Starting from the desperate efforts to alleviate some of the effects of the Great Depression, segregation in housing was strongly influenced by the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) and the Federal Housing Administrations (FHA), two government agencies that played a large role in how and where people lived in the mid 1900s. A surprising, but not unexpected, fact about the both of these programs is that neither of them were neutral and benevolent to all of the American people who needed help. Both the HOLC and the FHA unfairly favored white families and, just like in most of the history before this era, were unfairly discriminatory against black families. From the HOLC’s low grading for all the neighborhoods with a black population to the FHA’s approving of white families’ mortgages after a wall is built to segregate white and black area. It is painfully obvious that these two government programs had no interest in helping the black families in need of proper housing. 

Racism ad ethic discrimination was present in the public policy for suburban housing but an unforeseen effect that this had was the “seal of approval” that the national government gave to private institutions that followed the same discriminatory footsteps as the HOLC and the FHA (217). Banks and saving-and-loan institutions saw the government’s actions as an green light to deny mortgages based on “the geographical location of the property,” thus fostering a even worse prejudiced and biased environment for black families (217). Not only did black people have to suffer from social racial discrimination, they had to deal with political racial discrimination, which ultimately affected the place and quality in which they lived in. The government did nothing to help or protect them and even fostered more biased policy, thus creating an endless cycle within the public system.