As Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote last year in The Atlantic, this policy meant that the federal government had endorsed a system of financial apartheid under which “whites looking to achieve the American dream could rely on a legitimate credit system backed by the government. Blacks were herded into the sights of unscrupulous lenders who took them for money and for sport.”

African-Americans who were cut off from legitimate bank mortgages paid a price. But the penalty was especially high in Chicago and Baltimore, where laws allowed the worst kinds of financial predation. Black buyers often resorted to what was known as the contract system, run by sellers who were the subprime sharks of their time. They rigged up ruinously priced installment plans and financial booby traps with the express aim of repossessing the home when the buyer missed even one payment and then selling it again. To meet the outrageous costs, borrowers sometimes subdivided apartments and skimped on repairs, allowing properties to fall into decay.

The system accelerated urban decline and ghettoization. It also prevented a generation of black citizens from gaining the wealth that typically flows from homeownership. Writing of Baltimore just last month, Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, argued that “the distressed condition of African-American working- and lower-middle-class families” in Maryland’s largest city and elsewhere “is almost entirely attributable to federal policy that prohibited black families from accumulating housing equity during the suburban boom that moved white families into single-family homes from the mid-1930s to the mid-1960s — and thus from bequeathing that wealth to their children and grandchildren, as white suburbanites have done.”

Trapped in the Neighborhood

Segregation that traps black families in dangerous, decrepit neighborhoods continues to be an issue in Baltimore. As recently as 2012, for example, the United States District Court in Maryland approved a settlement in the long-running public housing desegregation suit, Thompson v. HUD, which sought to eradicate 100 years of government-sponsored segregation in the Baltimore region. The settlement called for expanding a housing mobility program that helps black residents move to low-poverty neighborhoods that are racially integrated in the city and surrounding region.

Against this backdrop, the data showing diminished life chances for poor people living in Baltimore should not be startling. The tensions associated with segregation and concentrated poverty place many cities at risk of unrest. But the acute nature of segregation in Baltimore — and the tools that were developed to enforce it over such a long period of time — have left an indelible mark and given that city a singular place in the country’s racial history.