“A Moral History of How the U.S. Legislated Belonging by Denying Access to Home” by Siji Deleawe

Twentieth-Century Redlining Map from the National Archives.

In the United States, the narrative of belonging has long been told through access to housing and home. Although the over-regulation of physical residences, presence of racial restrictions, and rejection of land rights have done substantial social and economic damage, these harms also communicate a broader message: “you don’t belong here.” Belonging can be defined as “the subjective feeling of deep connection with social groups, physical places, and individual and collective experiences.” It is a felt recognition that one’s humanity makes them worthy of being where they are. More than a feeling of acceptance, the dignity of belonging is communicated through the provision of the material conditions to establish a home: a residence where individuals can acquire the capabilities for human flourishing in the context of community. Access to housing is one of the most foundational of these conditions. It is a matter of human dignity. Through laws, policies, and social norms, America has been narrating the story of belonging for over 250 years. Unless we begin to interrogate and reframe these questions through the lens of human dignity, the systems of exclusion that deem people unworthy of home will only continue to reproduce injustice.

 Through a narrative exploration of legal decisions that made claims about who belongs in the U.S., we can examine the country’s claims about who is worthy to be at home in this nation. Such an analysis is important because the stories we tell about the subjects of the law influence the laws we make, and the laws we make influence the stories we tell. In his groundbreaking article, “Nomos and Narrative,” Robert Cover uses the term “nomos” to refer to a community’s “normative universe,” composed of shared stories, values, and practices sustained by narratives that provide the context for our laws. Cover explained,

No set of legal institutions or prescriptions exists apart from the narratives that locate it and give it meaning. For every constitution, there is an epic, for each decalogue a scripture. Once understood in the context of the narratives that give it meaning, law becomes not merely a system of rules to be observed but a world in which we live. In this normative world, law and narrative are inseparably related. Every prescription is insistent in its demand to be located in discourse – to be supplied with history and destiny, beginning and end, explanation and purpose … prescription, even when embodied in a legal text, cannot escape its origin and its end in experience, in the narratives that are the trajectories plotted upon material reality by our imaginations.

In other words, laws speak. Like the Biblical image of the Hebrew God speaking the world into existence, when laws are spoken into the dark and formless waters of society, they establish order and create meaning. Therefore, we cannot hope to reimagine housing justice systems without interrogating the old narratives of belonging ingrained in our nation’s jurisprudence. More than simply creating new policies to address the housing affordability crisis, America must create new narratives that reconnect physical houses with the dignity of the people who live in them and the flourishing of the communities that surround them.

The Development of Housing Ethics through U.S. Jurisprudence

Over the past quarter of a millennium, American legal institutions have profoundly shaped the connection between housing and morality by codifying social values into property laws. The legal frameworks around ownership, possession, and tenancy transformed the lived environment by constructing a housing system based on beliefs about what is in society’s best interests, at times blurring the line between legal regulation and moral policing. Whether consciously or subconsciously, the architects of our housing system, including government officials, developers, financiers, and local residents, have responded to the ancient moral question of “who is one of us?” In the U.S., this question has evolved into “who do I want to live by me?” 

The answer to this question inevitably impacts access to housing. Our morality shapes the structure of our communities as we legislate belonging through zoning restrictions, segregationist policies, and financial limitations that create an inequitable or even inaccessible housing market. Here, the concept of “home” does not refer only to a feeling. It points to a rights-based legal, social, and physiological space essential for human flourishing. However, in America, those rights have historically been denied, disempowering marginalized groups. Rather than building a society that cares for the most vulnerable, many of our nation’s housing architects have historically constructed a narrative of exclusion that uses housing as a tool to maintain social hierarchies based on race, class, and status.

When housing laws and policies are built on such a faulty moral foundation, they reinforce housing ethics that separate homes from humanity. This immoral construction has led to the affordable housing crisis we see in America today. Only by reexamining foundational moral values can we begin to rebuild a housing system that prioritizes people and advances affordability. By examining three Supreme Court cases that exemplify America’s narratives of belonging, we can acknowledge our nation’s moral failings and begin telling new stories of housing and home.

Native Americans & Reservations 

Even before the United States was an independent nation, it adopted a narrative of dispossession in which “uncivilized” characteristics made people unworthy of establishing a home within its territorial boundaries. This narrative can be traced to the designation of non-Christian Europeans as sub-human “savages,” which the Roman Catholic Church used to sanction the occupation, exploitation, and dispossession of native people in the “new world.” The principle behind this practice came to be known as the Doctrine of Discovery. Rooted in religious notions of divine right to conquer lands, the principle is at times referred to as the Doctrine of Christian Discovery and was adopted in the 1823 case Johnson v. M’Intosh.

In this case, Chief Justice Marshall, backed by a unanimous Court, entrenched the Doctrine of Discovery into American property jurisprudence so thoroughly that it remains good law today. In Johnson v. M’Intosh, two parties were in a dispute over whose claim to land was legitimate. Johnson, the plaintiff, claimed superior title to the land because it had been conveyed to him by the Native American Nation that owned it. The defendant, M’Intosh, claimed that he had a superior title because the same land was directly conveyed to him by the United States government.  The Supreme Court held that the federal government could not recognize the land conveyed by the Native Americans because Great Britain’s “discovery” of the land that would become the United States gave the U.S. “the exclusive right to settle, possess, and govern the new land.”

The Court’s legal reasoning was rooted in an ideology of native inferiority as seen by Justice Marshall’s statement that,

Although we do not mean to engage in the defense of those principles which Europeans have applied to Indian title, they may, we think, find some excuse, if not justification, in the character and habits of the people whose rights have been wrested from them. . . . [T]he tribes of Indians inhabiting this country were fierce savages, whose occupation was war, and whose subsistence was drawn chiefly from the forest. To leave them in possession of their country was to leave the country a wilderness; to govern them as a distinct people was impossible, because they were as brave and as high-spirited as they were fierce, and were ready to repel by arms every attempt on their independence.

The justification for what the court admitted was a deprivation of rights was not the Native Americans’ status as conquered people, but the claim that their identity and way of life were so incompatible with the kind of society that the burgeoning nation hoped to establish that it was impossible for them to ever fully belong in the United States. In other words, they could not be assimilated, so they had to be subjugated and stripped of legal rights to the land they had been living on for centuries.

By using “native inferiority” as the ground for their legal analysis, the court in M’Intosh not only made a judgment about who could own land, but also about who was deserving of a home.  Although the case was brought as a property dispute, the court was really legislating belonging by drawing the lines of demarcation around what it means to be “American” and therefore worthy of establishing a home in America. On the basis of the M’Intosh decision, the US government invalidated prior land ownership agreements and seized land from Native tribes, enforcing the limits of belonging. As the nation continued its westward expansion, the narrative of native people as undeserving of home took on a voice of its own that silenced opposition to the worsening restrictions on native land and ultimately legalized the immoral atrocities committed against Native peoples.

Through unethical legislation like the 1830 Indian Removal Act, which systematically severed Native nations from their ancestral lands by forcefully relocating them to the Southeastern United States, Natives were stripped of access to their physical, spiritual, and cultural home. The Indian Removal Act also legitimized morally unconscionable efforts to culturally assimilate Native school children in schools where young people were not only physically displaced from their homeland but also socially, spiritually, and psychologically uprooted from the identity of home that they carried in their hearts as a sense of belonging to something greater than themselves.

The legislation that justified such denial of humanity was built on the legal precedent of Johnson v. M’Intosh and continued to shape the national narrative of native inferiority centuries later. By removing Native Americans from their homes, America labeled them as unworthy of belonging in this nation. By giving their previous homeland to white settlers, America established Whiteness as a prerequisite for enforceable property rights that legally legitimized that belonging. Because the right to possess and occupy their homeland would have affirmed the human dignity of Native Americans, denial of that right in M’Intosh perpetuated the narrative that belonging as a prerequisite for access to home can be governed by the State. 

Slavery & Black Communities

As the U.S.’s 19th-century expansion continued, the nation used the same moral framework of dehumanization that enshrined the notion of native inferiority into law to justify the ownership of black people who were taken from their African homelands and brought to work lands bloodied by Native removal. The institution of slavery robbed black people of access to the most intimate concept of home as a zone of safety and privacy within one’s own body. Corrupted by racism, the moral foundation of the nation’s legal system created a social narrative about black inferiority that wrote the denial of their belonging into law. An example of this is found in one of the most infamous Supreme Court cases in US history: Dred Scott v. Sandford. 

In 1857, a formerly enslaved man, Dred Scott, sued for his freedom, claiming that because he had been taken to the free state of Illinois and then to a free part of the Wisconsin Territory, he could not legally be re-enslaved in Missouri. In a highly criticized opinion, Chief Justice Taney ruled that the court lacked jurisdiction to hear the case because neither Scott nor any other black American could be a citizen of the United States for purposes of diversity jurisdiction. Using explicit language of dehumanization to justify the denial of rights, Justice Taney went on to state that Blacks were,  “regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” With this statement, Taney propagated the narrative that, while Black people could work for America, they could not belong in America.

This overt denial of the humanity of black people produced outrage, particularly in Northern states, with many believing that “the Court had lost all moral authority.” However, many Americans in the South shared Taney’s sentiment. By publishing such racist notions of belonging in the highest court in the land, the Supreme Court effectively shaped a national narrative that said Blacks are not deserving of the humanity of home. While this case was one of many factors that polarized the nation on the issue of slavery leading up to the Civil War, the lasting legacy of its influence on the narratives shaping housing law cannot be overstated. Even outside the morally reprehensible structure of slavery, this case gave legal legitimacy to the narrative of Black inferiority that shaped the systematic denial of access to housing long after the Civil War forced the country to reckon with the “moral inadequacy of our original commitments.”

In the 20th century, the US continued to tell the story of belonging in America by limiting access to adequate housing along racial lines. As black people became more socially, politically, and economically active, after the passage of the Reconstruction Amendments, distorted narratives of belonging informed policies that locked black people out of the housing market to keep the races separate and blacks subjugated.  Often citing racist ideology imbued with white supremacist theology, leaders from local government legislators to the federal judiciary created segregationist housing and economic policies. One Louisville, Missouri councilmember rationalized segregated housing by stating, 

It is shown by philosophy, experience, and legal decisions, to say nothing of Divine Writ, that … the races of the earth shall preserve their racial integrity by living socially by themselves. Black neighborhoods are undesirable because “the shiftless, the improvident, the ignorant and the criminal carry their moral and economic condition with them wherever they go.”

While overtly racist rhetoric lessened over time, the nation never fully reckoned with the fact that our housing system was built on such immoral ideologies. Left unaddressed, this narrative of dehumanization poisoned the soul of our nation and continued to shape its social fabric even in the face of social reform. 

As more Blacks moved north, driven by the desire to escape the Jim Crow laws and racial violence of the South, Federal policies subsidized private sector segregation, enabling financial institutions to contain and exploit non-white communities for profit. Combined with systemic barriers, the belief that Blacks and other minorities were undeserving of owning property, being educated, or earning income at the level of their white counterparts created cycles of economic disenfranchisement. Blacks were often relegated to low-wage jobs in overcrowded neighborhoods with overpriced, substandard housing and underperforming schools. These unfavorable conditions led to an increase in mortality rates, economic exploitation, and crime. Areas where black people lived became co-terminus with undesirable character traits and declining property values. These very conditions were then used to justify excluding blacks from local credit and housing markets through redlining.

The Black families who could pay the inflated prices to buy suburban homes in safer (whiter) neighborhoods were often excluded due to racially restrictive covenants that prevented the sale of homes to Blacks in certain areas. While the country made progress toward eliminating these segregationist policies in the years leading up to the civil rights movement, the rhetoric of the judiciary did not denounce the narrative of black inferiority with nearly as much vigor as previous cases like Dred Scott endorsed it. One example of this is the 1948 Shelly v. Kraemer case. In this case, when the Shellys, a black family, bought a home in an all-white neighborhood, the neighborhood association sued to enforce a racially restrictive neighborhood covenant that forbade sale to non-whites and specifically prohibited the occupancy of Blacks. The Supreme Court ruled that by enforcing the racially restrictive covenants, the state violated Shelly’s equal protection rights under the Fourteenth Amendment. However, the court emphasized that the restrictive covenants themselves did not violate any Fourteenth Amendment rights, provided they were voluntarily entered into by private property owners.

While the Shelly v. Kraemer decision was a landmark civil rights victory, in it, the court still perpetuated the false narrative that black residents drive down property values by expressly permitting private property owners to contractually segregate by race. Although such racial covenants could not be judicially enforced, the entrenched myth of black’s depressing property values led white homeowners to resort to other means of segregation, including advocating for discriminatory local laws and even outright physical violence.In the aftermath of the Kraemer decision, the federal Fair Housing Act and the Jones v. Mayer decision represented significant signs of progress towards equitable housing. However, since then, further progress has been slow and has even been reversed in some cases because attempts at change operate within a racialized political structure that legitimizes a narrative of black inferiority as a justification for the denial of belonging.

Over time, housing justice advocates have continued to call for radical reform because the United States housing sector has been so thoroughly shaped by mechanisms of racism and segregation that they appear natural and even inevitable.  Through the private property rights system, spatial socialization has educated the populace about “good” and “bad” neighborhoods along racial lines, shaping the nation’s belief about who is worthy of a home. As more subtle forms of racism and segregation became ingrained in the US economy and social structures, segregation persisted along color lines, with black and minority neighborhoods experiencing cycles of degradation, exploitation, and gentrification. This pattern persisted for so long that the mere presence of black people in a neighborhood was conflated with neighborhood blight and depressing property values, creating a pretense for systematic demolition, forced displacement, and severe housing shortages for racial minorities that left them at the mercy of private landlords.

Denial of access to affordable, habitable dwellings solely because of skin color propagated a social violence that damaged human dignity and relegated black families to cycles of generational poverty. Beyond the body, it attacked the soul by depriving Black people of the space to fully flourish in communities that catered to their needs. Long after the laws changed, the narratives persisted. They are told and retold through local ordinances, zoning laws, and land-use restrictions in such a ubiquitous manner that even after years of court-ordered desegregation, millions of black people still find themself locked out of the social good of housing because they are deemed unworthy of the moral good of home.

Tenements & Urban Renewal

Although race was a significant factor in the narrative of dehumanization entrenched in the U.S. housing system, socio-economic status also relegated poor immigrants and low-wage workers to a subclass by legislating their belonging. This was particularly true within the tenement housing system. In the 19th century, an influx of immigrants and rising demand for production to support the growing US population led to rapid overcrowding in urban areas. In cities like New York, the demand for housing led landlords to convert single-family dwellings into multi-family tenement buildings that were unsanitary, unventilated, overcrowded, and cheaply constructed. 

Around the same time, a movement known as moral environmentalism led to a widespread belief that one’s environment influences one’s character. During this time, changes in the way people thought about character formation, the value of home life, spiritual redemption, the nature of poverty, and the causes of crime encouraged the idea that one’s physical environment shapes one’s moral condition. Due in part to the pervasiveness of this ideology, when the horrific conditions of the tenement houses were exposed in publications such as Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives, the response was massive and widespread.

Significant responses came from the religious community, which played a large role in the urban reform movements through material provision and intensified evangelism. During this era, the single-family middle-class house in the country represented the ideal living environment, with many decrying multi-family housing based on the emerging belief that the ideal family home was essential for a moral Christian life. Because the poor housing conditions of the indigent were further conflated with a reprobate moral state, missionary activity was seen as necessary to revive both souls and low-income neighborhoods.

Even outside of religious communities, responses often conflated the hazardous living conditions with an immoral character, as many who spoke out against tenement housing on moral grounds argued that inadequate housing corrupts the nature of those living in it. Linking health, housing, and morality, Dr. John H. Griscom argued that the conditions of urban slums “lowered morals and led to evils such as intemperance and prostitution.” Associating poor living conditions with moral degradation, Charles Elliot Norton wrote that areas classified as “slums” were places where “the passions are early roused and are subjected to no restraint. Misery seeks a short forgetfulness of itself in the gratification of sensual desires. The affections are stunted; the natural instincts become the guides of life.” He was expressing the popular sentiment that poor living conditions not only attract immoral people, but they also create immoral people who were “more brutal than the savages whom civilization has never approached.” This association led to the view that not only were certain kinds of neighborhoods unclean due to the living conditions, but they were unsafe because they produced morally reprehensible characters that would inevitably infect the rest of society with violence and crime.

While some in this era blamed the plight of the poor on the poor themselves, others embraced housing reform. They reasoned that if poor housing conditions contributed to immoral behavior, then improving housing conditions would improve morality. Building on the idea that environmental changes could lead to behavioral changes, housing reformers began to campaign for better housing for the urban poor, tenement regulations, sanitation standards, the relocation of slum-dwellers, and homeownership. The courts took action, and cases such as Tenement House Dept. v. Moeschen upheld the constitutionality of city sanitation regulations requiring landlords to comply with higher health and safety standards.  However, because the perception of the slum-dwellers was still largely linked to the places they occupied, what appeared as valiant efforts to rescue people in poverty from exploitative housing conditions also stigmatized those who could not afford to leave tenement housing. The inhumane condition caused many to call the humanity of those living there into question.

The belief that if individuals were not unworthy of belonging before living in such a neglected environment, they were certainly unworthy after living in it merged one’s moral state with one’s home, or lack thereof. This was a dangerous development that America’s social architects would use to build a housing system that restricted belonging by denying access to affordable housing. 

The moralization of housing was not a chance development or the natural evolution of social thought in the nation. It was an intentional effort to shift the levers of power in ways that would keep certain undesirable populations, such as immigrants and non-whites, from gaining too much power and influence over society. Many of these efforts played out in courts that legitimized the social narratives of morality and housing. For example, in Village of Euclid, Ohio v. Ambler Realty Co., the Supreme Court upheld a local zoning ordinance, reasoning that zoning laws were a legitimate use of police power designed to promote general welfare by regulating land use. In a notorious quote from the case, the majority suggested that an apartment in a single-family neighborhood “may be merely a right thing in the wrong place, —like a pig in the parlor instead of the barnyard.” Taken in isolation, Euclid, like Tenement House v. Moeschen, empowered the government to address public health and safety concerns. However, when viewed in their cultural context, these cases provided the architects of the housing justice system with a narrative that justified the exclusion of groups deemed undesirable and unworthy of belonging.

In Euclid and similar cases, the United States judiciary empowered local governments to restrict and regulate land use in the service of the “public good.” However, decisions about what was “good” were based on existing narratives of belonging, and which populations deserved to establish homes in the U.S. Therefore, the public good was often defined in ways that did violence to populations on the margins of society. Euclid empowered largely local legislatures to systematically structure housing based on who they felt deserved access to it. While these efforts often resembled government-sanctioned racial segregation, they also allowed the government to exclude people based on nationality, mental and physical ability, and financial status.

Because it was so ingrained in the nation’s ethos, the narrative of economic poverty leading to moral depravity persisted even after the tenements were torn down. The government used the perception of poor urban neighborhoods as blighted and their residents as disposable to justify their removal, even though in reality, most were stable, tight-knit communities. Courts validated this state action under the principle of eminent domain, empowering local municipalities to take private property for the public good, even if minority, poor, immigrant communities became collateral damage in the process. The resulting exclusionary zoning evolved into housing policy designed to systematize segregation while maintaining the existing social order,  leading in part to the current housing affordability crisis we see today.

How Narratives of Belonging Created the Modern Housing Affordability Crisis

In conversation with societal beliefs about human dignity, M’Intosh, Dred Scott, and Euclid established a narrative that excluded Native Americans, Blacks, and poor immigrants from access to the dignity of home in America. They created the conditions for the housing affordability crisis we see today through the systematic exclusion of people deemed unworthy or incapable of belonging.  Infused with the realities of racism, classism, and xenophobia, these cases revealed that America has historically used to regulate belonging in this nation.

Today’s housing affordability crisis began to emerge in earnest from this historical narrative after the Great Depression brought about new government involvement in housing policy under Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration. Influenced by the idea that higher morality and quality of life were linked to single-family homes, the federal government offered insurance for private residential mortgages and helped popularize the long-term, self-amortizing, low-down-payment mortgage loan. However, these federal policies intentionally displaced the poor and communities of color to create space for “urban renewal efforts.” The denial of access to these resources disincentivized racial minorities from homeownership by communicating that they were unworthy of the quality of life the nation desired for its citizens.

As tenement housing in urban areas was transformed through the development of government-owned public housing, poor families of color were displaced or disenfranchised in neighborhoods that were disinvested and relegated to fewer jobs, worse schools, and greater risk of environmental harm. Although the Housing Act of 1937 attempted to address the needs of low-income renters by financing local public housing projects, these projects tended to be cheaply made, poorly situated, and racially segregated. Poorly maintained and chronically underfunded, public housing came to be seen as a blight to the community and was often demolished or privatized.

While federal programs encouraged private investment in low-income housing through low-interest loans and subsidies, restrictions on those investments soon expired, allowing developers to sell homes at market rates. From the mid-1970s to the 1980s, the government severely cut HUD funding, and the new Section 8 housing program, providing government vouchers for housing, was underfunded, stigmatized, and ultimately undercut by private investors who received tax credits for building affordable housing.

This meant that the burden of creating affordable housing options had to shift to state and local governments. At the local level, homeowners, influenced by social narratives of exclusion and individualism, tended to advocate for ordinances to preserve the value of their investments, serving as the primary political participants in their communities. They resisted policies that would address affordability through relaxed zoning regulations, the development of low-income multi-family housing, and investment in resources like expanded public transportation systems. The effects of these social and political factors, coupled with events such as the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic, have made housing insecurity more pervasive than ever.

The paradoxical nature of the American push for housing as a tool for economic revival, on the one hand, yet the insistence on limiting those very same goals for segments of the population, on the other hand, reveals the historically immoral nature of American housing policy. It shows that the nation defined its success as white prosperity, relegating racial minorities, immigrants, natives, and those in poverty to a disposable outgroup, unworthy of belonging in their own nation, and therefore excluded from the benefits of home.

The belief that certain groups of people are less deserving of the safety, inclusion, and opportunities provided by a home will always influence policy decisions. Whether these decisions are made equitably depends largely on how one’s morality shapes their social priorities. The underlying considerations that shape how decision-makers structure cities and legislate access to affordable housing are what this article refers to as housing ethics. When these ethics are grounded on a faulty foundation of racism or economic exploitation, the decisions about access to housing will reflect those moral standards and undermine human dignity. This is especially true because houses, land, and locations are limited resources that require tradeoffs. While efforts to restore neglected communities are commendable in theory, they require acknowledgment of the structural injustice that has historically characterized American society. If equitable distribution is not prioritized, it will be undermined.

 There was social concern about the moral degradation produced by harmful housing conditions when it affected individuals whom society believed were redeemable. However, when a critical mass of society decided that the conditions in these urban ghettos were befitting of the current residents, the story shifted from condemning the community as oppressive to the people to condemning the people as oppressive to the community. In America’s moral narrative, the community was so intertwined with its people that, to revive it, they believed they had to expel those who called it home.

Although laws can evolve, social narratives are much more intractable in a system where access to affordable housing is more influenced by local policy than federal standards. This is why, decades after the civil rights movement, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s warning about the catastrophic costs to human communities when “profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people” rings truer than ever. Our moral narratives of home matter because, while they begin in minds, they are reproduced through law and policy in the lived experiences of community members. The vicious cycle of housing injustice will not stop until we shift our focus from outcomes to inputs. America’s moral narratives about who deserves access to the dignity of housing and the flourishing of home created the housing crisis we see today. But now, the housing affordability crisis is controlling the narrative. Many of the same neighborhoods, reservations, and urban areas that were intentionally segregated continue to have the highest poverty rates, worst health outcomes, and most dismal education prospects in the nation. Residents struggle to obtain loans to buy or renovate, leading to a decline in housing quality that drives down home values, depresses tax revenue, reduces school funding, and forces businesses to close. In this way, the U.S. housing sector serves as one of the clearest and most enduring legacies of the corrupt morality undergirding our housing policy to this day. ♦

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Recommended Citation

Deleawe, Siji. “A Moral History of How the U.S. Legislated Belonging by Denying Access to Home.” Canopy Forum, June 25, 2026. https://canopyforum.org/2026/06/25/a-moral-history-of-how-the-u-s-legislated-belonging-by-denying-access-to-home-by-siji-deleawe/.

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