The White Noose of Suburbia

How Homeownership Destroyed the New Deal Coalition

The New Deal was the most powerful political coalition in American history. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition is only second to Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party in its transformative significance for our political system, and the only reason why it’s second was that its ascension didn’t trigger a literal civil war. Its power was such that even when Republicans won back slim majorities in the House or Senate they were still induced to pay lip service to the victories won by the business unions backed by the national Democrats. 

In this essay I argue that the central thrust that broke apart the New Deal coalition was homeownership. Without understanding the role homeownership played in dividing the two main New Deal coalition partners — working-class whites and blacks — it’s impossible to fully understand the postwar political realignment which saw working-class whites move out of the Democratic Party and into the Republican Party. While entirely correct that race played the primary role in destroying the New Deal and creating the modern coalition of the Republican Party, this narrative lacks explanatory power if unrooted from material conditions.

Skin-color only means something when understood within a certain set of social relations. In other words, race is not an eternal struggle of us-versus-them. Race is instead the modality through which class politics plays out. Class — one’s position in relation to the means of production — is refracted through and influences the ever-evolving category of race. We therefore cannot talk about racism without understanding the material world in which it operated.

In America, this not only took the form of fierce labor struggles between blacks and whites over the terms of worker power, but of housing. The uneven democratization of housing across the American working-class promoted a deep fissure within the New Deal coalition which ultimately culminated in the defection of the white working and middle-class to the Republican party in the late-sixties and seventies. 

The House the New Deal Built

The New Deal coalition can be broken down to two very similar yet very different constituencies: white ethnics and blacks. Both were propertyless workers, but also occupied different social positions within the American social hierarchy due to skin-color. These racial differences were refracted into spatial and social distinctions. While white ethnics were concentrated in crowded tenement housing in the northern cities, most blacks lived under a racial police state in the rural south.

Despite their shared class positions, both groups fiercely competed over jobs. While efforts were made toward inter-racial class-first alliances like the Knights of Labor or the Populist Party during the late-nineteenth century, for the most part white workers militantly excluded blacks from trade unions, forcing blacks to become strikebreakers, and reinforcing the weakness of the labor movement as a whole. No matter how militant whiter laborers were in their calls for wildcat and sit-down strikes, these labor actions would never reach their full effectiveness without the inclusion of black workers.

However, the Great Depression changed the dynamic. Times were now so desperate that you had a Democratic President in the form of Franklin D. Roosevelt lean on the inclusion of blacks into the Democratic Party coalition. For blacks, though the Democratic Party was still home to their oppressors, the Southern planter elite, they felt the political balance to be shifting ever so slightly to their favor. The mechanization of cotton agriculture in the 1930s and 1940s meant that blacks less tied to the land started moving to the northern cities. During the 1940s, 1.6 million blacks left the South, followed by 1.5 million more during the 1950s. According to Charles Payne, “the new black vote mattered enough that by 1940 the national Democratic platform spoke to the question of equal protection under the law for the first time.”¹ This demographic movement meant that blacks were increasingly becoming a more crucial voter bloc for the Democrats aiming to pass their New Deal program.

While white and black workers were generally hostile to one another, their shared support for the New Deal program brought them together under a big tent coalition. The urgency of the Great Depression made a cross-racial alliance easier to tolerate. However, though the two groups were tenuous allies, black workers still often got the short end of the stick. For instance, while white workers won the right to unionize through the 1935 Wagner Act, the (purposeful) exclusion of domestic and agricultural workers meant the great majority of blacks were effectively denied this same right.²

This happened because Roosevelt needed the votes of the Senate and House Dixiecrats to pass his reforms, and so blacks were the sacrificial lamb that legitimized the American labor movement. The labor movement was tremendously ambivalent towards the economic rights of black-americans, as white ethnics in the construction trades of Detroit forced the latter out of the formal job market, cosigning them to part-time sub-contractor jobs or crime to survive.³

While the unions of the radical Congress of Industrial Relations (CIO) at the national level insisted that locals must be racially integrated, these efforts varied widely from local to local. The result was that everywhere from the steel plants of Pittsburgh, the General Motors manufacturers of Detroit, to the arms factories of Oakland, white ethnics won well-paying, secure jobs on the shop floor while blacks were consigned to the dirtiest and meanest jobs in the production process.

Nevertheless, the New Deal coalition of which the white and black working-classes were vanguard partners yielded tremendous spoils: namely, the democratization of homeownership. The triumph of national power for the next four decades opened up homeownership for millions of white ethnics. Agencies such as the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) configured the terms of homeownership to be so favorable that, according to Kenneth Jackson, it was often cheaper to buy a house in the suburbs than rent in the city.⁴ Working-class white ethnics for the first time were offered a literal new deal and thus subsidized to leave the working-class city for the middle-class suburbs.

It cannot be understated how transformative homeownership was for postwar politics, not just because it ushered in an era of affluence, but because the very experience of owning a home was politically transformative in and of itself. The democratization of white homeownership was nothing less than the elevation of the propertyless to the valhalla of the propertied. No longer would the white ethnic be a working-class outsider on the outskirts of the American political project; he was now an insider possessing a tangible, material stake in the maintenance of private property as proof of his American-ness.

The working-class politics of the tenant could now be thrown to the scrapheap and be exchanged for the new politics of the homeowner. As a homeowner, a working-class white ethnic could now build equity and become little capitalists themselves. While white ethnics would continue to be staunchly pro-union and pro-New Deal, their transformation into homeowners came with new priorities. Owning a little piece of land now meant you could lose that little piece of land. As Robert Self observes in his book on postwar Oakland, though homeowners were diverse in class background, “the structure of the housing markets into which they entered in the postwar decades would begin to give them a common identity, to shape for them a set of concerns and interests that would unite more than divide them.

These issues started with the concrete economics of taxes and home values.”⁵ Though they were still workers in the sense that they still relied on selling their labor-power for survival, they now possessed a little bit of capital in the form of the home; and protecting this little bit of capital would take priority over everything else. Now, these formerly working-class O’Malleys, Kowalskis, and Espositos were compelled to defend their hard-fought little piece of America, no matter the cost.

Cracks in the Foundation

But as whites reaped the rewards of homeownership, blacks were largely denied them. The FHA and the HOLC imported the practices of the real estate industry and redlined blacks into the inner-cities. Any neighborhood with even one black family was deemed to be in decay and thus its residents unfit for FHA loans. And because many of the new Sun Belt factories were relocating to the suburbs, blacks were also effectively locked out of the formal job market. Conditions were made worse by slumlords who exploited captive blacks in the inner-city with nowhere to go. As Beryl Satter notes, blacks had to sign “on contract” and pay exorbitant monthly terms for dilapidated housing, with even one missed payment triggering eviction.

The usurious terms compelled blacks to divide and subdivide their homes and charge rent to other blacks just so they could meet their monthly payments.⁶ All these processes intersected to create the black inner-city ghetto: hyper-exploited, over-policed, and under-funded neighborhoods in which blacks were forced by structural forces to live in poverty and joblessness. 

The “over-development of the [white] suburbs and the under-development of the [black] inner-cities”⁷ would set out the foundation for the Civil Rights movement. Though the momentum of the movement in the fifties began in the South, many of the Civil Rights movement’s first battles would be fought in suburbanizing cities such as Montgomery and Atlanta. Though the two biggest Civil Rights issues in Atlanta, school desegregation and public space desegregation, were ostensibly unrelated to housing, both nevertheless were. Where one lives determines where one’s children attend school. Similarly, where one lives determines what public amenities they may use. Therefore, for suburban whites, the movement of blacks into their neighborhoods meant not just the invasion of blacks into the domestic space, but the educational and municipal space as well.

The Civil Rights movement’s fight for fair housing placed the white working and middle-classes in a defensive position. As blacks marched for school and public space desegregation in southern cities like Atlanta, middle-class whites responded to Supreme Court rulings like Brown by continuing to disinvest from the public spaces of the cities and invest even further in the private enclaves of the suburbs, taking their tax bases with them. But while desegregation was an accelerant, it was not the catalyst of White Flight; as Kenneth Jackson notes,⁸ whites were already moving out of the city in droves to take advantage of the incredibly generous benefits the FHA and the HOLC offered to democratize homeownership among whites. Blacks, both in the south and the north, were denied these opportunities and were thus trapped in the inner-city ghettos, vulnerable to hyper-exploitation by slumlords. 

The house of the New Deal coalition, which was once the united front that delivered national political power to the Democrats, was now divided against itself. To understand why, we must remember that race is the modality through which class politics plays out. Although working-class white ethnics and blacks fought fiercely over who would benefit from the New Deal, both groups at the end of the day supported the New Deal because of their shared positions as propertyless workers. While white ethnics were obviously more integrated into American political and economic life than blacks due to the color of their skin, they were nevertheless without property, and thus fought for state intervention into the economy on their behalf just as blacks did. Both groups could vote for New Deal Democrats on shared premises. 

But mass homeownership among white ethnics left an irreparable fissure within the New Deal coalition. By elevating one group of people (white working-class ethnics) to middle-class homeownership while denying the same elevation to another group (working-class blacks), a fundamental contradiction was established. 

The politics of the working-class white homeowner, whose primary welfare was now located in their home equity rather than solely wage labor, was now fundamentally different from and opposed to those of the working-class black tenant. As Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor observes, the deterioration of the inner-city and the enrichment of the suburb were “dialectically connected.”⁹ As the inner-cities’ tax bases shrunk and social services deteriorated, the flight from the city to the suburbs accelerated; and as the suburbs became wealthier, whites became more militant in protecting their tax revenues from the inner-city.

Cities attempted to save themselves by annexing the suburbs to increase tax revenues. But the suburbs fiercely opposed such measures. “[They] wanted no part of the industrial city’s problems.”¹⁰ Suburbanites did not want to be burdened with taxes to fund programs that neither they nor their children would benefit from. They were also categorically opposed to sharing any public or private spaces with blacks and the problems suburbanite whites’ believed were their fault. The attempts of annexation as well as the ever-present fear of blacks moving in and thus destroying the property values of their homes (a not-completely absurd prospect as real estate associations and federal agencies constantly insisted that this would happen despite little actual evidence) contributed to a white suburban siege mentality.

The specter of foreclosure and thus losing everything led largely white working-class white suburbs in cities like Detroit to form a united front of homeowners’ associations, civic organizations, and citizens’ watches to stop the “black invasion.”¹¹ This white wall of resistance led to Civil Rights activists like Don McCullum to remark “[h]ere in Oakland… we are ringed by a white noose of suburbia.”¹²

The House Collapses

This contradiction was not lost on the Republican Party, and a new generation of ultra-conservative leaders sought to exploit it. Though liberal Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson handily beat conservative Republican Barry Goldwater in Northern California, Proposition 14—a referendum to repeal a ban on racial discrimination in home sales—passed by even higher margins.¹³ White working-class homeowners, though strongly pro-New Deal, were militantly opposed to blacks moving into their neighborhoods and more broadly to the racial liberalism championed by Johnson.

New Southern Republicans like Georgia’s Bo Callaway and California’s Richard Nixon rose up to exploit this breach and poach working-class whites from the Democratic Party. As documented by Kevin Kruse, the new generation of Republicans communicated the old politics of white supremacy in the new language of property rights. With explicit racial animus becoming more frowned upon, new Republicans spoke the rhetoric of white suburbanites increasingly hostile to a federal government bent on “forcing” them to send their white children to schools with blacks and on taxing their homes to fund increasingly larger social programs for the “undeserving” in the inner-cities.¹⁴

By the seventies, the New Deal coalition was dashed across the rocks of stagflation, runaway budget deficits, urban rebellions, and the New Left counterculture. The bloc of working-class white ethnics who were once the staunchest New Dealers were now the most steadfast suburban champions of middle-class property.

Becoming a homeowner slotted neatly within the modern Republican Party’s opposition to state-funded welfare and social insurance. It lends one towards opposition to welfare for the undeserving. As Melinda Cooper writes, the tax revolt of the 1970s was “almost exclusively associated with white suburban homeowners in revolt against income transfers to the poor.”¹⁵

The general chronology is as follows: though homeowners like when their property values increase, they don’t like when that entails higher tax rates. So homeowners led campaigns against the estate tax and local and state property taxes. However, this meant less money for the state to redistribute. Several possible solutions could have been pursued during the economic crisis of the 1970s. The one which ended up being chosen was to means-test welfare programs or cut them altogether.

These steps could be taken because suburbs could have “private tax collection, volunteer fire departments, and unpaid ambulance services. In particular, [middle and upper-class suburbs] benefitted from having a small percentage of population living at the poverty level and so requiring government assistance.”¹⁶ These material realities meant that as the late-twentieth century rolled on, the noose of the white suburbs actually was tightening around the black neck of the inner-cities.

Amid the Ruins

So we see throughout the postwar that housing in particular became a modality through which race developed. But this is because a house is not just a use-value, a domicile for one to sleep and eat in. A house is also a store of value. A house is Americans’ principle store of wealth. The house’s dual-properties of use-value and value can be roughly correlated with a home and a house respectively. A home because it is something personal, a nest of domesticity protecting you from the outside world. And a house, because it is an impersonal commodity that may be bought or sold on the market.

Likewise, the white suburbanite’s attachment to their home may be thought of in these two days: on the one hand, he is attached to his home as someone who’s put a lot of physical and emotional effort into maintaining their home, and who’s taken a great deal of pride in it. And on the other hand, he is attached to his house as a store of value, whose depreciation in value or foreclosure could mean the end of his world. 

We can then see how homeownership could so dramatically transform the politics of the white working-class — because being a homeowner essentially means becoming a little capitalist, a petit bourgeois.

This perhaps seems odd even for many Marxists, since we’re so used to seeing a petit bourgeois as a small business-owner, but makes sense when one remembers that all a member of the petit bourgeoisie entails is being a possessor of a little bit of capital. Of course, homeowners don’t employ anybody, and this is obviously what separates them from being a small business-owner. But I believe that this doesn’t make them not petit bourgeois; rather, it means they inhabit a different social category within that class strata. Underlining this point is important because it helps us to understand how white workers over such a short span of time went from staunch champions of the New Deal Democratic Party to becoming the vanguard soldiers of the modern Republican Party. 

And it’s not as though blacks during the postwar were immune to the politics of homeownership. In 1952, black middle-class residents rallied against a white landlord who wanted to build a 200-unit apartment complex for whites. Black residents protested utilizing strikingly similar rhetoric as white middle-class homeowners, claiming that the complex would promote “overcrowding,” destroy the investments of property owners, and lower property values.¹⁷ In Detroit, the black middle-class residents of Conant Gardens “like their counterparts in white, middle-class neighborhoods” strongly “opposed the construction of federally subsidized public housing… forming an unlikely alliance with conservative white homeowners’ groups in the area.”¹⁸ But for the most part, during the postwar-era working-class blacks remained propertyless relative to whites.

If homeownership were truly democratized across the working-class, then opposition to public housing or new housing construction would not have been racialized. But because one racial group achieving homeownership and another being denied it, both the suburbs and the inner-cities were effectively racialized, and race found another mode through which to live on. It is thus not completely absurd when radicals call the suburbs testaments to white supremacy.

This history is important because we often don’t make a distinction between workers who own property and workers who do not. Furthermore, we don’t talk about how the process of postwar suburbanization was dialectically connected to the deterioration of the inner-city and the reification of the central role race continues to play in the United States.

The democratization of homeownership among one race at the exclusion of another race meant that though both groups were still very much working-class, the experience of property-ownership was enough of a fissure to completely detonate the most powerful working-class coalition in American history. This bears even more relevance as the housing market continues to be white-hot, and as a minority of homeowners benefit from their sky-rocketing property values while a majority of Americans are left out as tenants. One cannot understand the political trajectory of the United States without understanding how the American Dream of owning a home continues to contribute to our National Nightmare. 

1. Payne, Charles. “I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle.” 17-18.

2. Katznelson, Ira. “When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America.” 43.

3. Sugrue, Thomas J. “The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit.” 119.

4. Jackson, Kenneth T. “Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States.” 205.

5. Self, Robert. “American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland.” 98.

6. Satter, Beryl. “Family Properties: How the Struggle Over Race and Real Estate Transformed Chicago and Urban America.” 4.

7. Self. “American Babylon.” 1.

8. “Federal housing policies were also not the sine qua non in the mushrooming of the suburbs. Mortgage insurance obviously made it easier for families to secure their dream houses, but the dominant residential drift in American cities had been toward the periphery for at least a century before the New Deal, and there is no reason to assume that the suburban trend would not have continued in the absence of direct federal assistance.” Crabgrass Frontier, 216-217

9. Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta. “Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership.” 37.

10. Jackson, 277.

11. Sugrue, 215.

12. Self, 211.

13. Self, 168.

14. Kruse, Kevin. “White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism.” 163.

15. Cooper, Melinda. “Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism.” 130.

16. Jackson, 285.

17. Kruse, 75.

18. Segrue, 41.