- The piece discusses the history of race and land ownership in America, focusing on the story of the Bruce family in Manhattan Beach, California.
- The Bruce family, who were black, owned oceanfront lots that were taken from them under the guise of eminent domain, after facing harassment from the Ku Klux Klan.
- The city of Manhattan Beach has recently taken steps to acknowledge and condemn what happened, but has not offered an official apology.
- L.A. County has released a plan to return the land to the Bruce family, which may finally bring justice to their story.
- The piece then shifts to discuss housing discrimination and its effects on wealth and quality of life for black families.
- Racial covenants and federal government policies, such as redlining and racially restrictive covenants, significantly expanded and locked in segregation.
- The federal government's involvement in the housing market excluded black people from accessing loans and mortgages, further perpetuating inequality.
- The damage caused by these discriminatory practices is immense and continues to have lasting effects.

- The GI Bill after World War II provided home loans to returning service members, but black service members were still denied loans, preventing them from owning homes in expanding suburbs.
- Levittown, a development on Long Island, exemplified this discrimination, with black people being explicitly told they were not welcome.
- White people who were able to buy homes in segregated suburbs gained significant wealth, while black people were excluded from these opportunities.
- The racial exclusion from federal programs was widespread, with only a small percentage of loans going to African Americans.
- The racial makeup of neighborhoods was closely tied to home values, leading to practices like blockbusting to drive down prices in white neighborhoods.
- The Fair Housing Act of 1968 made housing discrimination illegal and required the government to promote integration, but Nixon's administration undermined integration efforts.
- Discrimination in housing continues through zoning laws and realtors steering buyers away from certain neighborhoods based on race.

- Black homebuyers face discrimination at every step of the process
- African-Americans are routinely denied mortgage loans at higher rates, even when controlling for income, loan amount, and neighborhood
- Home appraisals can be tainted by discrimination, resulting in lower values for Black homeowners
- Efforts to address housing discrimination have been colorblind and ineffective
- Reparations are necessary to address the harm caused by housing discrimination
- A bill has been introduced in the House to study reparations for housing discrimination
- Potential models for reparations include Germany's payments to Holocaust survivors and the U.S. payments to Japanese-Americans interned during World War II
- Evanston, Illinois has implemented a program using revenue from legal weed to provide grants to assist Black residents and their descendants
- Reparations should involve a recommitment to civil rights enforcement, investment in Black communities, and cash payments.

- The author argues that there is a double standard when it comes to how black people are judged for their spending compared to white people.
- They believe that black people should have the right to decide how to spend reparations given by the government, just as white people have had the freedom to spend their wealth.
- The author acknowledges that money alone is not the solution and that structural changes are necessary to address inequality.
- They emphasize that paying reparations is the right thing to do and that it is long overdue, comparing it to the return of Bruce's Beach.
- The author believes that healing this wound and addressing the issue of reparations would allow the country to reach its highest potential.

This text discusses the history of race and land ownership in America, focusing on the Bruce family's story in Manhattan Beach, California. It highlights the taking of their land under eminent domain and the city's recent steps to acknowledge and condemn what happened. The piece also explores housing discrimination and its impact on black families, including redlining and exclusion from federal programs. It emphasizes the need for reparations to address the harm caused by housing discrimination, using examples from Germany and the U.S. The author argues for a recommitment to civil rights enforcement, investment in Black communities, and cash payments as part of reparations. They emphasize the importance of addressing this issue for the country to reach its highest potential.

John Oliver breaks down the long history of housing discrimination in the U.S., the damage it’s done, and, crucially, what we can do about it. 

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Specifically, the history of race and land ownership in America.

A history that has many horrifying chapters.

Pretty much from chapter 1, when America was discovered from under other people's feet.

In fact, it has so many horrifying chapters that some have nearly been forgotten.

Like this piece of local history that recently made the news.

In Manhattan Beach, California, a house on the Seine can cost up to 20 million dollars.

And Anthony Bruce's family used to own 2 oceanfront lots.

I should be a millionaire standing here talking to you today more than 100 years ago.

His great great grandparents, Willa and Charles Bruce, bought the land for about $1200.

They built a resort called Bruce's Lodge.

The Ku Klux Klan was involved in harassing them.

And when that didn't drive them away, the city government decided to take the property under the guise of eminent domain.

So when the cross-burning didn't drive the Bruce's out of town, the city called in a lawyer to finish the job.

And that tells you a lot about how racism in America works.

Sure, the vigilante racists are spooky, but you've really got to worry when the motherfuckers with advanced degrees show up.

What Manhattan Beach did to the Bruce family was clearly unforgivable, and to its credit, the city seems to be trying to reckon with how to deal with what happened.

Although, it is also placing some pretty hard limits on that reckoning.

The council did authorize spending $350,000 on art to commemorate the family, and this week voted to acknowledge and condemn what happened, but chose not to offer an official apology.

I wouldn't live here if we were a racist community, and my friends and neighbors would not live here as well.

First, Manhattan Beach's population is only 0.5 percent black.

So, even if you are not that community now, you don't look unlike it.

And second, if you took something worth $20 million, $350,000 just doesn't cover it.

Especially when none of that money went toward the family you stole it from.

There is pretty obviously only 2 ways of making this right.

Give the Bruce's 20 million dollars or give them their land back.

And incredibly, the latter might actually happen.

County, which owns the land, recently released a plan for returning it to the Bruce's, which is, to put it mildly, about time.

It's literally been called Bruce's Beach since 2006.

Is the apostrophe S a fucking joke to you people?

So, the story of Bruce's Beach might actually end with something approaching justice.

And I want you to keep the elegance of that solution in mind, as we talk about a far more insidious and widespread form of wealth appropriation, and that is, housing discrimination.

There is a long history of it in America, and we will get to that in a minute.

But before we do, let's just start with its effects.

Currently, only 45 percent of Black householders own their homes, compared with nearly 74 percent of whites.

And since home ownership is a key component of wealth, it is no surprise that the wealth gap between white and black families is so huge, many literally don't comprehend it.

1 recent survey found that most people think that for every hundred dollars in wealth held by a white family, a black family has $90, when the truth is, it's actually closer to $13.

With the median white family having a net worth of around 188,000, and the median black family having just over 24,000.

But the effects of housing discrimination go well beyond wealth, because questions about where your house is and how much it is worth impact so many things about your quality of life.

For instance, because a key way Americans pay for public schools is through property taxes, better homes lead to better schools, better teachers, and more resources, which in turn leads back to better neighborhoods in general, including cleaner streets, cleaner air, and crucially, only the most exclusive and fuckable trees.

That tree, don't just let the audio of this play in the background while you're working.

Click back on the YouTube tab and look at me.

So if it has led to a wealth gap this massive and consequences this wide-ranging, tonight, let's take a look at housing discrimination, the damage it has done, and more importantly, what we can do about it.

Some of you may already know what the last part is going to be and might even currently be shouting at your screens.

But please, don't spoil it for everybody else.

And let's start in the early 20th century, because that is when the real estate industry really began to grow.

And as it did, white people moved quickly to codify the distance between them and black people.

1 major way this happened was through racial covenants.

Essentially, bylaws written into deeds or neighborhood regulations forbidding the sale of a house to a non-white person.

And incredibly, These covenants were so widespread that many are still technically on the books.

A Texas news station recently unearthed 1 in a local suburb and showed it to unsuspecting residents there.

Section 2, page 3 reads, none of the lots shall be conveyed, leased, or occupied by any person other than of the Caucasian race.

It provides an exception for those employed as servants.

I'm a person other than the Caucasian race.

Okay, is usually reserved for a few things.

Finding out your grandma is still sending nudes, that Jeremy Piven launched a podcast called How You Live In J.

Piven, and that your neighborhood technically still has bylaws prohibiting black people from living there.

And while racial covenants were done at the local level, what really turbocharged segregation was when the federal government got involved.

In the 1930s, the New Deal established the Federal Housing Administration and the Homeowners Loan Corporation, or HULC, which is, incidentally, also French for Hulk.

The idea of these 2 agencies was to make it easier for people to buy and retain houses during the Great Depression.

And they were promoted at the time through newsreels like this.

This couple is going through a model house now.

The husband apparently isn't very keen about it all, but you know how wives are.

This cheerful room with its many handy cabinets impresses even this skeptic.

And his wife is entranced by the modern flat-top stove.

For according to this sign, they can buy this house with monthly payments that are less than they now spend for rent.

That is a very affordable house for 2 people that clearly do not get along.

They hate their wives and anything that would make her happy.

Every moment with them is torture, and maybe a new house would help, as neither of them will leave this wretched marriage, because It's the 1930s.

The pitch was that the government would insure your loans, so that banks would accept a significantly smaller down payment than was standard at the time with much lower interest rates and give you decades to pay it off.

The federal government essentially invented the modern home mortgage, and it worked incredibly well.

Millions bought homes who could otherwise never have afforded them, beginning a cycle of stable generational wealth that continues to this day.

Which is why it is so tragic that built directly into that plan was the intentional exclusion of Black people.

For instance, Hulk developed maps that color-coded areas green, yellow, blue, or red based on their credit worthiness.

A neighborhood could earn a red color or be redlined if any African-Americans lived in it at all.

At which point, the area would essentially be ineligible for any mortgages.

Meanwhile, when it came to new developments, the FHA's underwriting manual essentially mandated that communities have racially restrictive covenants as a prerequisite to receive mortgage insurance.

These policies alone had a devastating effect on black communities, significantly expanding and locking in segregation.

And some developers ensured that they would continue to qualify for loans by going to some ridiculous lengths.

Here in Detroit, there was a developer that wanted to build a development for whites, and they wanted to get FHA loans.

And the federal government said, you know what, there's a black community kind of close by.

And so the developer, in an effort to try to fix that, built a six-foot tall wall, a foot deep, to separate the black community from the emerging white community.

And then the federal government gave the loan.

And what makes it somehow worse is that that wall was only 6 feet tall.

It's like the height of a fridge, or a mattress, or Snoop Dogg.

Snoop making direct eye contact with you over your stupid racist wall?

White people basically wrote, black people can't live here on pieces of paper, and the federal government said, if you white people don't have 1 of those pieces of paper, you can't get a loan.

If everything had just stopped there, the damage already would have been immense.

After World War II, the GI Bill gave returning service members access to home loans with as little as no down payment, which is great.

But the vast majority of financial institutions still refuse to approve loans for African Americans, meaning that black service members returned home only to be shut out of home ownership in the rapidly expanding suburbs.

1 of the most famous examples of which was Levittown, a development on Long Island of over 17,000 homes.

And to ensure government support to build them, the developer had the contract state that...

And when black people did try to buy homes there, they were told in no uncertain terms just how unwelcome they were, as this woman remembers.

We went to the office where the gentleman was showing the houses.

So my husband said to him, my wife and I are interested in, you know, purchasing a home here in Levertown.

That is a sweet lady recounting an appalling story in just the most matter-of-fact way.

But I guess for black people in America, you ask your grandma to tell you a wholesome story about something like the first school dance she went to, or how she and Grandpa bought a house, and it's not long before you're suddenly in the middle of an August Wilson play.

And crucially, white people who were able to buy homes in Leathertown could accumulate massive wealth.

In 1948, homes there sold for around $8,000, or about $75,000 in today's money.

And they currently sell for $350,000 or more.

Meaning, families who bought homes back in 1948 gained more than $200,000 in wealth.

So, quick side note, if you are young, white, and looking for a real return on investment, forget about your AMC and GameStop stonks.

What you really want to do is get a time machine, travel back to the 1940s, and buy a house in a segregated suburb.

It's the safest investment you'll ever make.

And Levitown and Detroit were by no means alone.

So much so that the exclusion of Black people from these federal programs was nearly absolute.

For instance, a survey of 13 cities in Mississippi in 1947 found that of the more than 3,200 loans given to returning veterans under the GI Bill, only 2 went to African-Americans.

And nationwide, in just the first quarter century of the Federal Housing Administration.

The government insured over 40 billion dollars in loans.

That is the equivalent of nearly 400 billion today.

But some estimates indicate that 98 percent of them went to white Americans.

If you ate 98 percent of someone's cannoli, you basically ate all their cannoli.

Pointing out the fact that they've still technically got 2 percent somehow makes it worse.

And the implications of all of this can be hard for some to think about.

Earlier this year, CBS's Tony DeCoppo did a story about his grandparent's hometown of Lyndhurst, New Jersey.

And in doing so, broke some difficult news to the town's unofficial historian.

Wait a minute, you're telling me they were only gonna mortgage white people?

For you to say that Lyndhurst is the way it is because it almost implies that Lyndhurst was racist.

Most people would not have known that the federal government had this program in place.

Okay, first, I get that this is uncomfortable, but I will say, if a white person says, that almost implies blank was racist, and another 1 says, no, no, this is my family too, that doesn't mean the matter is closed.

If 2 white people are trying to figure out if something is racist, 9 times out of 10, it probably is.

As for that man's claim, most people would not have known this program was in place.

Just hold on there, because none of this was a secret at the time.

The link between the racial makeup of your neighborhood and the value of your home was so well-established, some speculators took advantage of it to buy homes on the cheap through a practice called blockbusting.

That is where they would go to a white neighborhood and make it seem like black people were moving in.

They would hire a black woman to walk up and down the street with a stroller or call homes and ask to speak to someone with a stereotypically black name.

The idea was that simply by doing this, the speculators could panic white homeowners into selling their homes at a loss.

But I will say, some white homeowners did stand firm like this amazing woman in Baltimore.

Well, I happened to be sitting on the steps with a friend of mine, and the man that had gotten the house from the woman next door, he came up and he said to me, would you like to sell?

And I said, no, I couldn't afford to sell because I can't afford to go anywhere else.

He says, well, pardon me, Angie, these are not my words.

And they get out on the porch in the summer and they drink beer.

Look, I know this story is full of terrible people and unmitigated racism, so we should probably take a moment to celebrate a lady who just wanted to get drunk on her porch with her neighbors, regardless of their color.

I love Rose's don't-give-a-fuck energy, but also Angie's Rose-is-gonna-Rose response.

Because when Rose said, pardon me, Angie, these are not my words, that was for us.

She knows who Rose is and she's made peace with it.

Just because Rose was an ally, doesn't mean she was always an easy person to be around.

And when you put all of this together, it is no wonder that by the late 60s, fair housing had become a core issue for the Civil Rights Movement.

Martin Luther King's efforts to combat housing discrimination in Chicago were met with fierce resistance, and uprisings began to break out across the country.

Unrest that reached a fever pitch in the wake of King's assassination.

LBJ and congressional leaders tried to settle things down with the Civil Rights Act of 1968, with sections 8 and 9 being the Fair Housing Act.

And section 10 titled, civil obedience and anti-riot act, which is a pretty effective way of saying, that's our final offer.

We've gone about as far as we're going with this whole civil rights thing.

The Fair Housing Act made housing discrimination illegal and also required the government to affirmatively further fair housing.

In other words, take an active role in integration.

And to his credit, Nixon's housing secretary, George Romney, Mitt's dad, actually did try to do that.

And developed a program to withhold federal grants from communities that refused to integrate.

But, Nixon then quickly stepped in, calling it off and publicly repudiating the whole plan.

Concerning Governor Romney's plan, to what extent should the federal government use its leverage to promote racial integration in suburban housing.

It is not the policy of this government to use the power of the federal government or federal funds in any other way, in ways not required by the law for forced integration of the suburbs.

I believe that forced integration of the suburbs is not in the national interest.

And it is worth reminding yourself once in a while just how deeply weird Nixon was.

He's been rendered so silly by a lifetime of cartoonish impressions, It is genuinely unsettling to watch him make unyielding eye contact while saying, I believe that forced integration of the suburbs is not in the national interest, like a cold robot powered by racism.

All I'm saying is, it really says something, that the most human version of Nixon is the 1 where he's a cartoon head in a jar.

And what Nixon made very clear there is that the federal government would not step in to integrate neighborhoods, meaning, neighborhoods weren't going to integrate.

Prices in white neighborhoods were now too high and the racial wealth gap was firmly entrenched.

And even though overt discrimination was now illegal, there were and still are many, many ways for neighborhoods to keep themselves white.

Sometimes it's through zoning, like requiring minimum lot sizes or banning multi-family homes.

And sometimes, it comes in the form of realtors steering buyers away from certain neighborhoods on a racial basis.

They are not supposed to do that, but it still happens all the time.

A few years ago, Newsday had testers of multiple races posed as home buyers on Long Island, and the black testers experienced disparate treatment nearly half the time.

In some cases, they were sent to vastly different neighborhoods, but even a realtor who Newsday said gave out similar listings to black and white buyers, thereby staying outside the legal definition of steering.

Accompanied them with some not-so-subtle tips that she only gave to the white tester.

And there's pockets of court jeff too that...

You know, down by the train, there's like an area there.

What I say is always to women, follow the school bus.

You know, that's what I always say, follow the school bus.

See the moms that are hanging out on the corners.

There was 1 fellow who insisted on this house, and the wife was pregnant and had a little 1.

And I said to him, I can't say anything, but I encourage you, I want you to go there at 10 o'clock at night with your wife and buy diapers.

I have to say it without saying it, you know, you have the knowledge of the areas.

I don't want to use the word steer, but I try to use the word...

As long as you don't say the word steer, it's okay.

As long as you don't say 1 of the 5 words on the card, you're completely in the clear.

At every step of the process, Black homebuyers are faced with discrimination.

A few years ago, reporters crunched through 31 million loan applications and found that African-Americans continue to be routinely denied conventional mortgage loans at much higher rates, even controlling the income, loan amount, and neighborhood.

And Even if you own your home, the simple act of having it appraised can still be tainted by discrimination.

This woman had her home appraised twice, but the values seemed low to her, so she did a little experiment.

Both are married to white men, and I was like, okay, I need to borrow 1 of y'all husbands.

When the third appraiser came, Duffy was gone.

Her friend's husband posed as her brother.

The result Duffy's home was appraised for $259,000 more than double that of her previous 2 appraisals.

We all know The only time the addition of a white man should increase value to anything is if that thing is a movie and that white man is Stanley Tucci.

And when you take all of this together, the redlining, the blockbusting, the steering, and not least, the federal government's involvement.

It all becomes clear that the myth of white Americans' post-war prosperity, powered by ingenuity and self-reliance, leaves a lot out.

And the problem is, there are many white people who are unwilling to acknowledge this, or even if they do, are unsure what to do with the information.

Remember Tony DeCoppo's story about Lyndhurst?

The mayor there and the historian had very different reactions to what they were learning.

The 1 thing that I'm struggling with, and this is as somebody whose family came through here, is when I looked at the old maps, just over the river, the areas were redlined by the federal government, meaning they weren't worthy of mortgages, and Lynnhurst wasn't redlined.

Okay, we'll get to the content of what they're saying in a second, but first, I gotta know everything about that mayor and how he came into office.

If I had to guess, a couple of candidates disappeared.

You can't have a runoff if only 1 candidate is on the ballot, can you?

But as nice as it sounds to just move on, that is not dealing with the underlying injury here, because even if you had a magic wand and were able to stop every facet of housing discrimination going forward, you still wouldn't be undoing the damage that has been done.

Home prices have risen much more than wages in the last 50 years, so buying a home today doesn't carry the same economic promise as it did when the FHA started.

In fact, by 1 estimate, if we do do nothing and move on, it would take 200 years for the wealth gap to disappear on its own.

And yet, so often, efforts to address the legacy of housing discrimination have been resolutely colorblind.

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Housing Discrimination: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)