Federal programs created to support homeownership dating to the 19th century “largely, and in some cases, exclusively benefited whites”

See Blacks Still Face a Red Line on Housing. NY Times editorial. Excerpts:

"In the 2017 volume “The Fight for Fair Housing: Causes, Consequences and Future Implications of the 1968 Federal Fair Housing Act,” the housing expert Lisa Rice notes that federal programs created to support homeownership dating to the 19th century “largely, and in some cases, exclusively benefited whites” while making it difficult for black citizens to achieve the dream of owning homes and land.

As enslaved people, she writes, black Americans were initially unable to take advantage of the Homestead Act, under which the government encouraged westward migration by giving away tens of millions of acres — to settler citizens. Former slaves gained full citizenship with the 14th Amendment and became eligible for land grants, but that right became irrelevant with the collapse of Reconstruction, the rise of Jim Crow and the limitations on the rights of black people that the Southern states placed in their constitutions.

The pattern of exclusion continued into the Great Depression, when programs aimed at rescuing homes from foreclosure were carried out in a patently racist fashion. The Homeowners Loan Corporation, established in the 1930s to refinance mortgages, set a discriminatory pattern when it drew lines around black communities — a system known as “redlining” — and decreed them unsafe for federal investment.

That system of exclusion was picked up with disastrous effect by the Federal Housing Administration, created in 1934 to encourage homeownership with federally backed mortgage insurance. A 2017 study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago found “evidence of a long-run decline in homeownership, house values and credit scores” that persists to this day in the formerly redlined neighborhoods."