“A New Home, a New School, a New and Wholesome Environment for Your Children”: Selling Segregation in Interwar Houston, Texas

Karen Benjamin, Elmhurst University

Early twentieth-century advertisements, planning documents, and government reports promoting suburban residential development in US cities are littered with references to idealized childhood. Residential developers and their government allies pressured affluent, white parents to purchase a home in the suburbs to protect their children from a host of urban harms. To entice families to move out to the relatively sparse edges of the city, they offered monopolies over new schools, parks, and playgrounds planned specifically for affluent residential developments. They also promised to dramatically increase the spatial distance between their targeted buyers and the large number of children who would be barred from the new suburban developments through exclusive deed restrictions, including racial covenants. Increased segregation subjected those children to greater environmental and social hazards while denying them access to new avenues of upward mobility, all in the name of fostering idealized childhood. This presentation will focus specifically on Houston, a city that never passed a single zoning law. It examines how the new childrearing standards then being imposed on affluent, white parents helped create hypersegregation, with or without zoning laws. Additionally, Hugh Potter, a central figure in Houston’s urban development, was the president of the National Association of Real Estate Boards (NAREB) in 1934 when the organization successfully lobbied for the Federal Housing Act. The FHA greatly expanded the reach of NAREB’s child-centered arguments favoring segregated housing, which ultimately led to the inclusion of more white children in suburban developments at the expense of children of color.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 120. Historical Geographies of Childhood and Youth