Promoting Public Health and Economic Justice: The Single-Family Dwelling

Home ownership has often — always? — been a part of the “American Dream,” whatever the American Dream may be. But now it’s becoming clear that it’s also a vehicle for creating economic equity and for helping people stay healthy.

Since March 2020, it’s become clear that people who live in freestanding houses are not only less likely to test positive for COVID, but demonstrate better overall health by a number of metrics. The structure of a freestanding home reduces virus transmission.

Apartments, condos, townhouses, row houses, and other homes which have shared crawlspaces, attics, and walls create paths for airborne pathogens. If a neighbor’s cooking can be smelled, then particles and vapors are being communicated from one living space to another. A virus can easily be among those things transmitted.

By contrast, a neighbor might cough and sneeze in one house, but if the next house is separated by several feet of grass, trees, and breeze, the chances of a SARS-CoV-2 transmission is nearly nonexistent. Freestanding single-family homes demonstrated their health benefits during the pandemic.

In addition to saving lives, however, home ownership is an important instrument in the effort to achieve an aspect of societal equity. Families who own a house are economically more resilient. Children who grow up in a single-family dwelling do better in school, are less likely to run afoul of the police, and are less likely to be obsese.

Some observers have asked whether home ownership might be a substitute for affluence in general. Could it be that the benefits attributed to home ownership are actually simply the benefits of wealth?

Further analysis, however, reveals that the smallest and most humble single family dwelling yields both the health and economic benefits which the grandest condo cannot give. A very modest house reduces virus transmission and bestows educational and social benefits, while a lavish upscale flat in an urban center does not.

Both for reasons of public health, and for reasons of social equity, zoning boards and local city councils should encourage the construction of single family dwellings more than condos and townhouses. This would especially benefit ethnic and racial demographic groups who are traditionally underrepresented in home ownership.

If local governments encourage “affordable housing,” but that housing isn’t freestanding houses, then those demographic groups will not be able to access the full benefits of home ownership. If society can increase the percentages of people who own a single family dwelling on its own piece of land, then that is a step forward for equity, equality, and justice.

LBJ’s Big Mistake: How Johnson’s Great Society Significantly Slowed Economic Progress for Black Americans

“Stagnant rates of increase in black prosperity” have troubled America for decades, writes Ben Shapiro. In the immediate wake of the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation and the end of the U.S. Civil War in 1865, it seemed that African-Americans were set to enjoy the opportunities of the economy.

In bits and pieces, Black entrepreneurship did indeed produce successes. But this growth could have flourished more, had not the government stood in the way. State and local governments which were not the result of free and fair elections took power in some places in the late 1870s.

For about a decade after the war’s end, the Reconstruction Era offered political and economic freedom to African-Americans, albeit imperfectly. Both in business leadership and in elected public offices, Blacks had high-profile roles.

In the late 1870s, that changed. Blacks lost many of the advancements they’d gained, as the Democratic Party reasserted itself. In some places, elections were neither free nor fair, and the Democrats gained control of cities, counties, and states. They enacted legislation and adopted policies designed to reduce opportunities for Blacks. After a decade of achievement, African-Americans lost ground, and “government involvement” was “to blame,” notes Shapiro.

Black economic fortunes were at a low point for several decades, until the administration of Theodore Roosevelt at the turn of the century, and the administrations of Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge in the 1920s.

President Theodore Roosevelt began a new trend when he invited Booker T. Washington to dine at the White House in October 1901. This was a signal of new openness to African-Americans. Theodore Roosevelt’s forward movement was interrupted by the election of Woodrow Wilson in 1912.

Wilson, who assumed office in March 1913, undid much the access which Roosevelt had created for Blacks. Wilson imposed harsh segregation in government departments which had been desegregated and integrated prior to 1913.

Happily, Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge picked up Theodore Roosevelt’s trend and carried it further. The 1920s were a time when African-Americans again advanced, both in business and in higher education. President Coolidge became the first president to deliver a commencement address at Black college when he spoke at Howard University in 1924.

Again, sadly, civil rights were put on hold. The direction given by Theodore Roosevelt at the beginning of the century was paused by Franklin Roosevelt in the middle of the century. While Franklin Roosevelt gave lip service to civil rights in order to obtain votes from African-American citizens, he took no action on their behalf. Instead, he insisted on segregation in the U.S. military during WW2. Eisenhower defied FDR’s orders and allowed Black and White troops to work together.

In this up-and-down narrative, the next up was Eisenhower’s presidency in the 1950s. Working together with Vice President Richard Nixon and with Martin Luther King, Jr., President Eisenhower drove two landmark pieces of legislation through Congress: the 1957 Civil Rights Act and the 1960 Civil Rights Act. Eisenhower also sent the U.S. military, in the form of the 101st Airborne Division, to Little Rock, Arkansas, where the Democratic Party’s Governor Faubus was determined to deny African-American children the right to attend school. Eisenhower made Faubus into an irrelevance and made sure that the Arkansas schools were desegregated and integrated, giving Black children major opportunities.

After the benefits of the Eisenhower years, African-Americans experienced another downturn during the 1960s. President Johnson inflicted a series of programs on the Blacks. These detrimental and even racist policies were lumped together under the heading of “The Great Society,” as Ben Shapiro notes:

In essence, the Great Society drove impoverished black people into dependency. In 1960, 22 percent of black children were born out of wedlock; today, that number is over 70 percent. The single greatest indicator of intergenerational poverty is single motherhood. As Thomas Sowell writes, “What about ghetto riots, crimes in general and murder in particular? What about low levels of labor force participation and high levels of welfare dependency? None of those things was as bad in the first 100 years after slavery as they became in the wake of the policies and notions of the 1960s.”

Presented as beneficial to African-Americans, these programs were not produced out of a sincere desire to help them or to promote justice. President Lyndon Johnson was an unrepentant racist. Behind the scenes, he routinely referred to Blacks using hateful and inappropriate epithets. He openly spoke to friends about how his programs were designed to deceive Black voters into supporting Johnson’s political party. But in public, he proclaimed himself a friend of the African-Americans.

The Great Society programs of President Lyndon Johnson, touted as a sort of reparations-lite by Johnson allies, actually harmed the black community in significant ways that continue to play out today. According to former Air Force One steward Ronald MacMillan, LBJ pushed the Great Society programs and civil rights bill out of desire to win black votes.

Johnson’s propaganda was designed not only to trick Black voters, but also to mislead the public into believing that his “Great Society” was having a meaningful impact, when in fact it was not, as historian Thomas Sowell writes:

Despite the grand myth that black economic progress began or accelerated with the passage of the Civil Rights laws and “War on Poverty” programs of the 1960s, the cold fact is that the poverty rate among blacks fell from 87 percent in 1940 to 47 percent by 1960. This was before any of those programs began. Over the next 20 years, the poverty rate among blacks fell another 18 percentage points, compared to the 40-point drop in the previous 20 years. This was the continuation of a previous economic trend, at a slower rate of progress, not the economic grand deliverance proclaimed by liberals and self-serving black “leaders.”

The 1964 Civil Rights Act was an example of President Johnson’s duplicity. While he’d opposed the 1957 Civil Rights Act and the 1960 Civil Rights Act, and had attempted to damage both of those laws by attaching amendments to them which could have weakened them, he suddenly presented himself as a supporter of civil rights and promoted the 1964 Civil Rights Act. In reality, however, the 1964 bill was different from the two previous ones: it proposed that the government intervene into the business practices of individuals and companies, effectively limiting civil rights rather than expanding them.

Johnson’s malignant racism hid behind his rhetoric, and a segment of the voting public believed his propaganda. Yet the Black experience during the Johnson administration showed only economic decline.

The next energizing step forward for civil rights, after the dreary oppression imposed by Lyndon Johnson, came during the presidency of Gerald Ford. President Ford had a longstanding friendship with Judge Willis Ward. Ward was a jurist who’d played football with Ford at the University of Michigan. Together, Willis Ward and Gerald Ford exemplified how civil rights could be promoted in practical situations.

The history of civil rights in the United States is not one of continuous and uninterrupted growth. It has been a narrative of ups and downs and ups, from 1863 to the present. It is a narrative with heroes and villains. Like the stock market, despite repeated downturns, the long term trend has been on the upside. Civil rights continue to thrive in the United States.