The refusal to build affordable housing has become a dog whistle for many suburbs seeking to maintain their predominantly white and wealthy demographics across the country.
The Baltimore suburb of Towson is actively attempting to stymy attempts to build more affordable housing in a historically Black part of the town, with the county council voting against it this week.
The resistance comes despite a 2016 federal lawsuit that found the town of Towson had wrongly been concentrating where affordable housing could be built in the upscale suburb.
That lawsuit forced the town to agree to build 1,000 affordable housing units by 2027.
Now, however, Towson’s county council is pushing back against the next phase of building affordable housing in the town near a community that was founded by formerly enslaved blacks in East Towson.
It voted unanimously this week not to fund a $2 million loan to help Red Maple Place, a 56-unit affordable housing community, and County Councilman Todd Crandell, a Republican, intimated that it was not the council’s responsibility to help meet the terms of the lawsuit.
The county council approves all housing and funding decisions for Baltimore County.
You can watch the entire meeting here.
Towson has been in the headlines lately for continuing to list racist language in the deeds to houses in the area, a legacy from the mid-20th century when redlining and specific language refused to sell homes to people of color, Jews, and the mentally disabled.
Many of those deeds also specifically forbid selling a home to people “of negro extraction.” You can read more of Postindustrial’s reporting on that here.
Over a quarter of homes in Towson’s posh Stoneleigh neighborhood still contain that racist language, despite a push from some locals to remove it entirely.
“There’s no place where you can go where you won’t find them,” Kirsten Delegard, co-founder and project director of Mapping Prejudice at the University of Minnesota Libraries, said at the time.
The refusal to build affordable housing has become a dog whistle for many suburbs looking to stay white and wealthy across the country.
A study by Stanford University in 2024 found that most opposition to building such housing is directly rooted in racism.
“The most significant predictors of opposition to affordable housing, though, were racism – as captured through the well-studied symbolic racism scale of beliefs–and negative emotional connotations associated with the idea of affordable housing,” the study found.
“While the effects of symbolic racism have been documented, the finding that people’s initial emotional response, potentially arising from unconscious racism or other biases, may affect their views on affordable housing is new.”
Towson is also famous for being the hometown of accused murderer Luigi Mangione.
