Racism, Real Estate, and the Strange Career of Trump's Wealth: A World More Concrete by N.D.B. Connolly

This week we examined “Racism, Real Estate, and the Strange Career of Trump’s Wealth,” by reading A World More Concrete by N.D.B. Connolly.  Although Professor Connolly co-created our draft syllabus, he left this book off its suggested readings; however, I heard him speak at my campus about a year ago and have wanted to read this book ever since.  I’ve also enjoyed his role co-hosting the popular Backstory podcast (it’s a great listen for academic and novice historians alike), so I was happy to fit it into our reading this fall.

Connolly’s research examines real estate as a source of wealth and inequality in American society.  He argues that over the first half of the twentieth century, white liberal landowners forged alliances with upwardly-mobile members of the African-American middle class to frame property rights as the most important venue for civil rights advancement; this minimized overt racial violence but never tackled structural inequalities that forced poor black communities to continue paying steep rents to landlords, and ultimately sustained forms of white supremacy (for a copy of my notes, see here). Connolly’s argument is complex, but his writing is clear and concise, and (for those who are simply reading along with this blog) this would be an excellent book to read at some point as it addresses many of the themes discussed across the syllabus all rolled up into one book. Regular readers of this blog might connect Connolly’s work to some of the previous books we’ve discussed – as I read the book, I recalled Kevin Kruse’s work on the Atlanta suburbs, as well as Elizabeth Hinton’s observations about the limits of liberalism. Connolly is able to make his complex argument by examining a variety of archives on southern Florida and its real estate markets.  While his research focuses on Miami, Connolly also connects his work to other studies of American urbanization and argues that his findings are illustrative of larger trends shared by American cities, particularly in the greater Sunbelt.  

In focusing on Miami, Connolly explores a city that grew from only 30,000 residents in the 1920s, and the important role the real estate market played in its development.  In the early twentieth century the city’s leading realty boards were controlled by white men exclusively, and they were able to turn huge profits as northerners began to look for land in the bourgeoning vacation destination.  Real estate investors acquired land cheaply from nearby Seminole communities whose self-appointed leaders saw opportunities in spectacle tourism and other moneymaking ventures, but the Seminoles’ profits did not filter down to the people more generally.  White landowners developed their newly acquired land using black labor coerced to work through vagrancy laws and the threat of lynching, forcing African Americans to construct new developments and rebuild crumbling ruins after hurricanes. While poor black workers were forced into hard labor, an emerging middle class of African-American business owners sought ways to gain political power, marginalizing radical, largely Caribbean-born voices in the community by denigrating their “superstitions” and opposing boycotts of white businesses. Connolly astutely notes that these efforts to acquire political power through property showed a willingness to forge cross-racial alliances built around their identity as a class of property owners; however, because property laws always worked in favor of white interests, it meant acquiescing to white supremacy in some form.

Over the course of the 1940s and 1950s, this emerging alliance of property owners worked to mitigate the violent forms of racism while at the same time still accepting broader racial injustices that allowed them to maximize their personal profits. For example, white property owners knew that lynchings and racial violence scared away potential tourists, and encouraged government officials to stop the Ku Klux Klan from attacking African Americans who moved into previously white neighborhoods.  However, white landowners themselves were responsible for creating the conditions that led to this violence – they opposed efforts to reclaim rundown and blighted properties for low-cost, federal housing using eminent domain decrees, and instead argued that as skilled developers they should be permitted to acquire land on the “free market” and redevelop it as rental properties. They built these properties next to white neighborhoods and were willing to rent to black families, knowing it would allow them to manipulate rapid shifts in supply and demand shaped by racial fears.  Landowners’ opposition to overt Klan violence allowed them to forge ties to poorer black voters, demonstrating their apparent support for desegregation.

However, white and black landowners used their political support from black workers to advance their interests as landowners. During the 1940s and early 1950s property owners blocked the use of eminent domain for the construction of black housing (instead using eminent domain to build schools), which had a dual effect of making eminent domain seem like a potential solution to problems while still relegating poor African-American families to high-rent, segregated apartments they owned. Connolly demonstrates that segregated apartment housing also locked white working-class families into high rents, but white families still had the ability to move to new neighborhoods and the government was willing to support their efforts, both options not available to black citizens. By the 1960s, the cross-racial alliance of black and white property owners had tackled some forms of segregation in hotels and golf courses, but this had little impact on the day-to-day lives of most African Americans.  Black tenants began working together to demand better living conditions; in many southern cities this process actually began earlier, but in Miami the black middle class actively worked to stymie these political alliances fearing that tenants’ demands were too radical, going beyond the realm of property rights to seek broader economic justice.  For their part, poorer African Americans hoped to find land in the suburbs, but soon found that the use of eminent domain to destroy blighted urban areas could just as easily force them into unequal housing situations in the suburbs.  Ultimately, Connolly’s research illustrates that the “free market” was unable to solve inequality within the real estate market, since the market treated black and white, and landowner and renter differently.

While recent years have seen increased efforts to bring the federal government’s power to bear on housing inequality, the Trump administration seems bent on creating policy that will only benefit wealthy landowners (perhaps this should not be a surprise, given the Trump family’s roots in segregated housing in New York). Although recent years have seen the elimination of giant racial disparities in public housing, poor African-Americans continue to be far more likely than poor whites to live in poor, segregated neighborhoods. These ongoing problems suggest that the federal government still has an important, active role to play to eliminate the structural inequality inherent in the American real estate market.  Unfortunately, the Trump administration’s current budget plans aim to slash funding for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and in particular programs that directly assist poor families. As Connolly’s book demonstrates, these policies have long and problematic roots in American history and need to be addressed before equality can truly be guaranteed for all Americans.