The

The Welcome back to Ten Blocks. This is Seth Barron, Associate Editor of City Journal.

This spring marks the 50th anniversary of the landmark Fair Housing Act of 1968, which aimed to eliminate segregation of Americans by place. I'm joined now

by Howard Hussock, Vice President of Research and Publications at the Manhattan Institute.

Howard is a contributing editor to City Journal, and he wrote, the trillion-dollar housing mistake,

the failure of American housing policy. He has

published widely, and his work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times,

and virtually every journal or periodical of note. Howard, welcome to 10 blocks.

Thank you very much, Seth. Good to be with you. So, Howard, take us back to 1968.

What was the state of housing in America, of race relations, and of racial segregation in terms

of housing?

The Fair Housing Act was passed in the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King.

So we were at a high point of the Civil Rights Revolution.

There was a sense that we were of two nations black and white to quote the

Kerner Commission report and that we needed to do something immediately to break down racial segregation

by neighborhood.

And that thing was going to be the Fair Housing Act, which was going to,

and did, outlawed discrimination on the basis of race. So anybody who goes to a bank any day of the

week today will see fair housing equal opportunity lender. That language is the result of the Fair Housing Act of 1968.

So what exactly did the Fair Housing Act, well, what did it set out to do and what did it do in terms of the actual mechanics of integrating American neighborhoods?

The Fair Housing Act, what it did not do was to assign some sort of

quota by race that every neighborhood had to accept and judge neighborhoods on that basis in some

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