How segregated housing fueled a deadly wave of coronavirus

Decades of discriminatory policy made NJ area ripe for COVID- 19

EAST ORANGE, N. J. – Angenetta Robinson shut her door, sat at the edge of her queen bed and stuck the thermometer under her tongue. It climbed to 99. Two hours later, it read 101, then 103. She last remembers 105.

She was terrified it would spread to the four other people in the apartment she shared with family and friends, including her 9- year- old grandniece who has asthma.

“I wasn’t even scared of dying, but I just didn’t want anybody in here to catch it,’’ the 57- year- old said.

Steps away in the living room, her housemate, Zayid Muhammad, couldn’t sleep and started having chills.

In the days that followed, Robinson got so weak she could hardly move from her bed. Water tasted like sugar, chicken soup like turpentine. Her hair was brittle. Her skin felt like fish scales.

Her brother called 911.

Segregation fuels the spread

At the height of the first wave of the pandemic, Essex County was among the top 10 in the country for its death rate from the novel coronavirus.

Housing segregation made Essex County ripe for the virus’s spread, dozens of public health experts, community activists, researchers and housing advocates said.

They point to decades of housing policies – some unspoken, some written – that banned white property owners from selling homes to Black buyers. Those practices also excluded Black residents from the midcentury homeownership and wealth- building boom.

Today, Essex County is home to some of the most segregated and impoverished communities in the U. S., where some residents jam together in cramped apartments, multigenerational homes and housing projects.

This reality, experts and local officials say, has contributed to an alarmingly high number of the county’s Black and brown residents catching the virus and dying from COVID- 19.

“These are real people,” said Maria Lopez- Núnez, a community activist in Newark. “And I don’t think that what family you were born into should dictate whether or not you survive a pandemic.”

‘ Like living in the Twilight Zone’

Funeral director John B. Houston can still hear the pleas.

Can you please pick my daddy up? Can you come and pick up mama? Can you come and pick up my uncle?

Notifications kept buzzing on his phone.

Death. Death. Death.

‘‘ It was like living in the Twilight Zone,’’ said Houston, owner of the Cushnie- Houston Funeral Home in East Orange.

Houston and his staff picked up bodies from hospitals and nursing homes – all people of color, mostly from segregated communities nearby. The funeral business, which he said is also segregated, is often the first to see what’s coming. His funeral home handled arrangements for more than 100 people in March and April. It usually buries that many in a year.

Nearly 2,000 people had died from COVID- 19 in Essex County by mid- September, according to state health department data. Of those, about 50% were Black, 18% were Hispanic and 28% were white.

Newark Mayor Ras Baraka said the alarming number of cases in his city terrified him. His own mother testified positive.

“I was scared. My wife was scared because I had to be outside doing all types of stuff,’’ Baraka said. “Early on nobody even knew what was happening. You don’t know who can get it. Who is dying? Why? ... And then we found out, ‘ Oh, Black and brown people are dying.’ That scared the heck out of us even more, especially in this town.’’

Newark, a city of about 280,000, is nearly 50% Black, 36% Hispanic and 26% white, according to census data.

American dream denied

In the late 1800s, affluent white people who wanted an exclusive enclave formed Glen Ridge, a tony suburb west of Newark, said New Jersey City University professor Max Herman. The town had restrictive covenants to keep everyone else out, he said.

Federal and state policies also fueled suburbanization and segregation in Essex County. The Federal Housing Administration subsidized home mortgages to white borrowers while also funding highway and infrastructure projects that bulldozed Black communities.

Local and state officials, real estate agents and homeowner associations adopted their own measures. They redlined communities considered undesirable for lending and investment. They bought up homes in white neighborhoods, moved in Black residents, then warned remaining whites property values would plummet.

Essex County is No. 1 on a segregation index of New Jersey counties, according to the 2020 County Health Rankings, a program from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute.

Frustrations reach boiling point

Civil rights activists have long challenged the state- sanctioned segregation.

In 1947, the New Jersey Afro- American newspaper in Newark submitted testimony to a congressional committee examining postwar housing shortages in Essex County.

The newspaper complained prejudice was a barrier to housing opportunities. “We are moved particularly by the tragedy visited upon our colored citizens and other minority groups by municipal and State policies as well as by private groups,’’ the testimony read.

The next year, the U. S. Supreme Court banned racially restrictive covenants. But that didn’t eliminate housing discrimination or white flight.

In the summer of 1967, Newark police arrested and beat a Black cab driver. During days of unrest and violence, 26 people were killed, millions of dollars in property destroyed and the city forever changed.

The uprising was about more than the beating of John Smith, experts and locals said. It was fueled by decades of systemic inequities that entrenched and empowered white people and corralled many Black residents into shoddy and crowded housing.

“We were confined to houses owned by someone else who had moved to the suburbs,’’ said historian and activist Junius Williams.

The protest sped up the shifting demographics of the city.

In 1950, Newark was 83% white. By 1970, according to the first census after the rebellion, the white population had dropped to 44%. By 2010, it was 28% white.

Muhammad had taken steps to ward off the virus – popping vitamin C, wearing masks, pulling on latex gloves and venturing out only when necessary. “It’s very sneaky,’’ he said.

He got the virus anyway. He suspects he may have gotten it from Robinson.

To prevent others from getting it, Muhammad used a sponge and bleach to feverishly wipe the sinks, the utensils, the countertops. And as much as he could, he stayed in a corner of the living room. Others sought safety in their rooms.

Meanwhile, Robinson’s condition worsened, and an ambulance crew took her to the hospital.

She returned home four days later, walking with a cane.

Muhammad, who has lung issues, didn’t have health insurance and didn’t go to the hospital. He had heard horror stories about people dying there, alone.

“I’m a Black man in America,’’ he thought. “I can’t take that risk.’’

Instead, Muhammad turned to a free city program that helped people who needed to isolate, including those who are homeless and those with no place to quarantine at home. For 14 days, he stayed in a room on the sixth floor of a boutique hotel downtown. Food was delivered outside his door. He was tested when he got there and when he left.

When Muhammad returned to Robinson’s apartment, everyone was COVID- 19- clear. “It could have been worse,’’ he said. “We could have all gotten sick.”

Magnifying racial inequities

Housing is one of the primary social determinants of health, experts said, and homeownership is the primary driver of wealth.

“COVID was never the great equalizer,” said Michellene Davis, executive vice president and chief corporate affairs officer at RWJBarnabas Health, a network of independent health care providers in New Jersey. “It was the great magnifier. And so it has been magnifying inequity, lack of access, health disparity, all of it.”

Doug Massey, a sociology professor Princeton University in New Jersey and a renowned expert on residential segregation, called the disparities “a conglomeration of disadvantages.”

The segregation of Essex County is emblematic of what happened in most major metropolitan regions during the 20th century, he said. But because New Jersey is sandwiched between New York and Philadelphia, the suburbanization there was much more rapid and much more complete.

People who live in these segregated communities are essential workers and use public transportation, putting them at risk for getting the virus, Massey and other experts said. Some others commute to New York City, another hot spot.

Faith leaders on a mission

Alarmed by the outbreak’s spread and frustrated by the state’s slow response, faith leaders, community activists handed out masks, served up hot meals of fried chicken and fried whiting, gave out bags of groceries, set up testing sites and went door to door swabbing noses in public housing complexes.

“Jesus didn’t wait for his disciples to come to him,’’ said David Jefferson, pastor of Metropolitan Baptist Church in Newark. “We couldn’t wait for people to come to us in their cars.”

A struggle to catch up

New Jersey scrambled to set up testing sites and lagged behind dozens of other states providing racial breakdowns of COVID- 19 cases, said Leslie Kantor, chair of the Department of Urban Global Public Health at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

Joenika Ponder, a member of Wilson’s church, brought her family to Saint Matthew in June to get a COVID- 19 test. Her teenage daughter tested negative. Ponder and her boyfriend tested positive for the antibody.

Ponder, 43, woke up one morning in March and couldn’t breathe, couldn’t stop coughing.

Her doctor told her to go to the hospital, where she was given a mask and waited six hours in a tent outside.

Finally, inside the hospital, staffers gave her a COVID- 19 test, hooked her up to a machine to test her breathing, then sent her home to quarantine.

For 18 days, Ponder holed up in her bedroom isolated from her boyfriend and her then 12- year- old daughter, Trinity.

Inside her bedroom, Ponder, texted, then, as she felt better, Facetimed her daughter to check on her schoolwork. She also texted family who lived hundreds of miles away in Georgia. She couldn’t catch her breath long enough to talk.

She didn’t tell anyone she was finishing her will.

Bracing for the next battle

Donna Williams plopped down in the reclining chair in her mother’s downstairs den and yelled to her nephew to call 911. She had been holed up in her upstairs bedroom for days – struggling to breathe, struggling to take a shower, struggling to eat, struggling to just get up.

“I believe if I had waited one more day … you would’ve got obituary information,’’ she said.

Williams is now fighting COVID- 19 on another front. She’s trying to help protect those who could become victims of the pandemic’s latest fallout: evictions.

Williams, a legislative aide on policy, works for New Jersey State Rep. Britnee Timberlake, a co- sponsor of a bill that would provide mortgage forbearance and payment plans for renters impacted by the pandemic. Timberlake and housing advocates worry many people who lost their jobs or were furloughed during the pandemic will be unable to pay all at once.

Those families, they said, may be forced to double and triple up, making them more vulnerable to the spread of the virus.

“It’s going to be a disaster,’’ said Yvette Gibbons, executive director of the Essex County Legal Aid Association. “This is a vicious circle.”

“COVID was never the great equalizer. It was the great magnifier. And so it has been magnifying inequality, lack of access, health disparity,” says health care executive Michellene Davis in N. J.

PHOTOS BY JARRAD HENDERSON/ USA TODAY Zayid Muhammad became severely ill from COVID- 19, which has killed nearly 2,000 others in his community near Newark, N. J. He didn’t go to the hospital after hearing horror stories of people dying there alone.

PHOTOS BY JARRAD HENDERSON/ USA TODAY “I knew I needed to help these families,” says John B. Houston of Cushnie- Houston Funeral home in Orange, N. J., one of three funeral homes he directs. “This is my calling. What I’m supposed to do. It’s not easy.”

Volunteers pack food for families in need at John F. Kennedy Recreation Center in Newark, N. J., where people of color have been hit hard by the pandemic.