June 12, 2022 Comments (SFChronicle.com)
People in suburbs often object to high-density housing development because it will change the character of their community. Yet we don’t appreciate how we came to live in homogeneous upper-middle-class neighborhoods.
I feel lucky to be able to own a home in the Bay Area because our parents were able to help us with our down payment.
Thus, we benefited from the generational wealth of our families.
We need to realize the reasons that many people of color have not been able to accumulate wealth through home ownership. This is because of public policies that discriminated against non-whites. African Americans were excluded from benefiting from New Deal and GI Bill benefits that created wealth for generations of white people.
Suburban housing developments often included racial covenants that prohibited sale of homes to people of color.
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So, the character of the white upper-middle-class neighborhoods many of us enjoy is the direct result of government-sanctioned discrimination.
We have a moral obligation to accept changes to the character of our neighborhoods through the inclusion of lower-income housing and higher density as the price to be paid for ending America’s shameful history of racist housing segregation policies.
Matt Metzler, Sonoma
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