Title
Resolution to Support the Black Lives Matter Movement
Memorandum
The United States was built on the backs of slave and immigrant labor primarily benefitting white households. For 400 years, systemic racist policies across all sectors of society have ingrained socio-economic inequities that have impacted black families the hardest. The Black Lives Matter movement was started by local community activists to raise awareness of systemic discrimination. The Black Lives Matter movement is demanding that the systematic and state-sanctioned violence against Black people in America must end.
The Ann Arbor Housing Commission (AAHC) supports the goals of the Black Lives Matter movement and other social justice movements to end systemic inequity and to support justice and equality for marginalized people, and in particular, black people. As a nonprofit organization and public housing authority, we provide affordable housing to low-income families and individuals. As a community service provider, it is our mission to support our families whose lives are impacted by systemic inequality.
The federal, state and local governments have a long history of systematically adopted housing policies that benefit white people over all other races. Following are a few examples. Segregationists created and pushed governments to adopt single family zoning to separate people by race. Public Housing Authorities built racially segregated housing. The Federal Housing Administration (FHA) subsidized mass production builders to create subdivisions with legal deed restrictions that were exclusively for white families. The FHA then created and insured 30-year mortgages so that white people could buy these homes. The FHA adopted maps with redlines around black neighborhoods and refused to insure mortgages in or around these redlined neighborhoods while also promoting the construction of highways through black neighborhoods to separate them from white neighborhoods. All of these activities...
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