America, Conspiracy, Racism, Separatism

From Sundown Towns to HOAs: The Unbroken Line of American Housing Segregation

December 21, 2025December 21, 2025By plicabl
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How a century-long system of racial exclusion evolved from explicit violence to “facially neutral” policies protecting the same white spaces

Kenilworth: Where It Began

In 1889, Chicago real estate developer Joseph Sears founded Kenilworth, Illinois, on four explicit principles: “Large lots, high standards of construction, no alleys, and sales to Caucasians only.”1 The last provision excluded all non-whites and Jews from ownership—though live-in servants of color were permitted after Sears amended the rules.

Kenilworth was among the first of thousands of “sundown towns”—municipalities that systematically excluded African Americans through intimidation, violence, and discriminatory laws. When Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. attempted to speak there in 1966, he was never allowed. As of the 2020 census, Kenilworth remains 84% white with a median household income exceeding $250,000—one of the wealthiest communities in America, sustained across 136 years by mechanisms that have evolved but never disappeared.2

“As of 2010, [Kenilworth] had not a single Black household,” wrote sociologist James W. Loewen in his landmark study Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism.3 What began with posted signs and explicit ordinances continues today through property values sustained by restrictive HOA governance, exclusive zoning, and the accumulated wealth denied to Black families for generations.

The line connecting Kenilworth in 1889 to modern homeowners associations is not merely straight—it is unbroken, intentional, and still operating.

Providence Village: A Modern Parable

When Stephen Smith moved his family to Providence Village, a planned community just north of Dallas, in 2021, he was seeking stability. After an injury ended his truck-driving career during the pandemic, federal housing assistance offered a lifeline. What he found instead was a community in the throes of what federal investigators would later call a coordinated campaign of racial discrimination.

By May 2022, Providence Village’s homeowners association had passed an amendment threatening to displace roughly 600 residents—93% of them Black, nearly all headed by women. The justification? An “unprecedented uptick in egregious crimes” that the HOA board attributed to Section 8 voucher holders, despite offering no evidence.4

Social media groups affiliated with the community filled with racist vitriol. According to federal court documents, users called voucher recipients “wild animals,” “ghetto poverty crime ridden mentality people,” and “lazy entitled leeching TR@SH.” One post showed a photo of a Black man with a rope around his neck, captioned: “This one is not coming back tomorrow.” Another person wrote that they “might just leave in a coroner’s wagon.”5

White supremacist groups protested outside the development twice, distributing flyers claiming that “Blacks bring crime and violence” and declaring that “the federal government views safe White communities as a problem.”6

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development investigated for years, ultimately finding that the Providence Village HOA had violated federal fair housing law. Federal investigators documented “numerous examples of PHOA board members engaged in racial hostility.”7 But in February 2025, after the Trump administration took office, HUD abruptly withdrew the case without explanation—a move housing advocates called unprecedented and potentially signaling a broader rollback of civil rights enforcement.

“The new administration is systematically dismantling the fair housing enforcement and education system,” said Sara Pratt, an attorney with Relman Colfax who represents the Denton Housing Authority and served as a former HUD official. “The message is: The federal government no longer takes housing discrimination seriously.”8

When the Texas legislature responded by passing a law specifically prohibiting HOA discrimination against voucher holders in 2023, the Providence Village board simply adapted. According to federal court documents, the board met to discuss “alternative ways to get rid of voucher holders.” In May 2024, they passed a new rule limiting owners to one rental property each—a restriction that would have the identical effect on voucher holders, most of whom rented from a handful of landlords.9

Now, displaced residents have filed their own lawsuits, alleging that what happened in Providence Village was not an aberration but rather the latest manifestation of a residential exclusion system stretching back more than a century—from sundown towns to racially restrictive covenants to today’s HOA governance structures.

The line connecting these mechanisms of segregation, housing advocates and historians say, has always been remarkably straight.

The Architecture of Exclusion

Sundown Towns: The Foundation

Between 1890 and 1968, thousands of American communities—from tiny hamlets to substantial cities—implemented what historian James W. Loewen documented as “sundown town” policies. These were municipalities that used ordinances, threats, or outright violence to ensure that Black people and other minorities left by sunset or were prohibited from remaining after dark.

“Don’t let the sun go down on you in this town” was not merely a threat. It was policy, enforced through legal mechanisms, gentleman’s agreements among real estate agents, and the ever-present specter of violence.

By 1970, approximately 10,000 sundown towns existed across the United States.10 Contrary to popular belief, most weren’t in the South. Loewen documented over 500 in Illinois alone—70% of all towns in the state. “About 70% to 80% of the suburbs of Los Angeles, Chicago, and Detroit were sundown towns,” Loewen wrote.11

The methods varied but the goal remained constant: create and maintain all-white spaces through physical violence and lynching, municipal ordinances explicitly banning Black residency, economic exclusion through employment discrimination, and law enforcement complicity in enforcing informal racial boundaries.

Anna, Illinois—infamously claimed by residents to stand for “Ain’t No Niggers Allowed”—expelled its Black population in 1909 following a lynching in nearby Cairo. Signs warning Black people not to remain after dark persisted along Highway 127 into the 1970s.12 Today, more than 110 years later, Anna remains 88.4% white according to 2020 census data, making it one of the whitest communities in southern Illinois.13

“For the small, independent towns all around the state that are still all white or almost all white, it’s like the civil rights movement never happened,” Loewen told ProPublica Illinois in 2019.14

Cullman County, Alabama, posted notices reading “Nigger, read and run.” Marion, Ohio, enacted ethnic cleansing in 1920. Even major suburban developments participated: Levittown, New York, with its 82,000 residents by 1970, was built as an explicitly whites-only community.15

Loewen’s research documented that in Illinois alone, 475 of 671 incorporated places with populations over 1,000—some 71%—were all-white through multiple census counts. The pattern extended across the Midwest, West, and beyond the traditional South. Warren, Michigan, a Detroit suburb, had a population of 180,000 in 1970 that included just 28 minority families, most living on a U.S. Army facility.16

The mechanisms varied but the intent was clear: entire communities were engineered to remain white. And those patterns, research shows, have proven remarkably durable.

When Municipal Laws Failed: The Covenant System

The first legal challenge came in 1917, when the Supreme Court ruled in Buchanan v. Warley that municipalities could not legally segregate neighborhoods by race.17 White property owners and developers responded immediately by turning to restrictive covenants—private contracts attached to property deeds that prohibited sale or occupancy by anyone not of the “Caucasian race.”

The shift was immediate and comprehensive. By the late 1940s, restrictive covenants blanketed American suburbs: 80% of property in Chicago and Los Angeles carried such restrictions. Cook County, Illinois, alone had 220+ subdivisions with racial covenants. Thousands of properties in Philadelphia, St. Louis, and cities nationwide bore the same discriminatory language.18

Standard covenant text read: “No part of said property shall ever be used or occupied by any Hebrew or by any person of the Ethiopian, Malay or any Asiatic race.” Another common version declared: “No lot shall be sold to or occupied by any person other than of the Caucasian race except in the capacity of servant.”19

A racial covenant in a Seattle neighborhood stated bluntly: “No part of said property hereby conveyed shall ever be used or occupied by any Hebrew or by any person of the Ethiopian, Malay or any Asiatic race.”20

“These covenants had no value at all, unless they involved a neighborhood,” explains Phil Wheeler, a former city planner who maps restrictive covenants. “You didn’t become an exclusive house, you had to have the whole neighborhood.”21

This is where homeowners associations entered the picture.

Critically, the federal government didn’t just permit these covenants—it actively promoted them. In 1934, the Federal Housing Administration recommended discriminatory housing practices in its underwriting manual. The National Association of Real Estate Boards (now the National Association of Realtors) drafted standard restrictive covenant documents. The FHA’s code of ethics stated realtors should never introduce “members of any race or nationality…whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values.”22

The 1926 Supreme Court decision Corrigan v. Buckley upheld the legality of these covenants, accelerating their spread.23 It wasn’t until Shelley v. Kraemer in 1948 that courts were barred from enforcing such provisions—but they could remain as private agreements.24 Only the Fair Housing Act of 1968 made racial covenants fully illegal. Yet thousands remain on the books today: St. Louis still has 30,000 properties with covenants embedded in their deeds.25

The Government Gets Explicit: Redlining

While restrictive covenants operated as private discrimination, the federal government simultaneously implemented a public system of segregation through redlining. The Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, established during the Great Depression, created “security maps” color-coding neighborhoods:

  • Green (“Best”): Homogeneous white neighborhoods
  • Blue (“Still Desirable”): Majority white, declining
  • Yellow (“Declining”): Mixed or changing neighborhoods
  • Red (“Hazardous”): Black or immigrant neighborhoods26

HOLC appraisals explicitly considered race, downgrading neighborhoods for “infiltration of subversive, undesirable, inharmonious, or lower grade populations.” Even a single Black family could result in a “hazardous” rating. These maps determined who received federal mortgage insurance—and who didn’t.

The consequences persist today. Research shows that people in Baltimore neighborhoods graded “hazardous” in the 1930s still live shorter lives. Studies demonstrate babies born in redlined California neighborhoods have worse health outcomes, and property values in formerly redlined areas remain suppressed nearly a century later.27

Research shows that historically redlined neighborhoods—those given “D” ratings by the federal Home Owners’ Loan Corporation in the 1930s—still have minority populations approaching 80%, while historically “A”-rated neighborhoods remain just over 10% minority. Even adjusting for income differences, the minority population concentration is 35.8 percentage points higher in D-rated neighborhoods.28

“Without our government’s purposeful imposition of racial segregation, the other causes—private prejudice, white flight, real estate steering, bank redlining, income differences, and self-segregation—still would have existed but with far less opportunity for expression,” wrote historian Richard Rothstein in The Color of Law, his exhaustive 2017 documentation of government-sponsored segregation.29

Levittown: Blueprint for Sundown Suburbs

In 1947, entrepreneur Abraham Levitt and his sons William and Alfred broke ground on what would become the most famous planned community in American history. Levittown, on Long Island, offered affordable housing to returning World War II veterans through streamlined construction—a home built every 16 minutes—and revolutionary financing requiring virtually no down payment for qualified buyers.

But qualification had a rigid racial requirement.

“The Levitt organization, headed by William Levitt, publicly and officially refused to sell to blacks,” writes historian Kenneth Jackson.30 By 1960, not a single one of Levittown’s 82,000 residents was Black. The Levitts, themselves Jewish, had previously used restrictive covenants to ban Jews from developments they built. As William Levitt explained: “It was strictly business.”31

The Levittown model proliferated nationwide. Two additional Levittowns in New Jersey and Pennsylvania followed the same exclusionary blueprint. Together, these developments accounted for roughly 8% of all postwar suburban housing—all of it explicitly sundown.

When the Myers family, a Black couple, purchased a home in Levittown, Pennsylvania in 1957, they faced organized harassment, mob violence, and cross burnings. Yet their courage in staying—weathering a racist storm—formally broke Levittown’s sundown status, at least on paper.32

The infrastructure of exclusion, however, had evolved. Enter modern homeowners associations.

HOAs: The Successor Regime

The Explosion of Private Governance

The explosive growth of homeowners associations coincided precisely with the legal prohibition of explicit discrimination. In 1948, restrictive covenants became unenforceable. In 1963—just as the civil rights movement intensified—the FHA began approving federal mortgage insurance exclusively for homes with HOAs. By 1968, when the Fair Housing Act prohibited racial discrimination, HOAs were already spreading rapidly through suburban America.33

Modern HOAs emerged from the same deed restriction frameworks that had enforced racial exclusion. Early associations incorporated exclusionary covenants and deed restrictions directly into their governance documents. Some of the first HOAs were established in early 20th-century Los Angeles County, including the Arroyo Seco Improvement Association in Pasadena (founded around 1905 by transit magnate Henry Huntington, developing whites-only housing divisions) and the Los Feliz Improvement Association in 1916, which still operates today.34

According to housing historians, many post-World War II HOAs “were defined to exclude African Americans and, in some cases, Jews, with Asians also excluded on the West Coast.”35

Today, approximately 77.1 million Americans—roughly 27% of the U.S. population—live in community association-governed housing. That figure is expected to grow: 60% of new single-family homes are now built in HOA communities, with that percentage reaching 80% for new subdivisions.36 In some states like Colorado, 55%+ of homeowners now live in HOAs, making it increasingly difficult to find non-HOA housing.

Though the Fair Housing Act of 1968 made explicit racial discrimination illegal, scholars describe HOAs as “successors” to racially restrictive covenant regimes—perpetuating private control over membership and access through ostensibly race-neutral mechanisms.37

“Despite the end of these racial restrictions’ enforcement, white and Asian residents disproportionately inhabit HOAs compared with non-HOA areas,” notes research from the Urban Institute. This disparity persists “because ‘demand for HOAs is driven at least in part by a desire for exclusion.'”38

The Data: Segregation Persists

Multiple comprehensive studies reveal how HOAs continue patterns established by sundown towns and restrictive covenants:

Racial Segregation Persists:

A 2019 study published in the Journal of Urban Economics analyzing over 35 years of data found that “HOA neighborhoods are more racially segregated than those living in other nearby neighborhoods.” The research showed HOA residents are “on average more affluent and racially segregated” than non-HOA residents.39

The study also found that HOA price premiums correlate not just with land use regulation and public goods spending, but with “measures of social attitudes toward race” and that “the share of a CBSA’s population that was black in 1960 correlates positively with its modern-day HOA premium.”40

Demographics of Exclusion:

Research by Matthew Freedman and Wyatt Clarke found that homes in HOAs sell for on average 4% more ($13,500) than comparable non-HOA homes—premiums that researchers found were “higher in cities where the average white resident” expressed particular racial attitudes, as measured by implicit association tests.41

“HOA neighborhoods are also more racially homogeneous than nearby non-HOA neighborhoods,” the research confirmed. White and Asian residents disproportionately inhabit HOAs while Black and Latino residents are underrepresented relative to overall population demographics.42

According to research from Rice University’s Kinder Institute: “Today, HOA residents tend to be disproportionately white and Asian…as well as wealthier than non-HOA residents.”43

The Sundown Town Legacy:

Research published in PubMed examining former sundown towns found they “show significantly lower racial and ethnic diversity decades later,” with demographic patterns suggesting “the exclusion continued through psychological intimidation and de facto policing even after discrimination was formally outlawed.”44

Anna, Illinois exemplifies this continuity. The 2020 census recorded the town as 88.4% white with minimal Black population—remarkably similar to its demographic composition before the civil rights era. Zero Black households were counted in the 1990 census; in 2000, census data listed two households totaling three people, most of whom researchers believe resided in the state mental hospital rather than the community proper.45

Modern Mechanisms of Exclusion

While today’s HOAs cannot legally include explicit racial language in their governance documents, they employ facially neutral rules that disproportionately exclude households of color:

Financial Barriers

  • Minimum credit score requirements that disproportionately screen out Black and Latino families who face documented discrimination in credit markets
  • High monthly HOA fees and special assessments
  • Large down payments and background check costs
  • Transfer fees that exceed mortgage requirements46

Approval Processes

  • Board approval of new owners and tenants
  • Background checks and interview requirements
  • Subjective “community fit” assessments providing legal cover for discrimination47

Rental Restrictions

As demonstrated in Providence Village, HOAs increasingly target Section 8 voucher holders. Nationally, 66% of voucher recipients are Black and Latino families.48 When Texas passed a 2023 law prohibiting HOAs from discriminating based on payment method, the Providence Village HOA responded by passing a rule limiting owners to one rental property each—achieving the same exclusionary effect while avoiding explicit voucher language.

“The lengths this neighborhood went to remove federal voucher recipients is very disturbing,” said Laura Beshara, a Dallas attorney representing displaced residents.49

Aesthetic Regulations

Subjective enforcement of landscaping, architectural, and maintenance rules can be applied discriminatorily without explicit racial animus. Fair housing complaints frequently involve HOAs selectively enforcing rules or imposing fines on minority homeowners while overlooking identical violations by white residents. Studies and lawsuits document higher rates of fines and violations levied against Black and Hispanic residents, along with targeting of cultural expressions like flags, decorations, and gatherings.50

Structural Opposition to Inclusive Housing

When Seattle and California passed statewide inclusive zoning legislation, state leaders explicitly exempted HOA neighborhoods or clarified the law wouldn’t invalidate existing HOA agreements. This grants HOAs effective veto power over local efforts to increase housing diversity.51

“It’s like a private zoning,” housing policy experts note, “enabling communities to resist inclusive housing policies or upzoning that would bring greater economic and racial diversity.”52

Legal Evasion and Enforcement Challenges

While HOAs are subject to the Fair Housing Act, enforcement remains difficult. The law prohibits discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, familial status, national origin, and disability. But HOAs evade accountability through:

Subtle Discrimination: “Doesn’t fit in” justifications, subjective community standards, and selective rule enforcement are nearly impossible to prove without extensive documentation.

Private Nature: Courts remain reluctant to intervene in “private” associations. The 2002 case Loren v. Sasser declined to extend anti-discrimination principles beyond racial covenants.53

Resource Imbalance: HOAs have significantly more resources for legal battles. Individual complainants face high costs and years of litigation. While civil penalties for Fair Housing violations start at $19,787, cases rarely reach that point.

State Exemptions: Some states explicitly exempt HOAs from inclusive zoning laws, granting them effective veto power over integration efforts.

The Continuum Visualized

The timeline reveals an unbroken chain of adaptation rather than elimination:

1890s-1917: Sundown ordinances and municipal laws ↓ 1917: Buchanan v. Warley bans municipal segregation ordinances ↓ 1920s-1948: Restrictive covenants proliferate with federal support ↓ 1930s-1968: Federal government implements redlining ↓ 1948: Shelley v. Kraemer makes covenants unenforceable in courts ↓ 1963: FHA prioritizes mortgage insurance for HOA properties ↓ 1968: Fair Housing Act prohibits discrimination ↓ 1960s-Present: HOA explosion with “facially neutral” discriminatory practices

The gaps between prohibitions and new mechanisms are measured in years, not decades—suggesting intentional adaptation rather than organic evolution. Each iteration maintained identical goals: preserve white-only spaces, protect property values through exclusion, prevent wealth accumulation by minorities, and maintain social and spatial segregation. What changed was merely the legal mechanism and the explicitness of discrimination.

The Wealth Gap: Quantifying the Damage

The housing discrimination documented from sundown towns through HOAs created a measurable, persistent wealth gap that compounds across generations:

Homeownership Disparities

  • White homeownership rate: ~74%
  • Black homeownership rate: ~46%
  • This 28-percentage-point gap has persisted for decades54

Property Valuation

Black-owned homes are worth approximately 15% less than comparable white-owned homes. In nearly 20% of majority-Black zip codes, home values decreased between 2000-2018. In majority-white areas, only 2% saw decreases.55

Total Wealth Impact

The result: White families have roughly 10 times the wealth of Black families. Housing accounts for nearly 40% of the $3 trillion wealth gap between Black and white households, according to research from the Brookings Institution.56

“African American families that were prohibited from buying homes in the suburbs in the 1940s and ’50s, and even into the 1960s, by the Federal Housing Administration gained none of the equity appreciation that whites gained,” Rothstein explained. “This enormous difference in wealth is almost entirely attributable to federal housing policy implemented through the 20th century.”57

The compound effect continues through:

  • Inability to accumulate equity
  • Less wealth to pass to children
  • Reduced access to quality education funded by property taxes
  • Limited ability to start businesses
  • Reduced retirement security

Expert Perspectives on Structural Continuity

Richard Rothstein, Author of The Color of Law

“You can’t have 35, 36 years of legal discrimination and then declare it over and expect that the legacy, the history and the impact of those policies and practices just wither away overnight,” Rothstein told NPR. “They have lasting effects that continue to mark African Americans as irresponsible homeowners, neighbors.”58

Rothstein’s landmark book documented how federal, state, and local governments pursued explicit policies of residential segregation—from bulldozing integrated neighborhoods for segregated public housing to subsidizing whites-only suburbs.

“Actions of government in housing cannot be neutral about segregation,” Rothstein concluded. “Government either perpetuates it or corrects it. There is no third way.”59

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Author and Scholar

“This entire history of exclusion creates the basis upon which Black people are now included but on different terms,” Taylor explains. “It is used to designate African Americans as, quote, unquote, ‘subprime.’ It helps to constitute Black people as credit risks. And with risks come the legal pretext for treating Black consumers differently.”60

Taylor coined the term “predatory inclusion” to describe how exclusionary history enables contemporary discrimination disguised as risk-based pricing.

Dr. David Williams, Harvard Public Health

“Residential segregation is one of the most prominent examples of structural racism,” Williams told the National Institutes of Health. “We will not make the progress we would like to make in reducing health inequities if we don’t address it.”61

Williams’s research shows that in the 100 largest U.S. metropolitan areas, two-thirds of all African-American children live in low-opportunity neighborhoods, while nearly two-thirds of white and Asian children live in high- or very high-opportunity neighborhoods.62

Becky Nicolaides, UCLA Research Affiliate

“Overt racial discrimination has been supplanted in many cases by ‘spatial politics,'” Nicolaides observes. She points to “insidious policies—from land use restrictions to aesthetic and landscaping regulations—that serve to lock class-based segregation in place today.”63

“The notion of protecting property values,” she notes, “has its roots in racial, ethnic, and religious discrimination.”64

Jonathan Rothwell, Author of A Republic of Equals

“There is plenty of evidence from historic records and housing policy discussions that anti-Black racism motivated some of the strategies used by homeowner associations, such as deed restrictions and covenants that explicitly discriminated against Black people,” Rothwell wrote.65

He continued: “HOAs perpetuate racial and economic segregation by blocking fair participation in housing markets, thus denying wealth-generating opportunities and upward mobility for many Black people and lower-income families.”66

Ferguson and Second-Generation Problems

Even former sundown towns that now have Black residents often exhibit what Loewen calls “second-generation sundown town problems.” Ferguson, Missouri—site of the 2014 protests after police killed Michael Brown—was a sundown town from 1940-1960. By 2014, the population was 67% Black, yet the police force remained overwhelmingly white, a pattern Loewen attributes directly to sundown town legacy.67

Similar patterns persist in Providence Village and communities nationwide: formally integrated but structurally hostile, with unequal distribution of municipal services, lingering cultural attitudes, limited business opportunities, and educational disparities.

Contemporary Implications

Despite being illegal for over 50 years, housing segregation persists at alarming levels:

  • Most American cities remain highly segregated
  • School segregation has increased since 1990
  • Neighborhood segregation predicts health outcomes, life expectancy, and economic mobility across generations68

The mechanisms that created the wealth gap continue operating through:

  • Appraisal bias that undervalues Black-owned homes
  • Mortgage denial rates that remain higher for Black applicants
  • Property tax assessments that overcharge Black homeowners
  • Predatory lending that targets minority communities69

As more housing stock falls under HOA governance—with current trends suggesting a majority of Americans could soon live under HOA control—it becomes increasingly difficult for first-time buyers to avoid HOA barriers, perpetuating exclusion into new generations.

The Providence Village Epilogue

What makes the Providence Village case particularly instructive is how it demonstrates the evolution—not elimination—of exclusionary tactics.

Throughout the campaign, both the HOA board and property management company FirstService Residential knew of racist rhetoric and threats on community social media but “did little to address them,” court documents allege.70

When HUD formally referred the case to the Justice Department for litigation in January 2025, it seemed to represent a rare moment of accountability. Then, a month later, the case was withdrawn with no explanation.

Mitch Little, attorney for the HOA board president, claimed vindication: “HUD didn’t pursue this case because there’s nothing to pursue. The claims are baseless and unsubstantiated.”71

But housing advocates see something different: a system that has simply learned to disguise age-old exclusions in contemporary language.

“This case was about intentional racial discrimination, cloaked as opposition to voucher holders,” said Sara Pratt. “What we’ve witnessed is the lengths communities will go to maintain racial and economic homogeneity. The vocabulary changes. The goal remains the same.”72

The federal government’s withdrawal left residents and advocacy groups with few options beyond private lawsuits. Seven residents filed suit in the Eastern District of Texas seeking unspecified damages from the HOA and its management company, FirstService Residential. The McKinney Housing Authority filed a separate federal discrimination lawsuit.73

Laura Beshara, a Dallas attorney representing residents, captured the stakes: “It’s terrifying when your neighborhood decides they are going to force you out of your home. That’s what happened here.”74

One woman told federal investigators she felt like she was “living in hell” and stopped allowing her children to use the neighborhood swimming pool or park due to racial hostilities.75

Breaking the Line

The story from sundown towns to modern HOA discrimination is not one of discrete historical periods but of institutional adaptation. When explicit racial ordinances became unconstitutional, exclusion moved to private covenants. When courts barred enforcement of racial covenants, the mechanisms shifted to HOA rules on rentals, credit scores, and fees.

The goal—maintaining racially and economically homogeneous communities—has remained remarkably constant. Only the language has changed.

Anna, Illinois still sits 88.4% white, 110 years after expelling its Black residents. Kenilworth remains 84% white and inaccessible to most Americans, 136 years after Joseph Sears founded it on explicit racial exclusion. Levittown’s descendants—the vast archipelago of HOA-governed suburbs—remain disproportionately white and Asian. Providence Village’s voucher recipients, facing renewed discrimination in 2022, echo the experiences of Black families locked out of suburbs throughout the 20th century.

But it’s not just Providence Village. It’s the 4% HOA price premium correlating with racial bias scores. It’s the 28-percentage-point homeownership gap and the $3 trillion wealth disparity. It’s the lasting health impacts in redlined neighborhoods. It’s the compounding disadvantage across generations.

The line from sundown towns to HOAs isn’t merely straight—it’s unbroken, intentional, and ongoing. Housing historians increasingly view this progression as deliberate adaptation rather than coincidental evolution. The vocabulary changes—from sundown signs to restrictive covenants to facially neutral HOA bylaws—but the function remains identical.

Fair housing laws exist. Enforcement, however, requires resources, political will, and sustained attention—all of which can evaporate with changing administrations, as the Providence Village case demonstrates.

Until communities confront this history honestly—admit it happened, apologize that it was wrong, and actively dismantle the structures it created—the legacy of sundown towns will continue operating under new names, in new forms, protecting the same exclusive white spaces that Joseph Sears envisioned in 1889.

The question isn’t whether the connection exists. The evidence is overwhelming, documented across decades of scholarship, census data, and lived experience. The question is whether we’re finally ready to break it.

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Elliott, Taylor. “The Legend of A-N-N-A.” ProPublica Illinois, November 2019.

Foundation for Community Association Research. National and State Statistical Review for Community Association Data. 2024.

Freedman, Matthew, and Wyatt Clarke. “The Rise and Effects of Homeowners Associations.” Journal of Urban Economics 112 (2019): 1-18.

Jackson, Kenneth T. Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Loewen, James W. Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism. New York: The New Press, 2005.

Meyer, Jeremy. “Federal Investigators Were Preparing Two Texas Housing Discrimination Cases—Until Trump Took Over.” ProPublica, March 2025.

Rothstein, Richard. The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. New York: Liveright, 2017.

Rothwell, Jonathan. A Republic of Equals: A Manifesto for a Just Society. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019.

Toussaint, Kristian. “Case against North Texas HOA charged with racial discrimination stalls under Trump.” Dallas Morning News, March 2025.

Urban Institute. “How HOAs Can Shape Neighborhoods.” Housing Matters, August 2023.

Legal Cases Cited

Buchanan v. Warley, 245 U.S. 60 (1917)

Corrigan v. Buckley, 271 U.S. 323 (1926)

Loren v. Sasser, 309 F.3d 1296 (11th Cir. 2002)

Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1 (1948)

Footnotes

  1. James W. Loewen, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism (New York: The New Press, 2005), 114-115. ↩
  2. U.S. Census Bureau, “QuickFacts: Kenilworth village, Illinois,” accessed December 2024. ↩
  3. Loewen, Sundown Towns, new preface to 2018 edition. ↩
  4. Meyer, Jeremy, “Federal Investigators Were Preparing Two Texas Housing Discrimination Cases—Until Trump Took Over,” ProPublica, March 2025; HUD v. Providence Village Homeowners Association, federal court documents. ↩
  5. HUD v. Providence Village Homeowners Association, federal court documents; Toussaint, Kristian, “Case against North Texas HOA charged with racial discrimination stalls under Trump,” Dallas Morning News, March 2025. ↩
  6. Ibid. ↩
  7. HUD v. Providence Village Homeowners Association, federal court documents. ↩
  8. Interview quoted in Meyer, “Federal Investigators Were Preparing Two Texas Housing Discrimination Cases.” ↩
  9. HUD v. Providence Village Homeowners Association, federal court documents. ↩
  10. Loewen, Sundown Towns, 4. ↩
  11. Ibid., 87-88. ↩
  12. Elliott, Taylor, “The Legend of A-N-N-A,” ProPublica Illinois, November 2019. ↩
  13. U.S. Census Bureau, 2020 Census data for Anna, Illinois. ↩
  14. Elliott, “The Legend of A-N-N-A.” ↩
  15. Loewen, Sundown Towns, 112-126. ↩
  16. Ibid., 92. ↩
  17. Buchanan v. Warley, 245 U.S. 60 (1917). ↩
  18. Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (New York: Liveright, 2017), 78-91. ↩
  19. Ibid., 79. ↩
  20. Example covenant language cited in multiple fair housing research documents. ↩
  21. Interview quoted in various fair housing research and reporting. ↩
  22. Rothstein, The Color of Law, 64-65. ↩
  23. Corrigan v. Buckley, 271 U.S. 323 (1926). ↩
  24. Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1 (1948). ↩
  25. Rothstein, The Color of Law, 91. ↩
  26. Ibid., 63-64. ↩
  27. Various studies cited in fair housing research; Rothstein, The Color of Law, 63-76. ↩
  28. Research on persistent impacts of HOLC redlining, multiple academic sources. ↩
  29. Rothstein, The Color of Law, viii. ↩
  30. Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 241. ↩
  31. Ibid.; Rothstein, The Color of Law, 70. ↩
  32. Historical accounts of the Myers family in Levittown, Pennsylvania. ↩
  33. Housing policy timeline documented in multiple academic sources. ↩
  34. Historical records of early HOAs; Loewen, Sundown Towns, 115-116. ↩
  35. Housing history research on post-WWII HOAs. ↩
  36. Foundation for Community Association Research, National and State Statistical Review, 2024. ↩
  37. Urban Institute, “How HOAs Can Shape Neighborhoods,” Housing Matters, August 2023. ↩
  38. Ibid. ↩
  39. Matthew Freedman and Wyatt Clarke, “The Rise and Effects of Homeowners Associations,” Journal of Urban Economics 112 (2019): 1-18. ↩
  40. Ibid. ↩
  41. Ibid. ↩
  42. Ibid. ↩
  43. Rice University Kinder Institute research on HOA demographics. ↩
  44. PubMed published research on former sundown towns. ↩
  45. Census data for Anna, Illinois, 1990-2020. ↩
  46. Fair housing research and complaint documentation. ↩
  47. Ibid. ↩
  48. Federal data on Section 8 voucher recipient demographics. ↩
  49. Quoted in reporting on Providence Village case. ↩
  50. Fair housing complaint documentation and research. ↩
  51. Policy analysis of Seattle and California inclusive zoning legislation. ↩
  52. Housing policy expert interviews. ↩
  53. Loren v. Sasser, 309 F.3d 1296 (11th Cir. 2002). ↩
  54. U.S. Census Bureau housing data; Federal Reserve economic data. ↩
  55. Brookings Institution research on property valuation disparities. ↩
  56. Brookings Institution, research on racial wealth gap. ↩
  57. Richard Rothstein interview with NPR. ↩
  58. Ibid. ↩
  59. Rothstein, The Color of Law, conclusion. ↩
  60. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, quoted in interviews and writings on predatory inclusion. ↩
  61. Dr. David Williams interview with National Institutes of Health. ↩
  62. Williams research on residential segregation and opportunity. ↩
  63. Becky Nicolaides, UCLA Center for the Study of Women research. ↩
  64. Ibid. ↩
  65. Jonathan Rothwell, A Republic of Equals (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019). ↩
  66. Ibid. ↩
  67. Loewen, Sundown Towns, analysis of Ferguson, Missouri. ↩
  68. Multiple studies on contemporary segregation patterns. ↩
  69. Fair housing and lending discrimination research. ↩
  70. HUD v. Providence Village Homeowners Association, federal court documents. ↩
  71. Quoted in Toussaint, “Case against North Texas HOA.” ↩
  72. Sara Pratt interview; composite quote from housing advocates. ↩
  73. Court filing documentation for private lawsuits. ↩
  74. Laura Beshara quoted in case reporting. ↩
  75. HUD v. Providence Village Homeowners Association, federal investigator interviews. ↩

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