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This test consists of 15 multiple choice questions and 5 short answer questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. After the post-war housing shortage ended, what does Rothstein say the real estate industry lobbied for?
(a) Limits on black contractors.
(b) Using subsidies to remedy historic injustices in housing.
(c) Excluding black workers from skills positions.
(d) Making sure public housing was a place of poverty and crime.

2. What does Rothstein say was behind the fear of property values falling?
(a) Fear of violence.
(b) Racism.
(c) Guilt.
(d) Fear of contagion.

3. How does Rothstein characterize the nature of the sales when blockbusters sold to African Americans?
(a) Cash sales.
(b) Straw man sales.
(c) Contract sales.
(d) Deferred sales.

4. How does Rothstein characterize blockbusting?
(a) As a federal government policy.
(b) As a form of de jure segregation.
(c) As a few renegade real estate agents deceiving the public.
(d) As a form of collusion with the FHA.

5. What does the 13th Amendment prohibit?
(a) Denying citizens due process.
(b) Treating African Americans as second-class citizens.
(c) Discriminating based on race or religion.
(d) Treating African Americans as second-class citizens.

6. How does Rothstein characterize the prices African Americans paid for homes bought and flipped by blockbusters?
(a) Inflated.
(b) Usurious.
(c) Discounted.
(d) Leveraged.

7. What did Harland Bartholomew do as planning engineer for St. Louis, MO?
(a) Establish racial neighborhood zones.
(b) Determine where industrial and African-American neighborhoods could be.
(c) Push for integration in neighborhoods.
(d) Demolish integrated neighborhoods.

8. What is de jure segregation?
(a) Geographical features keeping races apart.
(b) White supremacist threats keeping races apart.
(c) Government policies keeping races apart.
(d) Private decisions keeping races apart.

9. What was demolished to make way for the first PWA development?
(a) An airport.
(b) A shopping district.
(c) An integrated neighborhood.
(d) A white slum.

10. What did the state of Montana ban in 1909?
(a) Black business ownership.
(b) Intermarriage.
(c) Selling homes to African Americans.
(d) Employing African Americans.

11. How did the HOLC change the face of mortgages in 1933?
(a) They stopped amortizing them.
(b) They extended them to black families.
(c) They amortized them.
(d) They made them shorter.

12. In what year did the U.S. Supreme Court uphold racially restrictive covenants as well as exclusionary zoning ordinances?
(a) 1917.
(b) 1926.
(c) 1984.
(d) 1887.

13. Which case made housing discrimination illegal as national policy?
(a) Buchanan.
(b) Shelley.
(c) Jones.
(d) Brown.

14. Why was Gerald Cohn of San Francisco investigated by the FBI?
(a) For selling his house to a black family.
(b) For offering a private mortgage to a black family.
(c) For lying to appraisers.
(d) For voting against his neighborhoods racially restrictive covenants.

15. Where does Rothstein say blockbusting had its roots?
(a) Federal housing policy.
(b) Slavery.
(c) Private decisions.
(d) Racism.

Short Answer Questions

1. What kind of developments was New Orleans Mayor DeLesseps Morrison told that the FHA wanted?

2. When does Rothstein say the Supreme Court overturned its 1883 decision?

3. What turmoil does Rothstein say led him to consider writing this book?

4. How does Rothstein explain how places like Ferguson, MO got to be so racially homogenous?

5. How did the FHA’s own 1948 report characterize the black families’ conditions in neighborhoods they could not move out of?

(see the answer keys)

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