Tax Prof Named Urban Studies Scholar To Research Why The FHA Funded An All-Black Community Despite A Whites-Only Policy

Tax Law Professor Named Urban Studies Scholar Asks Why the FHA Funded an All-Black Community Despite a Whites-Only Policy:

Richard Winchester, J.D., professor of law at Seton Hall University Law School [moving to Brooklyn in January 2025] and a national authority on small business and federal employment tax policy, is spending the summer as a visiting scholar in the Urban Studies Department at the University of New Orleans. While there, he will be conducting archival research and other work in connection with a book he is writing on the New Orleans community of Pontchartrain Park.

Unique among American neighborhoods, Pontchartrain Park was the largest Black community whose construction was financed by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) during the 1950s at a time when the agency had limited its programs to whites, notes Winchester. The community was adjacent to an all-white subdivision that was constructed by the same builder. Even though the builder offered the same prefabricated homes in each community, the prices for the ones in Pontchartrain Park were substantially higher. Winchester is trying to understand why this occurred.

"I am asking questions that other scholars have not considered. My expertise in business and tax law enables me to understand the economics driving the joint venture that was formed to build this community," said Winchester. ... 

"For instance, I'm finding that the company's costs were higher than those for its all-white neighbor. But that doesn’t explain everything. There were multiple investors who partnered with the builder for Pontchartrain Park. They adopted a capital structure that put pressure on the company to generate elevated returns for the shareholders. In addition, because virtually no one else was building homes for Blacks, the company was in a position to operate without having to worry about meeting or beating the price that competitors might have offered. All of this impacted how much Black buyers had to pay and their capacity to build wealth at the same rate as their white counterparts."

A native of New Orleans himself, Winchester had many friends and high school classmates who lived in Pontchartrain Park. However, he was not aware of this aspect of the neighborhood's history until his scholarly interests expanded beyond his core expertise of tax policy. He began studying the role of homeownership in generating intergenerational wealth. That is when he learned about the FHA and the role it played in preventing most Blacks from becoming homeowners. Interestingly, the agency made a few exceptions, with Pontchartrain Park being the most noteworthy. ...

Winchester's objective is to write a book that will be of interest to scholars and non-scholars alike. The University of New Orleans (UNO) is uniquely positioned to support him in this endeavor, he explained. 

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