Minorities are concentrated in urban areas or CBD's by a variety of forces. After World War II, many people (mostly African Americans) migrated from the South to the North. The
housing demand was much greater than the
housing supply. The FHA and other organizations, supported by the U.S. government, began offering low interest
loans to white people in the newly developing suburbs. "While many organizations were providing low-cost
financing for
houses in the suburbs, such as the Home Owners Loan Corporation and the Federal Housing Administration and the Veteran's Mortgage Guarantee Program, the FHA refused to guarantee suburban
loans to poor people, nonwhites, Jews and other 'inharmonious' racial and ethnic
groups because the value of
homes in the neighborhood, according to the FHA, would drop in value (Chudacoff 270). Because of these low interest
loans to aid whites in moving to the suburbs and the restrictive covenants that kept blacks and other minorities out of suburban areas, minorities were not able to move out of CBD's. So whites fled to the suburbs (a phenomenon called white flight), but minorities were forced to stay. Many
jobs went to the suburbs as well, which means that urban
jobs became decentralized as well. Black neighborhoods were then further divided by freeways and other projects of urban renewal. The freeways became barriers between whites and other races, as Graham Greene called this "the racing and placing of America" (Greene 39). Jalbert also sums this up with "Suburbanization was a decidedly white experience enforced by blatant racism, unequal access to economic opportunity, and restrictive
housing covenants" (Jalbert).
