The housing machinery · the map, the covenant, the project

1937 – 1970

The federal appraisal: In the 1930s the Home Owners' Loan Corporation made a detailed real estate appraisal of every sizable American city, Fort Wayne included; its confidential survey of the city is dated 24 September 1937, and by mid-1937 the agency held 3,968 Fort Wayne mortgages worth $11,642,000. The grading was racial on its face: the lowest grade, "D," denoted an area of "low class population," where Blacks, the foreign born and poor whites were numerous, and the district south of the east-central area — where the city's Black population was gathering — was assessed in the third of four categories, "definitely declining," partly for the age of its housing and partly because its low prices were deemed likely to attract settlement from "undesirable elements" such as Blacks, whose presence would reinforce the downward trend of values. The prophecy fulfilled itself: the appraisals made local banks reluctant to lend in low-rated neighborhoods, and the Federal Housing Administration used them to red-line the parts of the city in which it would not insure mortgages. Fort Wayne's HOLC grades survive in the University of Richmond's Mapping Inequality project, among the seven Indiana cities the program mapped.

The private machinery: Before the war, Black Fort Wayne lived in well-defined but racially mixed inner-city districts — the east-central area between downtown and the railroad yards, and the Westfield development — where low-income whites were the large majority. In 1940, 20.1 percent of Black housing units needed major repair, against 5.9 percent of white dwellings, and the FHA estimated two-fifths of Black families were doubled up for want of room. What converted mixture into confinement after 1945 was machinery, not custom alone: restrictive covenants, deed clauses barring conveyance to Blacks, came into widespread use in Fort Wayne in the 1940s; the Fort Wayne Real Estate Board worked to keep planned suburban developments closed and colluded with community associations to prevent Black dispersion — a Fort Wayne Urban League official judged the board "one of the most conservative [realtor organizations] in the country." The Supreme Court's decisions in Shelley v. Kraemer (1948) and Barrows v. Jackson (1953) undermined the covenants without restoring mobility: realty-board members, claiming no official position, invariably referred Black purchasers to houses in the east-central district. By 1949 only a ten-block area on Hugh Street, adjacent to the district, had been opened to new Black settlement, at prices well above market value. Black home ownership nonetheless climbed — 228 dwellings in 1940, 656 in 1950, 1,477 in 1960, by which time almost half of Black housing units were owner-occupied — into stock the 1960 census found 91 percent built before 1940 and 48 percent deteriorating or dilapidated, against 12 percent of white-occupied units. In 1963 a cross was burned outside the home of a Black doctor who had moved into a white neighborhood — the most notorious incident in a record that, Morgan notes, never produced big-city violence. In the 1960s the line of settlement was at last allowed to extend beyond east-central to the adjoining neighborhood flanked by Calhoun Street on the west, Drexel Avenue on the south and Anthony Boulevard on the east. The contractor Roosevelt Barnes, by the Smiley Collection's account, built the Suburban Heights neighborhood — Black Fort Wayne building its own suburb.

Public housing, segregated by decree: Fort Wayne was one of only nine of eighty-two cities surveyed that did not apply promptly for federal public-housing funds after the Housing Act of 1949. A decade later the city had three public housing projects, two of which — Miami Village and Edsall Homes — were closed to African Americans; open housing was sanctioned only in the inferior Westfield Village project, parts of which had lacked a sewer hookup until 1951. When Miami Village was deeded to the Fort Wayne Housing Authority in July 1953 as a low-income project, its white tenants, backed by the adjacent Indian Village development and the Real Estate Board, banded to keep it white, and under that pressure the housing authority decreed that the color bar would be sustained. In 1959 Black families occupied 60 of Fort Wayne's 275 public housing units, and the United States Commission on Civil Rights concluded of the city's program, in words Morgan quotes, that it "is segregated and discriminates against Negroes." The city's answer was forty further units in the Westfield area, for Black occupancy.

Sources:

1. Iwan W. Morgan, "Latecomers to the Industrial City," IMH 95 (March 1999) — the HOLC appraisal and the "definitely declining" district; the covenants and the Real Estate Board; Hugh Street; the ownership and condition figures; Miami Village, Edsall Homes and Westfield Village; the 1959 occupancy count; the 1963 cross burning; the 1960s extension.
2. Iwan W. Morgan, "Fort Wayne and the Great Depression: The New Deal Years, 1933–1940," Indiana Magazine of History 80 (June 1984) — the HOLC in Fort Wayne: the confidential survey of 24 September 1937 (HOLC Records, RG 195, National Archives), 3,968 mortgages by mid-1937, the "D" grade's definition.
3. Report of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, 1959 — the verdict on Fort Wayne's public housing, as quoted by Morgan.
4. Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center, Marsha Smiley Collection — Roosevelt Barnes and Suburban Heights.