doable action and it actually applies to lots of places.
Shane Phillips 4:58
Lisa Schweitzer at USC gave us a similar assignment to go visit different stations, we could kind of pick. But actually remember one of my early observations moving to Los Angeles from Seattle, where I had also not owned a car for five or six years, and took transit everywhere was just the difference in you know, you take the bus or the train in Seattle, and it feels like a cross-section of the population, and in Los Angeles, it is decidedly not. I remember the first time, I took the train home, and recognized that I was the only white person on it. That was the first time I had experienced that coming from Seattle which is very white, and it was yeah very eye opening for me.
Laura Redford 5:42
Yeah, I have a similar experience.
Shane Phillips 5:45
So this is a paper in the Journal of Planning History titled 'The intertwined History of Class and Race Segregation in Los Angeles', and I think one of its main contributions is to introduce this idea of class-based housing segregation, into a more familiar narrative about racial segregation. So we didn't just have policies and private agreements that kept white people with white people and black people with black people or segregate other people of color as well. We also used these same tools and different tools to keep poor with poor or middle class with middle class and rich with rich.
Laura Redford 6:20
Yep
Shane Phillips 6:21
And of course, these class segregation and racial segregation efforts were not independent of each other as the title of your paper suggests. At the beginning of the paper, you're very explicit that this focus on class segregation is not intended to take anything away from the importance of racial segregation, or scholarship around it. But really, just to add nuance and give a fuller picture of our history. I'm just going to quote you here to make sure we're all on the same page about your goal in highlighting class-based segregation, "everyone agrees that racial segregation has had deleterious effects on communities of color and urban spaces. There is also consensus that racial segregation was deliberate. What needs more emphasis is the connection that racial segregation had to class segregation in the early 20th century. The latter was also intentional and part of the same development and marketing scheme as race segregation, it should not be dismissed as disembodied market forces. Acknowledging this link in no way diminishes the history of the pernicious practice and detrimental consequences of racial segregation. Developers and residents consciously created the physical form, social fabric, and sense of community and neighborhoods defined simultaneously by racial and class barriers". So it's notable to me that your article came out in 2017, which is the same year as Richard Rothstein's book, 'The Color of Law', which was about the role of government through housing policy in the racial segregation of America. His book was very popular making practices like redlining, almost household terms it feels like, and helping galvanize a lot of activism and reflection about our collective responsibilities and the need to redress past injustices. To my knowledge, there hasn't been anything close to that level of consciousness-raising around class-based segregation in America, and we don't need to make this a competition where we're trying to elevate the status or understanding of class segregation to the same level as racial segregation, but I think it's fair to assume that you believe we should understand the class aspects of this history better than we do at least. So to turn things over to you, give us your case for why.
Absolutely, it would not be a surprise to you or any of our listeners to know that we have a housing equity problem in the United States, and a host of other social problems accompany the way that we have chosen to build neighborhoods and to house ourselves, from differences in public health, to public schooling, all sorts of things impact, stem from rather, the neighborhoods that we built, and where we live. Thankfully, there has been a lot of attention on the history of racial segregation, and there has been some effort to not just acknowledge but address it. We definitely have a longer way to go for sure. But a lot of the language I think now around NIMBYism, the 'not in my backyard', kind of protect the place that I live so that it is always the same place that I, you know, bought into and remember, I think is now couched in class terms more than it is couched in racial terms. And I think we need to understand that these were actually, these ideas of racial and class segregation grew up together, because sometimes people are masking talking about race by talking about class and sometimes they just don't even understand that there's this intersection and a long history of them together.
Paavo Monkkonen 9:55
Thanks, yeah, that's super important point. And I think, you know, we can we could talk at length about how affirmatively furthering fair housing, especially in California also kind of connects class and race segregation and how to unpack that with the requirement of kind of race-neutral housing policies today. But let's get into this article, I think it would be helpful, you know, we're going to talk about the tools that developers and other actors were using to segregate cities by race and class, well LA specifically, by race and class. But before we do that, I was hoping you could help us understand why these practices became codified in the earliest 20th century. And so maybe a little bit about how real estate development worked in the late 19th century and kind of what was the push for the development of things like covenants and zoning. So Weiss has these terms, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on the terms, 'community builders' and 'curb stoners' right? So the community builders are the real estate, the Irvines right, the real estate developers that are building whole neighborhoods and with schools and all these other services and the curbs stoners were kind of what was happening previously, which was more just like land development, as I understand it in a kind of more freewheeling manner.
Laura Redford 11:10
Yeah, that is such a great question. And it really underpins all of my work on LA. And I think, is best answered by quoting a colleague of mine here who said that you can't have space without time and time without space. So there's a couple of things happening nationally that are important. And some things that are specific to Los Angeles that are really important. And the national story is that cities are a giant mess in the late 1900s, early 20th century; they're disgusting places to live. They are places where sewer systems are just finally being built, they are trying to deal with massive increases in population, they have factories polluting waterways, and, you know, garbage collection isn't a real thing. They are just gross. The more you study it, the more you realize, I can't believe anybody actually survived living in a city because they were just places that bred disease, and were gross and hard to live in. So you have that happening. And that's mostly the industrial cities of the Northeast and the Midwest. And Los Angeles really gets its start at that time. It's the late like, 1870s, but really the 1880s, there's a land boom, there's all this open land. We have to wait till the railroads basically come in; there's a railroad war and more people can get to Los Angeles, right? And there's all this open land, and it's relatively flat, and the people who come to LA decide that they're going to build a city that's going to be different than these problematic industrial cities. Now, the other thing that's happening, especially in the 1880s, is that there is this big land boom, and a ton of people start buying your property and flipping it really fast. And it's a bubble and it bursts and lots of people lose a lot of money. So there's a need both or a desire I would say amongst the , at least the realty profession, to build a city that's not going to have the same problems as these other cities, and also to address the issues of volatility in the real estate market. They're trying to provide some stability.
Paavo Monkkonen 13:21
Yeah, that's I mean, it's it's very striking because I think so the curb stoner, can you describe the curbs stoner practices? Is there a term in the LA region, because that seems like more of a Midwest East Coast term.
Laura Redford 13:32
I can just say in looking into the way that the Realty Board formed, so they started in 1903, as a way to distinguish themselves from kind of the fly-by-night, rip-you-off real estate agent, right? And so they would not be ones who were trying to quickly flip property. They were trying to establish practices and codes and policies and professional standards, that if you belong to this organization, you could be respectable instead of right, the swindler.
Shane Phillips 14:07
Curb stoner sounds like like the real estate version of a carpet bagger to me. I've never heard the term it
Paavo Monkkonen 14:15
It also sounds like a term from 1910.
Shane Phillips 14:18
Like, what's the etymology of that? Like where does that term actually come from?
Paavo Monkkonen 14:22
Who knows? Yeah, maybe they just...
Shane Phillips 14:23
What is this stone, what is the stone, what's going on here?
Laura Redford 14:26
Yeah, I don't know actually.
Shane Phillips 14:28
We'll have to look it up and maybe find something to put in the show notes.
Paavo Monkkonen 14:31
It's striking, because I've done a lot of work in Latin America and Mexico, especially I think the suburban housing developers there are, you know, in the last 20-30 years, are kind of in a similar place as LA in the early 1900s, where a lot of the urban development has been selling lots on which people build housing of various levels of quality, and this idea of trying to say "No, this neighborhood is going to all be of a certain type", kind of is this instinct that a lot of developers have, but haven't been able to codify legally in various ways as it happened in LA in the early 1900s so it's an interesting phenomenon.
Shane Phillips 15:12
I think we'll get into a little bit more of the motives that real estate interest in particular had. But I want to before we go too far, dig a little deeper into how policymakers and especially these real estate interests, put class-based segregation into practice. So could you just share what you did in the paper is you offer kind of three primary tools that were used to enforce class segregation? Could you just give us an overview of those and how they were used?
Laura Redford 15:42
I think it's important to note that they intersect. So it's not that there's these three avenues that don't overlap that they very much do.
Shane Phillips 15:49
Right.
Laura Redford 15:49
So the first would be zoning and restrictive covenants, or CC &Rs is the word that I use; CC&Rs are contracts, conveyances, and restrictions, and I use that in the paper because restrictive covenants have come to mean, in the salient literature, really talking about racial covenants. And I think I'm talking about more than racial covenants but that is included here. Right? The second way is using the courts to honor and uphold these kinds of CC&Rs, and then the third way is through advertising.
Shane Phillips 16:27
And can you give kind of an overview, I think, especially of that first one of how the CC&Rs work in practice. I think we're mostly familiar with how they work in the context of these racial covenants, where they basically say, like "you cannot sell to", "it cannot be occupied by a person of this ethnicity, or a person of this or that race". But how do they enforce or create this class segregation like what is the language included in the CC&Rs to achieve that end?
Laura Redford 16:58
Yeah, they're in the form of minimum building requirements. So often, to address again, that kind of flipping of land, they might say that you have to build a structure within a certain amount of time. So that would address that issue. But the class distinction really comes in, in dictating how much you have to spend to build the structure that you want to build. And it would give you maybe a range of money that tells you what class this neighborhood is targeting. And it's important to recognize that this is before developers are really building out whole neighborhoods, right? What happens, this use of CC&Rs for class distinction really only happens for a short amount of time because once developers are building the whole neighborhood, they get to determine the price point of sale, and it basically accomplishes the same thing.
Shane Phillips 17:49
Right? That was something that did stand out to me. I almost wrote a question about it but I'm glad you brought it up about you know, that just this idea that individual people, they were just buying the parcel themselves, and then building the home themselves or paying someone to do it, and that's just, you know, a very unusual phenomenon in the modern day.
Laura Redford 18:08
Yeah the developer would have and this is where advertisements come in right, they would say, this is what we've provided, right? There might be shrubs, there might be curbs, we might have paved the streets, and they might say what they've paved the streets with. So they're not telling you that you're just buying out by yourself, and you have to hook up your own sewer line, right they're saying, here are the things that we're providing, including water and sewer line connections, and those kinds of things. And here's how we've kind of made the neighborhood nicer, but you're still gonna buy the spot and build your own house.
Paavo Monkkonen 18:41
And do you know, when the first CC&R was written in LA?
Laura Redford 18:45
That is such a good question. I don't, I have examples from...
Paavo Monkkonen 18:51
what were like the early years?
1903 is the earliest example I have the first example of a racially restrictive covenant is from 1906 that I could find in looking through the Los Angeles Times.
Right. And so these are I mean, you know, I think we call them developers, but they were like land land subdivision developers, or land developers or something where they would acquire a big tract, and then cut it out. And they would cut and sell the lot.
Laura Redford 19:20
Yeah.
Paavo Monkkonen 19:20
And were they like Sears kit homes or were these mostly on site built housing?
Laura Redford 19:25
No, that is such a good question, and I don't know. I don't know how people were sourcing their materials. I don't know how many Sears Kit homes came to Los Angeles.
Maybe it's too far away from....
but they would be responsible to build their own and then they could hire builders to come and do it for them or they could do it themselves.
Paavo Monkkonen 19:44
So maybe if you could talk a little bit about how the CC&Rs were enforced, right so somebody has to bring a lawsuit for them to be enforced, right?
Laura Redford 19:54
So the first case that I could find about CC&R was actually about the issue of class and not the issue of race. And it's from 1911, and Emile Firth developed this tract of land that would, based on what I could figure out from maps, I think the 110 freeway actually has gone through this neighborhood. But it was close to Exposition Park, and there was a covenant that require that you spend a certain amount of money, I think it was $1,200 or $1,500, to build the house. Somebody had purchased a lot in this development, and then had resold it, and the woman who bought it built a house that cost her $800. And Emile Firth took her to court and said, "you have not followed the CC&Rs for this property - that is a detrimental value to all of the other homes in this neighborhood". And it got as far as the state Supreme Court, and the California State Supreme Court upheld it and said that she would then lose the title to the property because she didn't follow the covenants. And this is especially important because it wasn't a first time buyer. So it showed that the covenants could be in effect, as long as, in this case, the justices said that because he still owned some of the property in the tract then he still had actionable cause to bring her to court.
Paavo Monkkonen 21:23
Interesting. So she lost her property then because she only spent $800 on her house?
Laura Redford 21:28
That is what the records would say
Paavo Monkkonen 21:31
Wow, fascinating, fascinating.
Shane Phillips 21:33
That's rough.
Paavo Monkkonen 21:34
And then I just wanted to in your in your article, you mentioned that the plaintiff was the Southwest Protective Association. So I think this as an actor, like I've read about the Shelly versus Kramer case, and the plaintiff in that case was one of these associations as well. But it's tied with the developer themselves, or is it just like a bunch of local residents that are concerned about an unsightly $800 house in their neighborhood?
Laura Redford 22:00
Well, the Southwest Protection Agency was part of a different case. That was I think that was the Gary case.
Okay.
So there are two cases that come before the State Supreme Court in 1919, addressing CCRs that specifically racially restrictive covenants. The first one which is titled 'Trust versus Homer Guerrero, and in a seemingly favorable opinion, which says that you cannot restrict people's access to property based on race so that's a violation of equal protection in the 14th amendment. But the Gary case is adjudicated that same year, and it upholds occupancy clauses for restrictive covenants. So that meant that Mr. Guerrero could own a home in a place that had restrictive covenants, but wouldn't be allowed to live there, or any other person of color. So the Southwest Protective Agency, there's little record of them. What I did find is that the Los Angeles Realty board absolutely supported their efforts. So there was some collusion between that group of of what seems to be homeowners and the realty board and it would not, I don't have a documented record of this, but it just wouldn't at all be surprising to me if one of the members of the realty board was the developer of this neighborhood in question which is how they get looped in to the SPA.
Shane Phillips 23:30
And I think we mentioned that the Los Angeles Realty Board, I believe, it was created in 1903, and I think you also said the first class-based CC&R was also that year or the year after so I don't think that's a coincidence.
Laura Redford 23:45
Yeah
Shane Phillips 23:45
The LARB was a driving force behind a lot of these class segregation efforts, and I think also racial segregation efforts. So I think we've kind of talked about this, the case with Emile Firth sort of illustrates it a little bit, but let's get a little more into what was their motivation; you know, I can understand what you said earlier about how they formed and wanted rules in general to kind of have this air of being more respectable, things being standardized, and not so fly by night and everything, but how did they see themselves as profiting ultimately, from especially these class-based segregation efforts, and you know, maybe, if you can also talk about how individual homeowners or landowners might also have supported many of these efforts because they may not have wanted a really low-quality home in their neighborhood. So, you know, just making clear the extent to which this was like, maybe driven by the LARB but not necessarily them being the only ones who stood behind this.
Laura Redford 24:49
For sure, for sure. I think from a residents' point of view, the thing that they benefit from is real estate even early on, is you know, an income producer; it's an it's an investment. And if you have rapidly changing cities and cityscapes, you're not sure if your investment is going to be productive or not. So the more that you can be told and reassured that things aren't going to change with your investment, the more secure it would seem. From the realtors perspective, and that word is copyrighted, and they don't start at 18. So I, that's why I'm always like real estate agent, and I'm not using those words until they, you know, vote to join with the National Association and adopt that term. But I think I'm not a marketing expert at all, but just kind of common sense. It feels like it might be easier to market, if you are breaking things down by class, it's easier to explain who your clientele is, and Los Angeles really is on the forefront of doing this for multiple classes right?> That's one of the contributions of Los Angeles - history in this is that other places, other suburban communities had already formed. We talked about how gross cities were at this time. And we have these kind of elite enclaves, examples all around the United States. And Los Angeles is really the first place that en mass, they start to build spaces like those elite communities, but for people of all different classes and pocketbooks.
Shane Phillips 26:32
I can't remember if this was in your paper or not, but there were certainly minimum expenditures that were written into the CC&Rs. Ours for building a home, were they're also maximums in some neighborhoods where like, it wasn't just that you had to have a minimum of 1500 or so, it's also you couldn't build like too fancy a home, and so there was class segregation in that way, or was it really just like a minimum?
Paavo Monkkonen 26:54
That seems unlikely
Laura Redford 26:57
I mean, I did see a few advertisements that might be like, between this much and this much, but I don't know that the covenants would support that you could or you wouldn't be able to spend more.
Paavo Monkkonen 27:07
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I see it much more as like a classic price discrimination, where the same brand will have different, you know, polo, polo sport, you know, double RL right kind of a thing, and it is, you know, the Lian Phenol paper, that's a fantastic read 'Exclusions, Attraction' I think is part of this conversation, right, where you're selling - part of it is signaling that you're fancy, and you live in a fancy neighborhood and who your neighbors are going to be, but this kind of added value of having an exclusionary kind of block even. And I thought that example in there, the neighborhood, that even by block, it would differentiate how much you would have to spend on your house. Yeah, was really interesting.
Laura Redford 27:48
Yeah, there was one that if you were on the inside of the neighborhood, you didn't have to spend as much. But if you were on the outside kind of Main Street, you had to spend more money, which would be the reverse. Now, if we were to do that, right? The inside would be kind of the protected more valued space, and the outside, less, but this particular community was trying to showcase maybe from the outside what it was trying to be.
Paavo Monkkonen 28:15
These very early ones would have been before cars are everywhere, right? So that might have played a role where, you know, being on the main street was not as polluted and noisy and everything as it is today.
Shane Phillips 28:26
So we've mentioned this a few times, but just to be clear, the class-based and race-based segregation here, were not mutually exclusive practices in LA or elsewhere. Could you just talk about how these two often overlapped and reinforced each other? If there are ways that were unique in Los Angeles, that's great but also just generally too.
Laura Redford 28:48
Yeah, I did find I think it's really interesting, evidence of a suburban community. I don't write about this in the paper, but evidence of a basically suburban development that uses the exact same advertising tactics, and even the language about restrictions, which usually meant that there were restrictive covenants in place, but it was by black developers, and it said specifically that it wouldn't have racial exclusions. So they were doing the exact same thing in terms of, it was a middle to upper-middle-class black community is what they were advertising for. And I thought that was really interesting that it had become the pervasive way to maybe advertise in Los Angeles what you were building. But certainly there are ways in which talking about class and not talking about race is still really talking about race. In Los Angeles, for example, as is clear with lots of other places, there was a huge discrepancy and employment discrimination, and so just advertising class might be a way to say that you were being exclusive to racial groups. Obviously there were jobs on available to people of color, there's evidence that people were paid different wages, lower wages for the same job as white counterparts, all of those things. So I think that's can be difficult to tease out. I think it's also really important to recognize that racial categories were not surmountable right? So even if you were a very wealthy person of color, your class status in the early 20th century would not enable you to purchase a home in a neighborhood that you could afford if there were racially restrictive covenants,
Right!
So racially restrictive covenants sort of usurped or overshadowed the class restrictions.
Shane Phillips 30:41
And it wasn't a choice made by developers to do one or the other oftentimes, right?
Laura Redford 30:46
Yeah, they were often doing it the same yeah, at the same time. And I think it is interesting to know, I had looked through all of the documents for the 1939 HLC, Homeowners Loan Corporation security maps, and found references to that 47% of neighborhoods in Los Angeles had racially restrictive covenants but there was note of that. And in Los Angeles, the other thing that's different from other places, is that these were typically not put on retroactively, they typically were apart of the foundation of the neighborhood.
Shane Phillips 31:26
Can you talk more about that? Like why that's important, or why that was the case?
Laura Redford 31:30
Yeah, I think it's different from other cities. So a lot of other places had to retroactively if residents chose to put in racially restrictive covenants, they would have to gather, write a corpus of their residents, and sign legal documents and institute these things.
Shane Phillips 31:46
And this was largely just because they were built up before this practice had been developed.
Laura Redford 31:52
Yeah, and I think, again, the timing of when LA developed is really important here for why so many places are, so many of these neighborhood developers or attract developers are using restrictive covenants from the start,
Paavo Monkkonen 32:06
I think this might be a good place to talk about the St. Francis tract. And I feel like there's an argument here about how in some cases, having the racially restrictive covenants was more important than in other cases, right? So you're saying how, you know if you're discriminating so much on class, and houses need to be above some very high price point when you're they're built than just de facto that's discriminating on race as well, just because of inequality between different racial groups, but then in the lower cost segments when you're developing (for) a working class community, then in those cases, developers were more restrictive on race. Is that accurate?
Laura Redford 32:45
Yeah, and I don't have enough proof to say that this is the way that it always went. Finding the pairing between the advertisement and then getting a hold of the restrictive covenants is not an easy process. I wish that it were easier to be able to definitively say that, but it feels like that would be true, right? That this St. Francis track was the first one, the first reference I found in 1906, in the Los Angeles Times advertisement for a tract that then did prove to have racial restrictive covenants, and it was a working class neighborhood.
Paavo Monkkonen 33:24
And then the Torrance example, was also very much this, you know, built up as a working class city but for whites only.
Yeah, and Torrance absolutely was following that. It was trying to, you know, Jared Torrance, was trying kind of Pullman to build an industrial town, but do it do a better job of it, but racial exclusion was part of the fabric of that city.
Right, and do you think I wonder, I mean, compared to other parts of the country, you know, so were the developments like Torrance kind of creating a new definition of whiteness in California that maybe couldn't happen elsewhere just because, you know, the ethnic lines among the Eastern Europeans and the Western Europeans or the Northern Irish and the Italians were less traditionally drawn like they had been in other parts of the country, or was I just making that up as I read this?
Laura Redford 34:24
I would agree with that. Do I have enough examples to say, for sure, it's just how it's happening, I don't quite. It seems to me, though, that if we accept the premise that people in Los Angeles are trying to build a city that is different from the Midwestern and Eastern cities and the problems that they have, one of the perceived problems of those cities is ethnic division, and nationalism, and what that means for, you know, what does it mean to be an American and how are you defining these kind of bigger headier your terms I think, and the way to do that in Los Angeles was just not use ethnicity as the drawing mark for a neighborhood; class could fill that portion. And in this example of St. Francis's tract, I look at the census records of who lived in that neighborhood and where they were from and they were from, we have immigrants, we have native-born citizens, all White or what we would now say is White, but all very middle class working blue-collar jobs.
Paavo Monkkonen 35:29
So I appreciate your caution on making claims, I've found some historians often are happy to make big claims with limited amounts of evidence. As a social scientist that worries a lot about causality and evidence, I appreciate your caution. But maybe you could talk a little bit more about your methods. I mean, a lot of the meat of the article is based on really interesting objects from the archive. And so maybe you could, it could tell us a little bit how you uncover these things.
Laura Redford 35:56
Yeah, I used a lot of advertisements from the Los Angeles Times. I picked that newspaper because it's the one that's digitally searchable. So looking for terms like 'restricted', (and) focusing on housing advertisements, I found a series of collected pamphlets that were the advertising brochures for a wide range of neighborhoods in Los Angeles, in the archives at UCLA. And then I found the Los Angeles Realty Board records and I knew that they had existed because Mark Weiss had used them in his book in the 1980s, the late 80s, and no one could find them. I went to the Real Estate Board and had joined another board. They've moved locations a couple times, I dug through their basement. I couldn't find anything. And then two years later, I circled back and made a phone call and the executive director said I was looking for your phone number. You're the one who came and looked in our basement, right? We found the records. we found, I don't know how many years 50 years of meeting minutes in a bureau...
Shane Phillips 37:01
Oh wow, persistence pays off!
Laura Redford 37:03
Right? It was awesome. In a bureau in their conference room that nobody had opened for 20 years or so. So I went to their organization and I started looking at meeting minutes. The Los Angeles Realty then became more of a focus just because I had so much information there. Yeah, I was going to ask if I could make a photocopy of a document from 1912, and she asked me if I wanted to take it home. And I thought I have atwo-year-oldd at my house I do not want to take this to my house. So the Realty Board records are now at UCLA stock collections which I'm happy to say that I facilitate it so that other people can look at them now. You wanted me to talk though about one of the my favorite thing that I found in, my favorite advertisement that I found and it's my favorite because it is so blatantly egregious. It's for a development...
Shane Phillips 37:58
Favorite because it's the most hated.
Laura Redford 38:00
Yeah, it's the most horrible. I use it when I teach because students respond really strongly to it, and that's kind of the goal, right, is to see how blatant some of this could be. So it was an advertisement for a tract in Culver City, California, just south of the Los Angeles boundary, well surrounded I guess, by the Los Angeles boundary because of LA's weird shape. But it was trying to get people to come out and look at the land, look at the new subdivision. And so it was right around Christmas time, and any kid who brought an adult would get a box of candy and a present from Santa - really trying to get, I don't know why kids are reading the newspaper but maybe it was a way to get parents to say, "hey, come on this ride with me, and you'll get something for it". And then it said very clearly in a large parenthetical, "Lots and presents for Caucasians only". And I just threw up my hands and said Santa Claus was racist! I can't believe it. But then I went, and looked right? I had a connection with somebody who worked at a title company, and I picked a house in that neighborhood randomly, and got the title paperwork which included the original CC&Rs to show that indeed, there were class restrictions on that neighborhood, and there were racial restrictions on that neighborhood as well.
Paavo Monkkonen 39:20
Yeah, I would be remiss to not bring up Harry Culver since this since we're talking about Culver City. And he was he was an important player, one of the many players around this time as well right?
Laura Redford 39:30
Yes, and an active member of the Los Angeles Realty Board as well.
Shane Phillips 39:34
Yep, he was kind of from the era of the community builders, though, right, where he was actually buiding...,
Paavo Monkkonen 39:39
Like at the cusp, right? He was part of this innovative early period that eventually became community builders.
Shane Phillips 39:45
Yeah, I mean community builders sounds a little too positive like, I don't think there's like a normative, I guess there is between that and curb stoning because the latter is clearly supposed to be worse. Note, they were really building community or they were building certain kind of community
Laura Redford 40:01
They were building community, we just don't like necessarily the community they were building or we would take issue with the community that they were building.
Shane Phillips 40:09
Yeah, there you go!
Paavo Monkkonen 40:10
I think it's important to call the racist, exclusionary white communities 'communities', because a lot of times in the contemporary planning discourse when we talk about community participation, you know, a lot of planners when they say, "we want community participation", they don't mean to the end of racist exclusion but that's what happens a lot of the time right? So I think, you know, reclaiming the negative of 'community' is important.
Laura Redford 40:37
Well, I think it's important to emphasize that these were deliberate decisions, right? Sometimes, I mean, maybe in a post-Richard Rothstein The Color of Law world, it's harder to do, but I feel like some of the arguments I've heard over time is just that, "well, this is just the way it happened", right? Or this is just how we build. And it's like, no people made choices, and their choices were to make neighborhoods that were of like groups of people based on specific categories. Those were racial and ethnic categories, and class categories right? And that those are the decisions that we live with now. I think, as a historian, I love you know urban planning now, too but I like looking back to see well, how did we get to where we are now. And that's where I think this is most important, is just really investigating why we have what we have now is because of choices people made in the past.
Shane Phillips 41:34
I'm glad you brought that up, and I think it's important to I guess not take for granted that everyone listening is going to hear about this class segregation and be like, "well, obviously, that's bad". I think there's a reason that racial segregation and discrimination is illegal in this country. And class segregation is still not and it's because we don't see class segregation, as negatively as we see racial segregation. I can certainly see someone thinking like, well, yeah, like, if you buy a place, having no racial animus or intent whatsoever, don't include racial covenants or anything like that, just to say, like, well, I bought this home, or I spent $2,000, building it, and I don't want someone building a $500 home next door and lowering my property value. Like, on the one hand, that's like, selfish and whatever, but also, just given the system we've created, it is harmful to that neighbor, at some like financial level at least. If, and when you have people question you about this, like, what is your response to, to this idea that maybe there's something to this segregation? Or, you know, maybe they would not use the word segregation, but just like this, you know, setting of standards, I guess, would be like a positive spin on it.
Laura Redford 42:53
I would say we need to look at the assumptions that we're making right? Why did we assume that people of different classes couldn't live near each other in lovely homes of different cost right? It doesn't have to be because it doesn't cost much it isn't nice, right or well constructed, or doesn't look aesthetically pleasing? We came to decide that segregating by class was the thing to do. And that didn't, it feels like a foregone conclusion because that's what we're so used to. But I don't know that it has to be that way. And I do think that there are challenges as a society that we have inherited because of that assumption, and then the building practices that follow. I think there's a lot less compassion when you are only around people that are like you, and I think that stretches to socio-economic status, or what we say as class. I'm not going to go so far as to say, you know, we need to upend capitalism and all this other things but I do think that there is a capitalist argument that should be reconsidered if grouping by class is the standard that we set and why,
Shane Phillips 44:12
Like, if the incentives are pushing us in that direction, something is broken with our incentives potentially or the structures that we set up.
Laura Redford 44:19
I mean, you said it.
Paavo Monkkonen 44:22
I think it's also you know, if you really believe the myth of America that anybody can move up in their socio-economic status if they just work hard enough, then you wouldn't see this as necessarily a problem, right? It's just the people that wanted it badly enough, made it into this neighborhood, and anyone could have done that right? And so it's not a permanent kind of class segregation like you would have, if you're born into it. Assuming you believe that that's how it works.
Laura Redford 44:50
Yeah, but when you combine that with the long history of racial segregation, you're using the class argument to reinforce racial segregation.
Shane Phillips 45:00
Totally, yeah, and I think that point is really important, we can pretend like we can have a conversation about class segregation in isolation, but it never was, and it kind of can't be, and so it's maybe just not even really all that helpful to try to talk about class segregation in isolation. And, you know, you're the title of your paper is the intertwined history of class, and racial segregation.
Laura Redford 45:24
The other part of this that I think is connected, which, when my book comes out, I'll have you read the first chapter, is the decision that the single-family family home is going to be the valued unit, right? Because it means that if you have a neighborhood of single-family homes, and you have enshrined class separation into the way that you build, building an apartment building in that community becomes terrifically difficult. Building, even a duplex in that neighborhood could become terrifically difficult. And so there's a connection there between, again, we decided that the single-family home, the detached single-family home was going to be the ultimate expression of homeownership and achievement. And that, again, nowadays creates problems for neighborhoods or places that are struggling with an affordable housing crisis in a city really differentiating suburbs between urban spaces, as well, only single-family homes can go here, but over there, that's where we can put, you know, a low story apartment building,
Shane Phillips 46:31
I think there's something to the kind of context as well, where at the time when these covenants or CC&Rs, with class requirements or minimum construction expenditure requirements were in place, it seems to me that the land value component of the total cost of you know, building and having a home was pretty small. So you had to have or, you know, if this segregation was your goal, you had to have these requirements in place. But as land prices rise, you can just allow the restriction on density and other things to kind of stand in for that, because it just causes the land value itself to be the barrier rather than the construction cost of the home. And this kind of leads into one of my final questions here, which is, we've done a lot to reduce housing discrimination based on race in this country, obviously, still a long way to go. But we have made progress. But what about discrimination based on class? We know that policies like caps on density, minimum lot sizes, things like this, do a lot of the work of racial segregation in a facially race-neutral way, and I think that's been pretty well documented, and we talked about it in previous episodes. But you know, racial segregation overall, in this country hasn't really declined between the passage of the Fair Housing Act more than 50 years ago, and the present day. So I'm curious how you think about how you interpret the evolution of class based segregation here in the US over the last 30,50,70 years? How is that history still influencing or impacting our lives today?
Laura Redford 48:13
I think we have continued to build on a separated by class model, right? This is no more evident than building gated communities, right? We're not even, it keeps getting more and more and more entrenched. And if you accept the premise that class and race-based segregation were intertwined, from the beginning, then fixing the problems of racial segregation in the United States is going to require some looking at class segregation as well. And I think there are places that are trying to do this, but I think we don't talk explicitly enough about it. And because if we don't acknowledge that from the foundation, they were connected, it's easier to say this is race-neutral language, or this is a race neutral policy. But if we're not talking about classes as well, I don't know if those policies are going to be successful.
That's a great point. I was curious to hear so there last year, there was a law passed in California, AB 721, that had been something that had been brought up previously that would strike racist language from covenants, from deeds in California - asking County Recorders Office to strike that language. And I'm curious as a historian, what your thoughts on that are ? I know I can think of arguments for and against it.
Yeah, as a historian who used current title paperwork to try to figure out this historical record, I would be hesitant to strike historical language however offensive it is. Because then you are tampering with the historical record. I think it is important to have an evidence chain. Now what appears in these documents now is a piece of paper that says, "racially restrictive covenants are no longer legal or enforceable" right? So that documentation does go with the title paperwork. if racially restrictive covenants were part of its historical chain. I think keeping that might be a better action for , again, the authenticity of the historical record. I can understand why people would want that language out of their title paperwork, for sure but I also want there to be a chain for people to look at to investigate this history.
Shane Phillips 50:33
Maybe there's a kind of win-win solution here where the county recorders, or whomever has to go through these and digitize the old versions as they update and remove this language from the existing titles such that we have all of it in one place, which is great for researchers, all the old stuff; you don't have to dig them up property by property, that kind of thing. And it no longer, you know, has this racist language on the deeds of people who themselves it is describing which I can absolutely understand why someone would not want to have the home that they own, say in the title, you know, people of my race are not welcome here.
Laura Redford 51:12
Yeah, I think that's a fantastic solution, Shane, and just for several million dollars, you could probably make that. I will say that researching property records is incredibly challenging and time-consuming, and not for the faint of heart. I spent some time in the basement of the county offices that hold the property records in it. I did leave in tears.
Paavo Monkkonen 51:37
Well, thank you for your service. I think this research is extremely important. I mean, I think really understanding like the evolution or the development of real estate practices and real estate development practices in the US, I mean, it's exciting that there's so much work on it happening now. This early kind of pivotal period were because you can really see how these covenant practices and land development practices developed into more suburban speculative development.
Laura Redford 52:05
I am so glad that you can see that because that is actually the biggest claim I think I'm trying to make in this book project, is that Los Angeles becomes this, other places were also built this way but because Los Angeles does it on such a large scale, and because the real estate professionals who are responsible for it becomes so active and promoting it nationally yeah, and they're very involved nationally in the professional organizations, that Los Angeles is the bridge between either the industrial city or the elite suburban enclave and post World War II suburbanization. And then if you didn't have Los Angeles develop how and when it did, you wouldn't have that post World War II expansion of suburbs that are segregated by single-family freestanding homes, by class, and by race.
Shane Phillips 52:56
Maybe to close this out, are you able to talk about what the LA Realty board or other entities here in Los Angeles did or the influence they had on federal policy or policy that spread to other cities and states? What impact did they have more broadly outside of our own borders?
Laura Redford 53:15
That's a great question and will be the final chapter of my book. So I could give you a few sort of anecdotal things, but that's basically what it is. It's going to be like enough anecdotal evidence gathered that is what is going to prove my point.
Paavo Monkkonen 53:30
Right.
Laura Redford 53:30
So when the National Association of Realtors developed their code of ethics that included racially restrictive language that said that a developer, a realtor will not be the force that changes the racial composition of a neighborhood. It was a Los Angeles Realty board member who was the chair of the ethics committee for the national organization. Early in the night like in the 19 teens and into the 20s, there are several LA Realty Board leaders who have very prominent positions on the National Association. I have evidence from the Secretary saying people keep writing me from all over the country wanting our forms, like just the professional procedures that they were creating were becoming popular. Things like other cities writing to the Realty Board with questions, there's some evidence of that. There's even evidence of a prominent home builder coming to study Los Angeles, like already they owned a home building company that was active in other parts of the nation, and coming and studying what was happening in Los Angeles. So those are the kinds of pieces that I see coming together, and I also just don't see, you know, my initial research question again going back to the start of this conversation, I was trying to figure out what kind of city I lived in when I moved to LA. And it felt like a much more segregated city than New York, or other places that I I had lived. And I wanted to understand why. And I went back and it's like, okay, well, the Homeowners Loan Corporation and redlining, okay, I get that but where did those ideas come from? How did we decide that new construction of single-family freestanding homes segregated by race and class were going to be the things that were the thing that we thought were the best in those documents as we codify real estate practice. And it took me back to the late 19th, early 20th century and these men who were trying to build a city that, ironically, still had a lot of the problems that these other cities had, but they thought they could build a city that wouldn't.
Shane Phillips 55:38
Yeah, I think this has been so interesting, and something I hadn't really thought about, but just how important that the timing of all of this was for the way that we developed as a city here in Los Angeles, but also the way that we were able to serve as a test case or, you know, blazed the trail in the worst way for a lot of other cities and, and for the federal government, you know, to later do its zoning. Paavo, what's the ...
Paavo Monkkonen 56:02
The State Standardized Zoning Enabling Act?
Shane Phillips 56:08
Yeah, Zoning Enabling Act, there you go. All these things that were really just an artifact of timing when we happened to grow.
Laura Redford 56:16
And there's interesting work to by a historian named Nancy Kwok, whose book is about how, through federal aid subsidies, the United States helped support this kind of neighborhood development and building in other places in the world, because we thought our model was the best. And it's this LA model.
Shane Phillips 56:36
Laurie Redford, thank you for joining us on the UCLA Housing Voice podcast.
Laura Redford 56:40
Thank you so much for having me. It has been delightful to talk with you both. I appreciate the work you're doing, and this Housing Podcast. There's a lot of great information here.
Shane Phillips 56:53
You can read more about Laura's research on our website. lewis.ucla.edu. Show Notes and a transcript of the interview are there too. The UCLA Lewis Center is on Facebook and Twitter. I'm on Twitter at ShaneDPhillips, and Pablo is at Elpaavo. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.
About the Guest Speaker(s)
Laura Redford
Laura Redford is a history professor at Brigham Young University. The Journal of Planning History published her article on class and race segregation in Los Angeles.
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Sibley Simon is the man the myth the legendary soul behind New Way Homes. He’s joined by Workbench for this all night party streaming extravaganza.