Marlee Baker On Housing Discrimination in Oregon
Reported By: Sierra Reisman
Photo Courtesy: Linkedin
On Nov. 27, Marlee Baker came to George Fox University (GFU) to present a lecture on the history of housing discrimination in Oregon. Baker, a GFU social work alum, currently works for the Fair Housing Counsel of Oregon (FHCO) and engages in state-wide civil rights work. The FHCO works under the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which prohibits housing discrimination on the basis of any protected class. Although the Fair Housing Act may seem like a simple solution, Baker explained that the past and present of housing disparity in Oregon is anything but simple.
Baker began their lecture with a chronological history of race in Oregon. Pre-colonization, Oregon was home to 60+ native tribes, many of whom were nomadic. Because of the nomadic lifestyles of the many native tribes, white settlers viewed the land as unoccupied. When Oregon became a US state in 1848, there was a vision of the land as a white agricultural paradise. The white settlers believed that the presence of any people of color in the land would erode their idyllic vision, and thus both anti-slavery laws and general black exclusion laws were passed. These exclusion laws were not repealed until 1926, less than 100 years ago.
Other non-white groups also faced discrimination in Oregon. Native peoples were increasingly restricted to reservations, and these plots of land grew smaller and smaller. This map visually demonstrates the rapid undercutting of Native land claims through measures like the 1850 Donation Land Claim Act, and the Dawes Act of 1887. Chinese immigrants also faced housing discrimination in Oregon, and in 1959, they were banned from owning real estate; this provision was not repealed until 1943.
With the rise of Jim Crow segregation, Oregon became known as a sundown state and was home to the largest KKK membership per capita in the US in the 1920s. When the Great Depression began and the New Deal subsequently came into effect, Oregon doubled down on housing discrimination. The federal government underwrote $120 billion in loans, significantly expanding home ownership, only 2% of which were for nonwhites. The Federal Underwriting Manual from 1936 argued that neighborhoods must remain racially segregated or property values would plummet.
Once neighborhoods were segregated, redlining began, in which primarily black neighborhoods were deemed unsafe/unstable for lenders. “Urban renewal” projects were also used to create physical barriers between communities, reinforcing the racial ones.
According to Baker, the battle against housing discrimination was one of the most difficult of the civil rights movement, with the Fair Housing Act only passing to riots following Dr King’s assassination. In addition, the act was not even enforced until 1988 because there had been no mechanisms in place to actually hold housing providers accountable.
Baker emphasized that the key to understanding the root of housing discrimination is understanding de jure segregation (legal segregation enforced by the federal government) and de facto segregation (segregation that appears to happen naturally). De facto segregation is insidious because while it is still objectively the result of government policy, the policy itself is nominally non-racial. As Baker explained, “segregation is often both implicit and explicit.”
Oregon today is less than 3% black, far less than the national average, and less than any other West Coast state. Baker’s lecture emphasized that this was by design, and although de jure segregation is no longer on the books, over 100 years of de facto segregationist engineering does not simply disappear. Organizations like the Fair Housing Council, which exist to advocate for diverse populations in housing issues and provide education on the history of housing discrimination, are crucially important for continuing the work the Civil Rights movement began.