How Racist Policies Destroyed Public Housing and Created the American Suburbs

World War II reorganized the economy and geography of the United States. By the 1940s, pushed by Jim Crow and pulled by employment in war industries, more than six million Black people relocated to urban centers. US government guest-worker programs also spurred immigration from Central and South America—a fair-weather reversal of the deportation project that had ejected two million Mexicans just a decade before. LA’s population of Black residents nearly doubled. But interlocking real estate exclusions restricted the places Black and Brown people could live to just five percent of the area of the city.