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redlining



  • The Tyranny of the Maps: Rethinking Redlining

    by Robert Gioielli

    The four-color mortgage security maps created by New Deal-era bureaucrats and bankers have become a widely-known symbol of housing discrimination and the racial wealth gap. But does the public familiarity with the maps obscure the history of housing discrimination? And what can historians do about that?



  • The Invention of America's Most Dangerous Idea

    by Gene Slater

    How did a right-wing conception of "freedom" rooted in the individual's absolute property rights supersede an idea of freedom based in social equality? Blame the real estate industry. 



  • How to Ensure a New Redlining Initiative Succeeds

    by Robert Henderson and Rebecca Marchiel

    Ensuring equity in mortgage lending requires understanding why the Community Reinvestment Act failed to achieve the same goal decades ago, through a better awareness of the ongoing problems in mortgage lending. 



  • How Academia Laid the Groundwork for Redlining

    by Todd Michney and LaDale Winling

    Richard T. Ely and his student Ernest McKinley Fisher pushed the National Association of Real Estate Boards to adopt "the unsupported hypothesis that Black people's very presence inexorably lowered property values," tying the private real estate industry to racial segregation. 



  • Redlining Happened, but Not Exactly the Way We've Thought it Did

    New economic research reinforces an argument made by historian Amy Hillier, that federal agencies didn't invent "redlining" but responded to widespread public prejudices that imagined Black residents as threats to neighborhood property value. 



  • The Odd Place of one Savannah Neighborhood in the History of Redlining

    by Todd Michney

    The history of the Cuyler-Brownville area shows that HOLC risk assessments and Federal lending practices were responsive to local banks' perception of lending risk and desire for profit, factors which resulted in the rarity of an African American community retaining a "green" rating. 



  • Redlining: What is It?

    "Though the maps were internal documents that were never made public by the federal government, their ramifications were obvious to Black homeowners who could not get home loans that were backed by government insurance programs."



  • Redlining, Race, and the Color of Money

    by Garrett Dash Nelson

    "Redlining maps reveal how the federal government managed risk for capital—a role that has perpetuated inequality long after the end of explicit discrimination in the housing market."



  • Why Supermarkets Are Powerful Flash Points In Racial Politics

    by Tracey Deutsch and James McElroy

    In addition to selling food, grocery stores have also preserved a social order that treats shoppers of different races differently, dispensing hierarchy along with food — and, in fact, creating it.



  • COVID-19 and the Color Line

    by Colin Gordon, Walter Johnson, Jason Q. Purnell, and Jamala Rogers

    The disproportionate toll COVID-19 has taken on black Americans is a product of conscious choices by actors at every level of government and private industries like banking, insurance and real estate.