Most of Connecticut is a great place to live and raise children. Almost 60 percent of our state ranks high or very high in opportunity as measured by national data on education, employment, crime, and other factors. Only 2 percent of Connecticut ranks very low in opportunity. But fully half of our black and Latino residents live in that very low opportunity 2 percent, and 73 percent live in the fifth of the state that is low to very low in opportunity.

“Out of Balance,” a report just released by the Open Communities Alliance, shows how federal and state housing assistance perpetuates this segregation.

For much of the 20th century, the federal government explicitly encouraged segregation. When the United States began guaranteeing mortgages in the wake of the Great Depression, it refused to guarantee housing in mixed-race areas. This meant that families of color could not get financing on the same terms as whites, radically depressing their ability to buy homes and the value of the homes they owned. Even worse, as suburban multihome developments exploded in the 1940s, the U.S. demanded that developments include racially restrictive covenants to secure financing. These policies shut nonwhite families out of middle-class suburban housing, and deprived the integrated urban areas where they lived of the flood of capital and investment following World War II.