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85% of the people who lived in redlined neighborhoods when this practice was legal were white, a fact that often goes unmentioned in pieces like this. If there is a direct link to criminal violence and redlining, the demographics of offenders would be far different than what we observe today.
Further, those neighborhoods were mostly “worker housing” built near/within walking distance of (big, noisy, dirty, polluting) factories to begin with.
The sinister “polluted places”/environmental justice correlation cited here is often overblown and has a perfectly logical explanation: neighborhoods grew up around polluting factories where jobs were. No one went out and built houses on top of polluted places for any reason other than convenience to jobs in the pre-auto era…not to force working class people and people of color to live in bad conditions.
Redlining still exists today. It’s called zoning.
In my downtown neighborhood, the house next-door to me recently sold for nearly a million dollars. It is a 4500sq ft Victorian. In 1972 my former next-door neighbor bought his house for $4500. He had to use his credit card because a bank would not give him a mortgage. At the time he bought it, it had already been a rental for almost 50 years with three apartments, owned not by somebody living there, but somebody with capital. The house was not near a factory. Unfortunately it is now only blocks from an Interstate highway, made possible by bulldozing houses in previously red-lined areas of the city.
So 21 R, and Chris B, and feel smug with their comments, but the truth is red-lining nearly destroyed the core of the city, and only 50 years after the 1968 fair housing act, are some neighborhoods rebounding.
Unfortunately the effects of red-lining linger on, in that the people that should benefit from rising home prices, the people living in up and coming areas, had already been forced out of the opportunities of home ownership and are now just renters. The name we give to this phenomenon is not structural racism, because too many people likes those that commented above might not believe it exists, but we call it “gentrification” now days.
Good Article Tom Gallagher!