Vida Newspaper, Volume 2, Issue 1 - September 1974

Unequal Housing Opportunity For CECILIA M. HERNANDEZ The Average person often tends to think of housing discrina- tion in terms of a minority family’s inability to buy a particular house in a particular neighborhood,” said the U.S. Commission or Civil Rights. The commission, in a 72 page report dated July 1974 and titled “Equal Opportunity in Subur¬ bia”, went on to say that there were other forces, institutional and governmental, that affec¬ ted the home buyer on a much “larger scale than individual discriminatory practices could ever achieve.” houses for sale only in ч white neighborhoods and showing mi nority persons houses listed for sale only in predominantly Chi cano or black neighborhoods. “A black schoolteacher named Lorraine Parks testified that she visited about 12 real es¬ tate offices in St. Louis to find CENSUS BUREAU SPANISH ORIGIN LAGGED BEHIND IN INCOME IN 1974 In the investigations conduc¬ ted by the commission, the real estate industry was, found to fflay a leading role in creating and maintaining segregated neighborhoods. Real estate brok¬ ers admitted to having a dual market; one for minorities and another for whites. These illicit practices, though difficult to de¬ lect by the individual home- seeker, were uncovered by “tes¬ ting” or comparing the respon¬ ses of brokers to potential non¬ white and white customers who were quite similar in all res¬ pects except race. For example, in 1969, witnesses for the Great¬ er St. Louis Committee for Freedom of Residence conduc¬ ted a testing survey and des¬ cribed a discriminatory real estate practice called “steer¬ ing.” As the term alludes it is “showing white persons out where they would offer her housing. In almost every one they referred her to a black or racially changing neighborhood. Heddy Epstein, a white woman, also visited 12 real estate of¬ fices in St. Louis. When she asked to be shown houses in a nearby black neighborh о о d called University City, she was answered with, “Well, Universi¬ ty City is all colored; you don’t want to go there.” Another common practice of brokers is to control the “avail¬ ability of housing to non-white purchasers by preventing non¬ white brokers, whose clientele is primarily non-white, from getting access to listi n g s of houses for sale in white areas.” This technique is widely recog¬ nized by minority brokers. Yet, at a Baltimore hearing, white (Continued on Page 5) According to a recent Census Bureau report, families of Span¬ ish origin in the United States last year lagged behind the na¬ tion in median income and average education. The report contained statistics gathered in 1973 on the more than 10.8 million persons of Me¬ xican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Central and South American, and other Spanish background living in the U.S. Well over half of this group - more than 6.5 million — are of Mexican origin. Despite a median income in¬ crease of approximately 18 per¬ cent between 1969 and 1973, there was no increase in real income (income adjusted for the effects of inflation) for Spanish origin families during the same period. In contrast, for the U.S. population as a whole, there was a four percent increase in real income between 1969 and 1973. Median income is the amount at which there is the same num¬ ber of incomes reported above