Wednesday, June 2, 2010

The Finale

The final blog posting has arrived and I must bid farewell to my followers that were interested in San Lorenzo housing discrimination. Through the journey of researching San Lorenzo I have discovered that during the post-WWII construction of the San Lorenzo villages, minorities were excluded through legal covenants. The movement towards the "Ticky Tack" suburb conformity was needed at the end of the war. At the helm of conformity stood David Bohannon in which he organized and successfully built the first mass suburbs of California. However, housing segregation was motivated by racial redlining through home associations, real estate agencies, and the people of the neighborhood. Legal covenants forced other counties to take on the onflux of minority residents. Through forcing them to choose other neighborhoods, San Lorenzo may have slowed down the forward progression of local minorities.

A future conceptualization of the problem with racial discriminating covenants for historians to study is the effects that surrounding counties dealt with when they absorbed the minorities. Did racial tensions across California rise in counties(such as Oakland) that practiced racial discrimination ? I feel that the future in housing discrimination still remains to be a concealed secret and needs to be further researched in order to provide true equal housing opportunity across America.

As you read this last blog entry and bid farewell to this quarter, remember this, legal jargon has corrupted society since America was founded. The suburbs were created for middle - class whites to escape lower class minorities and allowed them to shape their own excluded society during the mid 1940's. Legal covenants have restricted minorities access to the best homes, schools, and leisure activities. Ask yourself this, if housing associations remain to be restrictive, than could all of society truly be forward progressive ?