Fairfax County’s manufactured affordable housing crisis is rooted in choices made due to racial bias and economic discrimination, as evidenced by a longstanding pattern of overinvesting in White communities and systematic neglect of Black communities. The pattern of inequity does not only affect housing, but other public facilities. During the Jim Crow period Fairfax, like counties across Virginia, required separate public facilities for Whites and Blacks. These practices constructed an infrastructure under which public parks, pools, libraries, and recreation centers were deliberately designed to reinforce racial segregation.

In 1953, at a day-long seminar, “Know your County,” hosted by the Fairfax League of Women Voters, Black residents recounted instances of racial exclusion. One individual shared the story of being refused admission to Great Falls Park, operated by the Fairfax County Park Authority. Parks official John W. Brookfield responded with:

This story is story was far from unique. Public parks, pools, beaches, and golf courses throughout the United States were contested spaces during the long Civil Rights Movement. In Landscapes of Exclusion: State Parks and Jim Crow in the American South, geographer William O’Brien shows that while the scars of segregation may not be apparent to state park-goers in the present, “racism and discrimination were etched into the geography and design of the region’s scenic landscapes”—in the form of separate park entrances and segregated facilities, for example, and even completely Whites-only parks. Both O’Brien and cultural geographer Carolyn Finney, the author of Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors, agree that the exclusion of Black Americans from natural sites and activities during Jim Crow imposed lasting effects on how Black Americans experience natural spaces, even into the present. Both authors also note the exclusionary effects of designing so many state parks and official nature sites around the use of cars.