Barriers and Disparities: Housing in America

Barriers and Disparities Housing in America January–July 2021 Learning Guide

Barriers and Disparities Housing in America January–July 2021 In the book Evicted, Matthew Desmond argues that eviction and homelessness are not only results of poverty, but may also cause it. To contribute to better understanding of the close relationship between access to housing and financial (in)stability, this exhibition focuses on selected moments in the history of the United States from the 1840s to the 1990s.

Representing a broad sweep through American history, the installation helps us visualize how this period of great social change is reflected in housing policies and urban development that have unequally impacted the daily lives of individuals.

These works thus encourage consideration of various factors that contribute to the current housing affordability crisis and pose larger questions about systemic injustices in our society.

Barriers and Disparities: Housing in America is organized by Sheldon Museum of Art as part of Speak Up for Housing Rights, a city-wide initiative aimed at addressing renter eviction and housing affordability in Lincoln, Nebraska. To learn more, visit SpeakUpLNK.org.

Exhibition support is provided by Nebraska Arts Council and Nebraska Cultural Endowment, and Sheldon Art Association.

Barriers and Disparities Housing in America January–July 2021

Ralph Steiner

Artist unknown

American Rural Baroque

J. C. Burbank’s Residence, Summit Ave., St. Paul, Minnesota

Ansel Adams

Solomon D. Butcher

Old House, Redwood City, California

The Jacob Coover Sod House Hunting Family, Goose Creek

Paul Strand The White Fence, Port Kent, New York from Paul Strand: Portfolio Three

Wright Morris Upstairs Bedroom from The Home Place, near Norfolk, Nebraska

John Alvin Anderson Modern Indian Home

Edmund Henry Garrett The Old Manse from the American Etchings portfolio

John Mackie Falconer Louis B. Sloan Self-Portrait

Negro Huts, Near Wilmington, N.C. from the American Etchings portfolio 1880

James VanDerZee

John Anansa Thomas Biggers Untitled from the Our Grandmothers book with text by Maya Angelou

Miss Suzie Porter, Harlem from the James VanDerZee: Eighteen Photographs portfolio

Charles Henry Alston Deserted House

Barriers and Disparities Housing in America January–July 2021

Gordon Parks Willie Causey and Family, Shady Grove, Alabama, 1956

James Alinder At Breakfast, Fresno, California

Vincent D. Smith The Super

Michael A. Smith Toledo

Laurance W. Miller Robinson’s House

Gordon Parks Outside Looking In, Mobile, Alabama, 1956

Ralph Steiner

Cleveland, OH 1899–Hanover, NH 1986 American Rural Baroque 1930 Gelatin silver print Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, Anna R. and Frank M. Hall Charitable Trust, H-2426.1980

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Ansel Adams

San Francisco, CA 1902–Monterey, CA 1984 Old House, Redwood City, California 1934 Gelatin silver print Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, Anna R. and Frank M. Hall Charitable Trust, H-511.1958

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Paul Strand

New York, NY 1890–Orgeval, France 1976

The White Fence, Port Kent, New York from Paul Strand: Portfolio Three 1916 Gelatin silver print, printed 1980 Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, gift of Michael E. Hoffman, U-4055.1.1987

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Wright Morris

Central City, NE 1910–Mill Valley, CA 1998 Upstairs Bedroom from The Home Place, near Norfolk, Nebraska 1947 Gelatin silver print, printed 1978/80 Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, gift of Josephine Morris through the University of Nebraska Foundation, U-5100.2000

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By capturing different parts of houses, the photographers represented here recognize the myriad of emotions evoked by the home, as well as the significance of the structures. Yet, in all of these carefully composed photographs of houses, their occupants are conspicuously absent. Who lived in these houses? What brought them to these residences? What were their lived experiences in and around these homes?

Wright Morris Upstairs Bedroom from The Home Place, near Norfolk, Nebraska

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Louis B. Sloan

Philadelphia, PA 1932–Philadelphia, PA 2008

Self-Portrait 1956 Oil on canvas Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, Olga N. Sheldon Acquisition Trust, U-5539.2009

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A year prior to his graduation from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, Louis Sloan painted himself standing in the backyard of a row home in West Philadelphia, the neighborhood where he lived. A portion of this neighborhood, located west of the Schuylkill River, north of Market Street, and east of 59th Street, saw a 72% increase of Black residents and a 25% decrease of Irish American residents during the first part of the twentieth century.

In the 1930s, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC), a governmentsponsored organization that provided federally insured mortgages to limit

Louis B. Sloan Self-Portrait

foreclosure rates during the Great Depression, classified West Philadelphia as a “Grade D” or hazardous neighborhood, where lending risk was too high. On the HOLC maps, such Black-majority neighborhoods were designated by the color red, giving rise to the term “redlining.” This refusal to insure mortgages in and near redlined neighborhoods furthered disparities in housing access, the effects of which are still felt today.

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John Anansa Thomas Biggers Gastonia, NC 1924–Houston, TX 2001

Untitled from the Our Grandmothers book with text

by Maya Angelou 1994 Lithograph Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, Anna R. and Frank M. Hall Charitable Trust, H-3069.5.1997

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This lithograph is one of five illustrations John Biggers made to accompany Maya Angelou’s “Our Grandmothers,” a poem that is a tribute to the strength and resilience of Black women during enslavement. Biggers’ inclusion of slave quarters, or what Angelou referred to as “the huts of history’s shame,” is a reminder of the inequities that formed part of the nation’s foundation and have become part of its systems, including banking and housing, that disproportionately impact non-white people.

John Anansa Thomas Biggers Untitled from the Our Grandmothers book with text

by Maya Angelou

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Artist unknown J. C. Burbank’s Residence, Summit Ave., St. Paul, Minnesota 1847 Lithograph with hand coloring Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, Anna R. and Frank M. Hall Charitable Trust, H-1671.1.1972

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Located at 432 Summit Avenue in St. Paul, James C. Burbank’s house, designed by Chicago’s Otis E. Wheelock, was a marvel in pre-Civil War luxuries. This multistory structure boasted steam heat, hot and cold running water, and gas lighting, amenities that only few could afford.

Artist unknown J. C. Burbank’s Residence, Summit Ave., St. Paul, Minnesota

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Solomon D. Butcher

Burton, WV 1856–Greeley, CO 1927 The Jacob Coover Sod House 1887 Hunting Family, Goose Creek 1900 Gelatin silver prints Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, gift of the Nebraska State Historical Society, U-2374 and U-2375

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Working in Nebraska between 1886 and 1912, Solomon Butcher photographed the lives of homesteaders in the harsh conditions where they were tasked with living on 160acre parcels of land that they were to improve with buildings, wells, and crops. Immigrants, farmers, women, and formerly enslaved people took advantage of these seemingly equitable opportunities offered by the various Homestead Acts for the chance to own land distributed by the federal government.

Solomon D. Butcher The Jacob Coover Sod House Hunting Family, Goose Creek

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John Alvin Anderson

Halland, Sweden 1869–Atascadero, CA 1948 Modern Indian Home 1898–1910 Gelatin silver print Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, gift of Mid-America Arts Alliance, U-1959.1976

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The US government’s distribution of western land to homesteaders was inextricably tied to federal Native American policy and the forced removal of Indigenous peoples from their ancestral homelands. John Alvin Anderson’s photograph, which shows a log cabin and tipis on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South

John Alvin Anderson

Dakota, depicts the effects of these policies at

Modern Indian Home

the turn of the twentieth century. The Sicangu Oyate, a branch of the Lakota people, were forced to assimilate to life on the Rosebud Reservation by giving up their traditions to live in conditions deemed “modern” by the federal government.

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Edmund Henry Garrett

Albany, NY 1853–Needham, MA 1929 The Old Manse from the American Etchings portfolio 1879 Etching Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, University Collection, U-423.17.1963

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In this etching, Edmund Henry Garrett depicted the Emerson family home, The Old Manse, in Concord, Massachusetts. Beginning with the Reverend William Emerson in 1765, generations of the family lived in the home, which is now preserved as a historic site.

Author Ralph Waldo Emerson, a grandson of William, lived in The Old Manse during

Edmund Henry Garrett

the 1830s, when he wrote his famous essay

The Old Manse from the American Etchings portfolio

“Nature.”

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John Mackie Falconer

Edinburgh, Scotland 1820–New York, NY 1903 Negro Huts, Near Wilmington, N.C. from the American Etchings portfolio 1880 Etching Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, University Collection, U-423.5.1963

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John Mackie Falconer embraced the European tradition of artists, such as Giovanni Battista Piranesi and Hubert Robert, portraying ruins to comment on the passage of time. However, he did so in an American context, which he learned from painters including Thomas Cole and Asher Durand. In this print, Falconer reached back to a simpler

John Mackie Falconer

past and represented a timeless scene of

Negro Huts, Near Wilmington, N.C. from the American Etchings portfolio 1880

outdoor labor from a pre-urban and preindustrial past, depicting hard work as a balm for the period’s many rapid social changes.

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James VanDerZee

Lenox, MA 1886–Washington, DC 1983 Miss Suzie Porter, Harlem from the James VanDerZee: Eighteen Photographs portfolio 1915 Gelatin silver print, published 1974 Sheldon Museum of Art, Nebraska Art Association, purchased with the aid of funds from the National Endowment for the Arts, N-423.5.1976

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Dressed in an intricate lace dress and seated in her home surrounded by the period’s decorations, Suzie Porter, the photographer James VanDerZee’s niece, became an aspirational symbol for the emerging Black middle class in Harlem, a neighborhood in New York City.

Yet, the neighborhood itself, with its vibrant Black culture, was the result of white flight. By 1905, English, German, and Eastern European Jewish immigrants started to leave the neighborhood when Black Americans, who fled the South’s poor economic conditions

James VanDerZee Miss Suzie Porter, Harlem from the James VanDerZee: Eighteen Photographs portfolio

and widespread discrimination as part of the Great Migration, began moving into the borough’s more affordable housing units.

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Charles Henry Alston

Charlotte, NC 1907–New York, NY 1977 Deserted House 1938 Lithograph Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, Helen Y. Thomson Art Gallery Fund, U-5510.2008

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Charles Henry Alston completed this lithograph in 1938, shortly after he returned to New York from a tour of the South with the Farm Security Administration (FSA) where he likely saw countless abandoned homes like the one he depicted here. A federal organization created by President Roosevelt in 1937 to combat rural poverty,

Charles Henry Alston Deserted House

the FSA is best remembered for its influential photography program that employed photographers, such as Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Gordon Parks, to document the lives of farmers, sharecroppers, and agricultural workers.

The Great Depression accelerated the migration of Black Americans from the South to the Northeast and Midwest in search of the few jobs that were available to them.

In 1931, the unemployment rate for white workers was 31.7%. For Black Americans, the unemployment rate was over 50%.

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Gordon Parks

Fort Scott, KS 1912–New York, NY 2006 Willie Causey and Family, Shady Grove, Alabama, 1956 1956 Pigment print, printed 2013 Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, Robert E. Schweser and Fern Beardsley Schweser Acquisition Fund, through the University of Nebraska Foundation, U-6472.2015

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Gordon Parks’ photographs of the Causey family first appeared in the September 24, 1956 issue of Life magazine as part of an article called “The Restraints: Open and Hidden” and again in the December 10, 1956 issue. As his assignment, Parks photographed Allie Lee, Willie, and six of their eleven children, who lived in Shady Grove, Alabama.

Through Allie Lee’s work as a teacher and Willie’s work as a farmer and lumber supplier for the local paper mill, they lived in a house that Robert Wallace, the Life magazine writer,

Gordon Parks

described as “unpainted, disintegrating, with a

Willie Causey and Family, Shady Grove, Alabama, 1956

half-fallen barn and pigpen close behind it.”

Despite their steady work making what the December Life article described as “a good livelihood,” the Causey family’s home and life in Shady Grove were ultimately precarious.

After the publication of the September Life essay, Allie Lee was fired by the town’s Board of Education for her remarks advocating for integration, and Willie was falsely accused of owing money on his truck. Eventually, the Causey family was forced to leave.

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James Alinder

born Glendale, CA 1941 At Breakfast, Fresno, California 1970 Gelatin silver print Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, gift of the artist, U-1886.1976

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The post-World War II housing boom gave rise to the suburbs that were filled with white families, as in this photograph by James Alinder. A combination of several factors, including rising birth rates, the desire for more

James Alinder At Breakfast, Fresno, California

space for supervised play, and a burgeoning car culture that allowed for easy commuting, contributed to rapid development of the suburbs, neighborhoods of single-family homes on large lots located outside city centers.

However, from 1945 to the late 1960s, the criteria the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) used to issue government-insured mortgages and discriminatory practices by banks and real estate agents shaped the development of these neighborhoods.

Americans of different races and religious affiliations were systematically excluded from most suburbs that were designed from their very beginnings as homogenous enclaves.

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Vincent D. Smith

New York, NY 1929–New York, NY 2003

The Super 1972 Oil, sand, and collage on canvas Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, Olga N. Sheldon Acquisition Trust, U-6918.2020

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During the decades when many white Americans left for the suburbs in a process known as white flight, cities changed demographically, becoming largely Black and surrounded by a white suburban perimeter.

This kind of migration was also seen in New York, where Vincent Smith worked, but on a smaller or neighborhood-based level. In Brooklyn, for example, the neighborhood of East Flatbush was majority Black in the 1970s.

Located only three miles away, Bensonhurst was 93% white.

As a result, when Smith rode the aboveground subways in New York’s outer boroughs, he traveled through largely uniform

Vincent D. Smith The Super

neighborhoods with demographic shifts between each, observing and painting the apartments that lined the subway tracks from this unusual and elevated viewpoint.

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Michael A. Smith

Philadelphia, PA 1942–Bucks County, PA 2018 Toledo 1980 Gelatin silver print Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, gift of Charles and Diane Guildner, U-5091.2001

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Taking a high vantage point, Michael A. Smith photographed rows of single-family homes with tidy rectangles of grass behind each structure, highlighting the neighborhood’s uniformity. The style of houses in this block

Michael A. Smith

of Toledo, Ohio, suggests that this area was

Toledo

probably built as part of the post-World War II housing boom, where large tracts of land were given over to rapid residential development in order to house workers, who, in this case, could have worked for the Willys-Overland Company manufacturing Jeeps.

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Laurance W. Miller

born Port Chester, NY 1942 Robinson’s House 1971 Contact prints Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, Anna R. and Frank M. Hall Charitable Trust, H-1583.1972

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To make this contact print, Laurance Miller lined up a dozen Kodak film negatives and exposed them directly on a single sheet. The photograph’s subject, Robinson appears four times in various poses in front of his house. By repeatedly portraying the structure with the proud and possessive figure, Miller highlights the close link between the man and his home, a bond to which some Americans had limited

Laurance W. Miller

access due to federal, state, and local policies.

Robinson’s House

On a federal level, the Fair Housing Act was passed in 1968, three years before Miller’s print was made. Additional legislation, passed in 1974, sought to stop mortgage lending discrimination, and the practice of redlining was finally outlawed in 1977 with the Community Reinvestment Act.

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Gordon Parks

Fort Scott, KS 1912–New York, NY 2006 Outside Looking In, Mobile, Alabama, 1956 1956 Pigment print, printed 2013 Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, Robert E. Schweser and Fern Beardsley Schweser Acquisition Fund, through the University of Nebraska Foundation, U-6471.2015

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In this photograph, which was made as part of the same Life magazine assignment as the image of the Causey family seen in the adjacent gallery, Gordon Parks visualized the juxtaposition of inequities and enduring hope seen in American society.

Peering through the chain-link fence at the distant park on the opposite side of the barrier, the six children serve as both a symbol for societal injustices and a beacon for future progress. While they were still on the “Outside

Gordon Parks Outside Looking In, Mobile, Alabama, 1956

Looking In,” the children were also living in Alabama, an important center for the Civil Rights Movement, which worked to shape their futures.

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Barriers and Disparities Housing in America Additional resources

Homesteading

Desmond, Matthew. Evicted: Poverty and

Center for Great Plains Studies, University of

Eviction in the American City. New York:

Nebraska–Lincoln: https://www.unl.edu/plains/

Crown Publishers, 2016.

homesteading-research

Just Shelter, an organization “founded by

Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC),

Matthew Desmond and Tessa Lowinske

redlining, and American suburbanization

Desmond to raise awareness of the human cost of the lack of affordable housing in America…”

Speak Up for Housing Rights, a city-wide initiative aimed at addressing eviction and housing affordability in Lincoln, Nebraska.

Massey and Denton, pp. 50-ff Rothstein, pp. 63-ff Redlining in Omaha, Nebraska Undesign the Redline, The Union for Contemporary Art, https://www.u-ca.org/

References

redline

General reading about housing access

Gordon Parks in Life Magazine

in America

Wallace, Robert. “The Restraints: Open and

Massey, Douglas S. and Nancy A. Denton.

Hidden.” Life Magazine, September 24, 1956.

American Apartheid: Segregation and the

Available on Google Books, pp. 98–112:

Making of the American Underclass.

https://tinyurl.com/y2nkqomf

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,

1993.

Stolley, Richard B. “A Sequel to Segregation,” Life Magazine, December 10, 1956.

Rothstein, Richard. The Color of Law. New York:

Liveright Publishing Company, 2017.

NPR coverage of the book: https://www.npr.

Available on Google Books, pp. 77–90: https:// tinyurl.com/yykbkgze

org/books/titles/526656129/the-color-of-lawa-forgotten-history-of-how-our-governmentsegregated-america The Burbank House Jacobsen, Christina H.. “The Burbank

Livingston-Griggs House: Historic Treasure

on Summit Avenue.” Minnesota History

(Spring 1970): 23–34.

https://unl.box.com/s/ w9p3y0nw2gaq02zexude7tzqzgq73zz9

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