You only have to look at Detroit to see how the Civil Rights Act failed to produce integration and home ownership for Black people. When the Act opened up the housing market in Detroit, neighborhoods were almost completely segregated by race. Since the law no longer allowed this, Black people started buying homes in white neighborhoods. But that wasn’t the end of the story, it was just the beginning.

Throughout the 1970s and '80s, most white people in Detroit sold their homes and left, in what has since become described as white flight. Today, with the exception of two or three neighborhoods, Detroit approaches being a 100% Black city. The segregation is so stark that you can cross certain well known borders like 8 Mile Road and watch the populations flip from majority Black to majority white.

White flight devastated the Detroit economy. Property values plunged, and the tax base evaporated. Plenty of Black folks in Detroit own their homes today, but they aren’t building much wealth, because property values are so depressed. Unlike people who live in nearby white neighborhoods, they can’t just sell their homes and move, because they wouldn’t see enough revenue from the sale. A home that might sell for $250,000 in a Detroit suburb, for example, might sell for only $25,000 in Detroit proper. If that.

What you see happening instead is Black families sort of working their way up, taking a financial hit to sell their home and move to Southfield or Dearborn, which are racially mixed but with higher property values, and then eventually trying to move again, even further outside the city.

But it’s a long, hard, financially inequitable struggle, all produced by racist housing laws and customs from the early and middle 20th century. The laws have been changed, but the racist effects are still in place and will be for a very long time.