How two towns illustrate racial divide
West Hartford is mostly white, while Bloomfield is largely Black; their stories highlight history of segregation in American suburbs
“We think it’s totally free will. And then we realize it wasn’t all free will. There are other factors at work here.”
— Tracey Wilson, West Hartford’s official historian and author of a book about the town
For more than two years, homeowners in one West Hartford neighborhood rallied fervently against a proposal for multifamily housing they say would change their community.
The fight began in 2018, when 181 residents signed a petition opposing the development, which had been proposed for the corner of New Britain Avenue and Berkshire Road. It continued last fall, with residents again seeking to block a zoning change that would enable the housing to move forward.
Residents, echoing others across Connecticut and across the nation, said multifamily housing would destroy their residential neighborhood, which sits in a census tract that is more than 90% white and largely middle class. They worried the new development would not, as one homeowner put it in 2018, “fit the complexion of the community.”
The residents ultimately did not get their way, with West Hartford’s town council approving the development after a five-hour hearing in December. But their effort, like others in other majority-white towns across the state, raise a question that often goes ignored in these debates: How did these communities come to look the way they do in the first place?
To some residents of Connecticut suburbs, the racial and
socioeconomic composition of their towns can feel obvious and predestined, as though determined by some immutable force: West Hartford is majority white and middle class, while Bloomfield is majority Black with lower levels of income and wealth.
A glance through history, though, shows that isn’t remotely the case.
“We think that it’s just happenstance. We think it’s totally free will,” says Tracey Wilson, West Hartford’s official historian and author of a book about the town. “And then we realize it wasn’t all free will. There are other factors at work here.”
This is the story, recorded by local historians, of two neighboring Hartford suburbs and how they came, throughout the 20th century, to represent the racial segregation persistent in Connecticut and across the nation.
A history of discrimination in West Hartford
During West Hartford’s formative years during the first half of the 20th century, local, federal and real estate industry officials took steps that would ensure the town remained overwhelmingly — almost entirely — white.
West Hartford’s transformation from an agricultural outpost to a modern suburb began in the 1920s, when the popularization of cars allowed some who worked in Hartford to move out from the city. In less than a decade, census records show, the town’s population more than doubled.
But as West Hartford’s population increased, town leaders quickly stepped in to shape the composition of their community, as chronicled by Trinity College professor Jack Dougherty, author of a book-in-progress about segregation in the Hartford region.
In 1924, West Hartford became the first Connecticut town to enact zoning regulations, dividing residential areas by home size to functionally segregate citizens by socioeconomic class — a process whose effects would ripple for the next century. Robert Whitten, a consultant from Cleveland who guided West Hartford’s zoning process, wrote in a zoning plan that the new guidelines would “make it un-economic to build two-family houses.”
“The development of crowded tenement house conditions such as exist in many larger communities will be effectively prevented in West Hartford,” Whitten wrote.
On the surface, the guidelines were race-neutral, but in practice they were anything but that. Black residents were far less likely to be able to afford single-family homes in the area, meaning they were less likely to be able to move to West Hartford at all. The town, like most other Hartford suburbs, remained essentially all white.
The 1930s brought another form of housing discrimination: redlining. In hundreds of cities across the nation, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation assessed the ostensible “security” of various neighborhoods, offering color-coded recommendations on which areas were safe for banks to lend in. The most “desirable” neighborhoods were shaded green, while less-appealing areas were labeled blue, yellow or, worst of all, red.
Manuals from the Federal Housing Administration instructed appraisers to beware in their assessments of “inharmonious racial or nationality groups.”
When HOLC agents visited the Hartford area, they recorded the population of “foreign-born families” and “Negros” in each district they examined. In one 1937 report, available through a University of Richmond database, they described a district encompassing Hartford’s Clay Arsenal neighborhood as “the city’s oldest residential section which has gradually drifted into slum area now mainly occupied by Negros.” That area was color coded red.
When the agents finished canvassing the Hartford area, they rated West Hartford mostly green and blue with no red at all; Hartford mostly blue and yellow with some red; and East Hartford (populated largely by lower-income white people) almost entirely yellow or red. As a result, affordable mortgage loans became readily available in West Hartford, allowing wealth to accumulate among residents there, and scarce in Hartford and East Hartford.
Even as redlining helped cement West Hartford as an upscale, white suburb, some real estate developers chose not to take any chances, layering socioeconomic segregation with outright racist discrimination. Research from Wilson and
others has uncovered five restrictive covenants in West Hartford, all written in the early 1940s, covering about 200 parcels of land. There were the High Ledge Homes on South Main Street, the Bel-Crest development on Ridgewood Road, the Hillside Homes development on Park Road, an unnamed development on Asylum Avenue and the Dryad’s Grove development just off Trout Brook Drive.
The covenants each issued the same restriction, that “no persons of any race other than the white race shall use or occupy any building or any lot,” with the exception of “domestic servants of a different race domiciled with an owner or tenant.”
Restrictive covenants were eventually struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1948, but discrimination didn’t stop. Wilson tells of wealthy homeowners who sold to friends instead of listing their houses, so as to control who moved in.
During World War II, as the federal government built public housing for war workers and their families, locals in West Hartford fiercely objected to allowing Black workers in a development on Oakwood Avenue, describing themselves to a local newspaper as “alarmed” and “horrified” at the idea of African American neighbors, while citing concern that their home values would drop.
When federal officials insisted West Hartford could not exclude Black residents from the development, local officials relented, with an essential caveat: They would allow only Black workers “who were engaged in essential industry in West Hartford.” According to a 1943 article in the Metropolitan News, a weekly newspaper that covered West Hartford at the time, only six workers fit that criteria, none of whom wished to live in the new housing.
The development, therefore, remained exclusively white.
Racial steering in Bloomfield
As West Hartford grew through the 1930s and 1940s, Bloomfield remained largely agricultural until the 1950s, when increased demand for suburban housing caused the town’s population to increase by 137% — the most during that decade of any Connecticut municipality, accord
ing to census records. Through that period, Bloomfield remained about 95% white, with only slightly more Black residents than other Hartford suburbs.
That, however, soon began to change.
As Dougherty describes in a 2012 article in the Journal of Urban History, some real estate agents in the 1960s and 1970s steered Black homebuyers — previously confined to Hartford’s North End — toward Bloomfield, while directing white homebuyers to West Hartford and Avon. As many Black and white residents alike sought to leave Hartford, a combination of industry interests and personal prejudice worked to segregate them within the neighboring suburbs.
For Black buyers who had previously been denied the chance to see any suburban homes, Bloomfield became an opportunity to realize their American Dream. For some real estate agents, Dougherty writes, the town represented something else: a chance to turn white racism and Black desperation into profit.
Those real estate agents embraced a practice known as “block-busting,” in which an agent would sell a home to a Black resident, then use the arrival of Black neighbors to scare white residents into selling their homes at a bargain rate. The agent, Dougherty explains, would then sell those same homes to Black buyers willing to pay top dollar for a rare chance at homeownership.
In a 1983 interview with The Courant, a white homebuyer named John Keever recalled asking to see homes in Bloomfield, only to face “innuendos about the school system” and horror stories of “attacks on white girls in the Bloomfield schools.” After smearing Bloomfield, real estate agents pointed Keever toward West Hartford and Avon.
For Black buyers who had previously been denied the chance to see any suburban homes, Bloomfield became an opportunity to realize their American Dream.
Combined with racist attitudes among many white homeowners, these tactics rapidly altered the face of Bloomfield. The town, which had been 94% white in 1960, shifted to 70% white by 1980, leaving it with the second-highest proportion of nonwhite residents of municipalities in the area, behind only Hartford.
If Bloomfield briefly looked like a model of integration, white flight ensured that appearance was fleeting. Adelle Wright, a white resident of Bloomfield during this time, described watching the town — and particularly its schools — change quickly.
“To show you how fast things happened, in the 1970s my children in public schools were in a majority: 70 percent white, 30 percent minority,” Wright told researchers from Trinity College in 2005. “By the late ’80s, my last to graduate was in a minority: 30% white, 70% black.”
Activists soon noticed what was happening. In 1973, a Hartford-based civil rights group called Education/Instrucción trained volunteers to pose as homebuyers and pretend to seek homes in the Hartford area, while following a common script. Again and again, Black and Latino volunteers were pointed toward homes in Hartford and Bloomfield, while white volunteers were directed toward Avon and West Hartford.
In 1974, Education/Instrucción shared its findings with lawyers at the federal Department of Justice, who ordered an investigation.
Federal attorneys soon filed a lawsuit against seven of the eight largest real estate firms in the Hartford area, alleging violations of the Fair Housing Act of 1968.
In an eventual out-of-court settlement, the real-estate agencies committed to educational programs for agents but no financial penalties. They did not admit wrongdoing.
Julia Ramos Grenier, a co-founder of Education/Instrucción, recalled years later her disappointment at the settlement.
“They were supposed to cease and desist,” Grenier told Trinity researchers. “Well, you know, it just became a little more quiet and underwater about it, that’s all.”
Segregation entrenched
Today, many openly discriminatory housing policies of the 20th century have faded. Restrictive covenants are illegal. Redlined maps no longer govern mortgage loans, even if their effects linger. Housing developments are no longer explicitly segregated by race.
And yet as of the most recent census, West Hartford was 79.6% white and 6.3% Black, while Bloomfield was 35.7% white and 57.5% Black. West Hartford’s per-capita income, meanwhile, was twice that of Bloomfield.
This disparity is not unique to these two neighboring towns. Across the state, Black and Latino residents are mostly concentrated in cities, while many neighboring suburbs remain more than 90% white.
This has had major implications for life in Connecticut.
Segregated housing means segregated schools, with those in Black and Latino areas chronically under-funded. It means disparities in policing, with stops and arrests concentrated in major cities. It has meant disproportionate impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Black and Latino neighborhoods, where the disease has torn through tightly packed groups of vulnerable residents.
Fionnuala Darby-Hudgens, community outreach and education coordinator at the Connecticut Fair Housing Center, attributes disparities statewide to “very clear policy decisions [that] continue to be made.” At the local level, zoning rules keep white, wealthy neighborhoods white and wealthy, just as West Hartford sought to do in the 1920s. At the state level, light funding for rental relief during the COVID-19 pandemic leads to greater housing insecurity, which worsens inequality.
“In Connecticut, 2,500 families were evicted every month [even before the pandemic], and they were overwhelmingly women of color with young children,” Darby-Hudgens said. “We’ve denied [Black people] access to wealth-building opportunities for 100 years, so now they’re forced to rent. And the only place that there’s [affordable] rental properties that exist are in urban areas.”
Indeed, low-income renters and buyers alike often face limited choices. West Hartford currently has 2,091 units of affordable housing, about 7.9% of the town’s total units, compared to 11.1% in Bloomfield and 39.3% in Hartford, according to Housing Data Profiles from The Partnership for Strong Communities. About two-thirds of units in West Hartford are designated as single-family.
Several times in the recent past, West Hartford officials have allowed housing developments to
proceed with no affordable units despite pleas from residents and activists.
In other local suburbs, affordable housing is even more scarce. According to the Connecticut Data Collective, only 4.1% of Avon’s housing units are affordable, as are just 4.7% of units in Simsbury and 5.7% of units in Glastonbury. Each of those towns remains overwhelmingly white.
Even when prospective tenants do find affordable housing in the Hartford suburbs, low-income Black and Latino renters often face discrimination due to criminal records or source of income. Though landlords in Connecticut are not legally allowed to turn away holders of Section 8 vouchers, who nationwide are more likely to be Black or Latino, Darby-Hudgens says many do anyway.
“What we’ve seen in the private rental market is a landlord will say, ‘I don’t accept Section 8,’ and you’ll say, ‘You have to,’ and he’ll say, ‘I’ll find another reason to deny you,’ ” Darby-Hudgens said.
Some housing advocates and state legislators have clamored for statewide zoning reform that would help meaningfully integrate Connecticut’s suburbs, but the idea has yet to build serious momentum at the Capitol.
Shari Cantor, West Hartford’s mayor, says she understands her town’s history of discriminatory housing practices, noting that the house she lives in once held a restrictive covenant. Today, she says, she hopes to create a more inclusive town — but is wary of any housing policy that might risk residents’ property values.
Cantor said she supports expanding affordable housing through incremental changes such as accessory dwelling units and affordable carve-outs in broader development projects.
“I think there needs to be increased housing choice,” Cantor said. “I don’t think we need to necessarily think about building large developments that are affordable. I don’t think that’s the way for us to go. I think for us it has to be, in a very fully developed town, a more incremental approach.”
To Suzette DeBeatham-Brown, Bloomfield’s mayor and a 25-year resident of the suburb, her town isn’t a victim of the discriminatory housing practices that shaped it. In fact, she values Bloomfield’s racial diversity and cherishes the town’s status as a welcoming place for Black families.
As she sees it, it’s the other suburbs, the ones that have spent decades erecting barriers to racial and socioeconomic inclusion, that miss out on the richness of her town.
“When you say that [affordable housing] would change the color of how you live or where you live, what does that really mean?” DeBeatham-Brown said. “I am a Black woman, and I believe whatever community I’m a part of, I make the community better. Let’s not judge people. Let’s give people a chance.”
Instead, most Connecticut suburbs reflect decades of racist zoning, redlining, restrictive covenants, racial exclusion and racial steering, plus more recent drivers of segregation such as source-ofincome discrimination.
“It absolutely matters and is an important part of our history and part of who we are,” Cantor said. “So we need to be cognizant of that as we plan for the next generation, the next 20-30 years and what we want to be.”