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The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed many of the flaws within our country, but perhaps one of the most glaring examples is how the virus has disproportionately impacted Black and brown communities. This isn’t a coincidence. It all goes back to one major thing: housing. In the 1930s, when our government decided that non-white communities didn’t deserve access to better housing, it established systemic barriers that ended up segregating communities by race. So in 2020, when the global pandemic made its way to the United States, it wasn’t a surprise that the most susceptible communities were those that had long been strategically neglected by our government. Much of our present-day society is related to the laws and agencies that were created generations ago. This includes one of the most structurally defining practices of the last century: redlining.
What is redlining?
During the Great Depression, the housing market was hit hard. Many Americans were unable to purchase new houses and many of those who were already homeowners lost their homes. In response, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal created the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) which became the core of the National Housing Act of 1934. This law created the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) — a government agency that was established to provide mortgage insurance. In doing so, the FHA committed to cover unpaid balances if borrowers didn’t make their payments. It meant that lenders were protected from default if a borrower couldn’t pay and it helped millions of people become homeowners. However, these new and beneficial terms were only made available for loans and properties that met specific requirements. Many of those requirements and policies upheld and encouraged segregation as plainly laid out in the FHA’s Underwriting Manual.
“Areas surrounding a location are investigated to determine whether incompatible racial and social groups are present, for the purpose of making a prediction regarding the probability of the location being invaded by such groups,” the manual says. “If a neighborhood is to retain stability, it is necessary that properties shall continue to be occupied by the same social and racial classes. A change in social or racial occupancy generally contributes to instability and a decline in values.” That is just one of the various instances in which the FHA clearly outlines its intention to work as a structure that would continue to enforce segregation.
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In addition to the FHA’s explicitly racist Underwriting Manual, there were color-coded “residential security” maps created by the HOLC. These maps showed the “grades” that neighborhoods in 239 cities received based on: age and condition of housing, transportation access, distance to parks and polluting industries, economic class and employment status of residents, and especially ethnic and racial composition. The grades and colors were as follows: grade A was green for “best,” grade B was blue for “still desirable,” grade C was yellow for “definitely declining” (sparsely populated and typically bordering all-Black neighborhoods), and grade D was red for “hazardous” (Black and low-income neighborhoods). The “redlined” areas, most often occupied by Black Americans and immigrant communities, were deemed too risky to insure mortgages. As a result, loans to Black Americans weren’t likely to be insured — drastically limiting their housing options. The federal government set the standard for America’s mortgage lending practices as the use of redlining spread throughout the mortgage industry and shaped the America that emerged after the Great Depression — helping to create the America we see today.
How did it shape the physical development of U.S. cities?
From the late 1940s through the 1960s, in large part thanks to the government’s FHA and Veteran’s Affairs (VA)-backed mortgage loans (which also followed the FHA’s model), many white families moved from cities to suburbs. These loans and the 1956 creation of the federally funded interstate highway system were instrumental in the moving of white people from cities to suburbs. It also further enforced racial inequality for housing, as local expressways and interstates were strategically constructed to divide communities by race, and in many American cities, they paved over Black neighborhoods, destroying them.
Another method used by the FHA to block Black Americans from moving into suburbs was its business with housing developers. Suburban housing developers who received bank loans from the FHA did so under terms that prohibited them from selling homes to Black people. According to the Brookings Institution, as of 2017, almost half (49.8%) of the redlined population live in 10 major cities: New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Boston, San Diego, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Baltimore.
What were the sociopolitical repercussions?
The years that followed the Great Depression were vital in creating an expanded middle class, and the federal government ensured that this class mobility was readily available to white Americans and out of reach for most Black Americans. Homeownership is a key method of building wealth, as Lisa Rice, executive vice president of the National Fair Housing Alliance, told the Associated Press. The largest share of wealth for typical families comes from home equity, yet Black families haven’t had the opportunity to build and pass down generational wealth the way many white families have. According to the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, 74% of neighborhoods that were redlined by the HOLC are low-to-moderate income today, and 64% of those redlined communities are minority neighborhoods.
The racial wealth gap isn’t the only repercussion of redlining. “A few years ago I bought a home in Maywood, Illinois, which is a predominantly Black suburb of Chicago,“ Gianna Baker, co-executive director of the Chicago Area Fair Housing Alliance, told Teen Vogue. “Part of the legacy of redlining [that] majority-black neighborhoods like Maywood often face is that we don't have equal access to essential resources. For instance, there isn't a grocery store in my community.” According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), approximately 19 million Americans live in “food deserts” that lack adequate access to fresh foods and grocery stores. A disproportionate amount of these households are Black and Latino.
Lack of access to healthy food options paired with other environmental factors — these communities have higher temperatures and higher exposure to polluting industries — leads to more health disparities. People living in redlined communities have higher rates of obesity, diabetes, asthma, hypertension, and kidney disease.
“Housing is truly a lifeline and the centerpiece of all other life opportunities, from jobs and educational opportunities to healthy food and health-care options. We’re seeing this connection highlighted more and more as the pandemic persists,” said Baker. “Public health professionals have equated housing to a vaccine. I think Dr. Megan Sandel coined that term: Housing as a vaccine points to the many ways that safe, healthy, and stable housing protects families, especially children, from a whole host of physical and emotional ills.”
How is the practice still relevant today?
“Redlining was outlawed in 1968 when the Fair Housing Act was passed, but it still happens today with home loans and appraisals,” said Baker. “People of color are still likely to be denied a home loan more often than whites. A recent report on home loans in Chicago found that Black and Latinx households are still blocked from homeownership opportunities.” According to the WBEZ report Baker referenced, between 2012 and 2018, “68.1% of dollars loaned for housing purchases went to majority-white neighborhoods in Chicago, while just 8.1% went to majority-Black neighborhoods and 8.7% to majority-Latino neighborhoods.” “There was also a study released last fall that showed that Black and Latinx homeowners still face discrimination in home appraisals because home values are largely driven by the racial makeup of neighborhoods,” said Baker.
Can anything be done to address these harms?
“I think there are several things the federal government can do to undo its contribution to housing discrimination and housing insecurity that exists as a result. First, it can vigorously enforce existing laws that ban discrimination,” Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, assistant professor of African American studies at Princeton University and author of Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership told Teen Vogue. “We know from several media exposés that racial discrimination in housing continues to delimit the choices of Black buyers and renters. The Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) ability to investigate claims of discrimination and then to punish offenders could go a long way, but the main thing that has to be done is that HUD has to increase the supply of affordable and free housing. We need a revitalized agenda concerning public housing. We need to build and invest in public housing. The federal government should also back the financing and building of truly affordable housing and get the private sector out. Only the federal government can intervene in housing at a scale that actually responds to the level of crisis that exists in housing affordability and accessibility.”
What are activists doing in the meantime?
“While we want to emphasize the inequity, what I think sometimes gets lost is even when we think about redlining these are the communities that were deemed hazardous and risky,” Baker told Teen Vogue, “and that still is the way that people look at our community. So I always try to emphasize the history, the legacy, and the work that people are doing right now.”
“We're working with groups across the country to advocate for the 2015 Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule (AFFH) to be reinstated,” Baker said about the rule that was repealed by the Trump administration. “The AFFH rule was the most concrete action the federal government had taken to eliminate discriminatory housing policies and remedy the harms caused by them since passing the Fair Housing Act. The rule requires jurisdictions to identify and document barriers to fair housing and to develop a plan to address them. What's important about the AFFH rule is that it kind of gives some teeth to the Fair Housing Act so that local governments are taking meaningful actions to remedy the past and really ensure that they're taking steps to remove those housing barriers.”
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