The Troost Wall and the Geography of Segregation

Troost Avenue runs roughly north to south through the center of Kansas City. It is, by most urban geography assessments, the starkest racial dividing line in a major American city: a street where the racial composition of the neighborhoods on either side changes sharply, and has changed sharply for most of the past century. The Troost Wall, as it is called by the people who live near it and by the researchers who have studied it, did not arise from accident or from the preferences of the people who live there. It was built.

The instrument of its construction was the network of racially restrictive covenants that Jesse Clyde Nichols and other Kansas City developers placed on deeds throughout the southern and western parts of the city from the nineteen tens onward, prohibiting ownership or occupancy by anyone identified as non-white. Those covenants pushed Black residents to the east side of the city. Federal Home Owners' Loan Corporation redlining maps from the nineteen thirties color-coded the east side neighborhoods as hazardous to lend in, meaning Black-occupied, meaning banks would not write mortgages there. The Federal Housing Administration followed the same logic in approving loans for the postwar suburbs west and south of the city.

The result was a geography of compounding disadvantage. The neighborhoods east of Troost received less mortgage capital, less school funding tied to property values, less commercial investment. The neighborhoods west of Troost received all of those things. The line held for sixty years of formally segregated policy and has proven durable in the decades since the policies became formally illegal.

Researchers at the University of Missouri-Kansas City have documented that the Troost boundary remains one of the sharpest predictors of poverty, school outcomes, and life expectancy in the metropolitan area. The legal architecture that created it was dismantled. The built environment it created is still here, and still sorting people.