After the Civil War, newly freed Black families increasingly moved away from the South and into cities all over the U.S. But various forms of housing discrimination and inequality prevented Black Americans from living in the same neighborhoods as their white counterparts. Many, like the speaker in "The Ballad of the Landlord," lived in an uneasy in-between, stuck in segregated neighborhoods but nevertheless accountable to white landlords and developers. Whereas immigrant groups of every background have tended, throughout American history, to congregate in ethnic and cultural enclaves, African Americans have faced a particularly persistent and unaltered form of housing discrimination. As a result, the conditions that followed the end of slavery were unresolved when Langston Hughes wrote this poem nearly a century later. In many ways, they remain unresolved today, though some activists and politicians have worked hard to decrease inequality in housing.
Redlining was perhaps the most infamous form of discrimination against would-be Black homeowners. A practice in which banks refused to lend to people in certain—usually primarily Black—neighborhoods, redlining essentially meant that most Black people were unable to receive loans and take out mortgages. Because homeownership is a major route, not only to stability, but to generational wealth, redlining ignited cycles of poverty and housing instability that continue to this day. Named for lenders' habit of outlining "high risk" neighborhoods in red ink, redlining is now illegal under both the 1968 Fair Housing Act and the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act. Yet in a sense redlining remains, through a practice called "reverse redlining," in which certain neighborhoods are targeted for predatory lending—making Black, Latino, and lower-class families especially vulnerable.
Another form of housing discrimination came about as a result of New Deal public housing policies. The New Deal was a bundle of progressive policies that helped relieve the economic stresses of the Great Depression in the 1930s and early 1940s. Though the New Deal resulted in the construction of vast amounts of public housing, helping a great many families avoid homelessness—and though one-third of the families who called these housing projects home were Black—the buildings themselves were not racially integrated. Indeed, these segregated buildings caused a number of previously integrated downtown areas to become more segregated, as racially diverse apartment buildings were replaced by all-white or all-Black ones. This New Deal construction preceded the publication of "The Ballad of the Landlord" by just a few years, meaning that Hughes wrote and published his poem in an era where financial crisis generally had given way to increasingly segregated cities. However, the years immediately following the poem's publication would see an exacerbation of this problem as the government built more subsidized, and segregated, housing for the wartime labor force.
The Federal Housing Administration (FHA), another New Deal-era government body, also increased neighborhood segregation—not during the depression era, but in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. The agency sought to move white families out of dense urban areas and into the suburbs. When suburban developers applied to the FHA for loans, they were often required to meet certain conditions that upheld segregation. These developers were granted loans only if they assured the FHA that the homes in their new developments would be sold only to white families. Moreover, according to FHA requirements, the deeds to these suburban homes stipulated that their new, white owners could not sell or rent the homes to Black families. As a result, the newly built suburban neighborhoods where midcentury middle- and upper-class Americans made their homes were off-limits to Black families, regardless of their finances.
"The Ballad of the Landlord" was written decades before the major housing rights reforms of the 1960s and 1970s, and in the midst of economic reforms that would in many ways worsen urban segregation and increase the power white landlords and developers held over Black tenants. While preexisting class differences tended to prevent Black Americans in particular from buying homes, redlining worsened this situation by keeping loans out of the hands of Black families, further preventing them from accessing their homes. Meanwhile, while the reforms of the New Deal helped house large and diverse numbers of people, these reforms also resulted in segregated urban housing projects—and, later, all-white suburbs. Meanwhile, as white families brought their wealth to the suburbs, government disinvestment in urban areas worsened the poverty in Black and immigrant neighborhoods, perpetuating years of segregation and inequality.
