The Thick Red Line (Baltimore: real estate, foreclosures, rent)

[Infinite_heights77]

*Good stuff!

The Thick Red Line ‹ TERP

The Thick Red Line



iSchool Researchers Digitize 1930s Maps to Show Legacy of U.S. Housing Discrimination

by Liam Farrell | illustration by Brian G. Payne | photos courtesy of The Baltimore News-American, UMD Special Collections and John T. Consoli
Frank and Ethel turner paid $25 a week for 10 years to buy a sliver of America.
They turned over most of their meager earnings—$109 a month from Social Security plus rent from four tenants—for the three-story house at 412 Colvin St. in East Baltimore.
But when a city inspector tacked a notice to the door on Dec. 14, 1967, that the crumbling house was no longer safe to inhabit, the Turners discovered they didn’t own it at all.
According to a Baltimore Sun article published the day of their eviction, the couple had purchased their home with a “land-installment” contract, meaning through a property owner rather than a bank or mortgage company. The payments, ostensibly for the cost of the home, could instead be gobbled up by whatever fees the owner invented. Frank, 79, and Ethel, 67, paid more than $12,000 for rotting floors, grim advice from Legal Aid lawyers and dueling lawsuits with the property owners.
It was an inevitable end, written in 30-year-old red ink.

IN 1937, local real estate brokers and an economist helped federal officials evaluate each neighborhood in Baltimore to determine eligibility for home loans. On a sliding scale of worth, the Colvin Street area—along with most of the city’s core—was colored red, indicating hazardous for investment. The report noted negatives such as a “heavy concentration of foreigners” and “infiltration of Negro.”
Children play in a vacant lot surrounded by crumbling homes on Baltimore’s North Vincent Street in 1962, when the consequences of redlining were already clear. Photo courtesy of The Baltimore News-American, UMD Special Collections.

These maps and reports were the foundation of “redlining,” which confined African Americans nationwide to specific neighborhoods outside the post-World War II housing boom. Without traditional avenues for home loans, black people were drawn into land-installment contracts and other pernicious methods that laid the groundwork for decades of poverty.
A new project by the University of Maryland’s College of Information Studies is bringing this material out of the historical shadows by creating a digital atlas of hundreds of Depression-era maps and reports that span thousands of neighborhoods. The Mapping Inequality initiative, says Richard Marciano, director of the Digital Curation and Innovation Center, will provide a new foundation in understanding how the racist policies of the past contribute to the inner-city problems of today.
“It’s a continuation of this historical hurt,” he says.

WHEN MARCIANO, an expert in digital archives and databases, moved to San Diego in the 1990s, he was curious about his neighborhood’s past. What people told him—that the area once had white occupancy requirements—pulled him into the dark side of American real estate. He collected original deeds for his Mission Hills subdivision and was amazed that racial restrictions from the early 1900s mirrored present-day trends. Eventually, he found that local bigotry had been institutionalized by the federal government through the Home Owner’s Loan Corporation (HOLC).
Signed into law in 1933 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, HOLC was designed to boost the struggling real estate industry during the Great Depression. U.S. residential property construction had fallen by 95 percent, with half of all mortgages in default and more than 1,000 foreclosures a day.
Through HOLC and later programs in the Federal Housing Authority and Veterans Administration, the federal government helped refinance tens of thousands of homes and introduced the modern mortgage standard of smaller down payments and decades-long financing for homes meeting minimum building requirements. To guide its decisions, the government partnered with real estate officials around the country and drew maps to grade areas as green, blue, yellow or red.
Abandoned rowhouses are common today in Baltimore neighborhoods redlined in the 1930s. Photo by John T. Consoli.

HOLC and its descendant agencies were undeniably successful in expanding homeownership. By 1972, 63 percent of Americans lived in homes they owned, up from 44 percent in 1934. Embracing the romantic ideal of the countryside, the nation underwent a monumental shift to the suburbs, as industry collapsed in inner cities, developers snatched up cheap and plentiful land, and the federal government sank its resources into highway construction and loans for boxy houses planted in rows on the fringes of cities.
Baltimore peaked as the sixth-largest U.S. city in 1950, with about 950,000 people; in 2010, the city’s population had plummeted to less than 621,000. In those 60 years, Baltimore County’s ballooned from 270,000 to 805,000.
The HOLC maps dictated what parts of the country were—and weren’t— worth investing in. They put a premium on neighborhoods of single-family homes in all-white hands, with new construction and no evidence of African Americans. The directions for HOLC assessors considered “lower grade populations or different racial groups” as toxic as slaughterhouses.

[Woodlands]

Interesting Thanks for sharing. Anyone surprised that the affected areas are the ones that are essentially struggling today? No one can deny that personal responsibility is certainly important but it's obvious that the role of the government and good ole fashion capitalism has certainly played a role smh