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Redlining was a government policy of limiting federally-backed mortgages to areas which were perceived as high risk for default - and those areas were also largely black and immigrant areas. If people couldn't get a mortgage to buy houses in those areas, then prices were kept lower. And since it was difficult, if not impossible, for blacks to buy in white areas, it trapped them in areas with lower property values, because the ability to finance the purchase of property inflates the value of the property. It also made it much, much cheaper to buy a house in a black neighborhood than in a white neighborhood - if you had the money.
However, never have I seen mortgage default statistics sorted according to race. Perhaps mortgage default rates in these predominantly black and immigrant rates WERE so high that the government rightly felt that these were high-risk areas - they certainly were at the time of the mortgage default crisis of 2006-2009. And the descent of black neighborhoods into crime-ridden, drug-ridden areas with most households that contain children headed by only a mother or grandmother, with high dependency on social welfare payments, cannot be blamed upon inability to borrow against the value of the house.
So, did redlining destroy black neighborhoods and impede the accumulation of wealth in black families? Or were these areas really at higher risk of mortgage default, and hence too high risk for mortgages? Is the descent of black neighborhoods into extreme poverty, drug use, crime, and social welfare dependency a consequence of redlining? Or was redlining a means of avoiding bankrupting the nascent federally backed mortgage program?
People used to adhere to the belief that correlation does not imply causation necessarily. It seems this has been thrown completely out of the window lately. Journalists with no training in mathematics or statistics pick random data and throw it together to create some kind of argument for something they already believe in. This journalist's claim to fame was a food blog.
The article is correlating someone being denied a home loan in the 1930s with the obesity rate today. I have a much simpler hypothesis, maybe the person just eats too much junk food. That might also explain the diabetes.
I'd really like to see the data showing that these communities were vibrant, healthy places and the residents had minimal health complications before the redlining maps were created. And then after the maps were created, I'd like to see how it went from that into what we have now. That would be a start.
Why is the part of the CITY where the property is located being judged instead of the PERSON seeking the loan? Hmmmmmm. If the person is deemed creditworthy through an unbiased process, that is fair. They can then purchase a property wherever, as long as they've gotten approved for that amount.
Funny, the high rate of obesity amongst the poor, and the obesity-related diseases that come with it, are all a creation of farm subsidies and the food stamps program. Government subsidies for grains make high fructose corn syrup and grain-derived oils very cheap, in addition to cheap feed for animals. This makes junk food, pork, chicken, even beef relatively cheap. Think of two dollar big bags of Doritos, two dollar nearly half gallon containers of ice cream, 49 cent/pound chicken, dollar a pound pork, two dollar a pound hamburger, cheap oil and sugar, all mixed up by fast food manufacturers into cheap buckets of chicken and dollar menu burgers and fries. Meanwhile, fruits and veggies are pretty expensive, because they're not subsidized. And SNAP benefits are about $200/head, decreasing by the head as the number in the family goes up, but still adds $150/head even over 8 people, which means that people who are poor qualify for a LOT of money to spend at the supermarket on food.
If you look at footage from 1960s/1970s gatherings of young black people in the US, no one is overweight! Today, most are morbidly obese. If you ask black people over 60 what they remember eating on a daily basis, it sure is not gonna be KFC, McD's , and chips and ice cream.
I don't think that redlining had anything to do with it. I do think that housing discrimination that kept blacks out of white neighborhoods, yes, that had something to do with it, because it denied blacks the opportunity to buy houses in neighborhoods where housing values would rise, as they paid off mortgages. But if they bought houses in predominantly black areas, there was little to no appreciation, because no one who had money wanted to live there, they couldn't get that increase in wealth as the property values didn't rise. In addition, as family structure fell apart, crime skyrocketed, making real estate in black neighborhoods even less valuable.
Covid rates are high in black areas because for those who do work, they often work in service jobs that involve a lot of exposure, and because of non-compliance with social distancing and mask wearing in these areas. It's the same reason that covid rates are high in pro-Trump areas, none of which are black, but all of which eschew mask-wearing and social distancing. We certainly cannot blame sky-high covid rates in North Dakota on a remote history of red-lining.
Covid rates are high in black areas because for those who do work, they often work in service jobs that involve a lot of exposure, and because of non-compliance with social distancing and mask wearing in these areas. It's the same reason that covid rates are high in pro-Trump areas, none of which are black, but all of which eschew mask-wearing and social distancing. We certainly cannot blame sky-high covid rates in North Dakota on a remote history of red-lining.
Worldwide covid rates are high in the whole US, in Brazil, South Africa, Russia, and India so I don't think it's good logic to link it to Trump.
Funny, the high rate of obesity amongst the poor, and the obesity-related diseases that come with it, are all a creation of farm subsidies and the food stamps program. Government subsidies for grains make high fructose corn syrup and grain-derived oils very cheap, in addition to cheap feed for animals. This makes junk food, pork, chicken, even beef relatively cheap. Think of two dollar big bags of Doritos, two dollar nearly half gallon containers of ice cream, 49 cent/pound chicken, dollar a pound pork, two dollar a pound hamburger, cheap oil and sugar, all mixed up by fast food manufacturers into cheap buckets of chicken and dollar menu burgers and fries. Meanwhile, fruits and veggies are pretty expensive, because they're not subsidized. And SNAP benefits are about $200/head, decreasing by the head as the number in the family goes up, but still adds $150/head even over 8 people, which means that people who are poor qualify for a LOT of money to spend at the supermarket on food.
If you look at footage from 1960s/1970s gatherings of young black people in the US, no one is overweight! Today, most are morbidly obese. If you ask black people over 60 what they remember eating on a daily basis, it sure is not gonna be KFC, McD's , and chips and ice cream.
I don't think that redlining had anything to do with it. I do think that housing discrimination that kept blacks out of white neighborhoods, yes, that had something to do with it, because it denied blacks the opportunity to buy houses in neighborhoods where housing values would rise, as they paid off mortgages. But if they bought houses in predominantly black areas, there was little to no appreciation, because no one who had money wanted to live there, they couldn't get that increase in wealth as the property values didn't rise. In addition, as family structure fell apart, crime skyrocketed, making real estate in black neighborhoods even less valuable.
Covid rates are high in black areas because for those who do work, they often work in service jobs that involve a lot of exposure, and because of non-compliance with social distancing and mask wearing in these areas. It's the same reason that covid rates are high in pro-Trump areas, none of which are black, but all of which eschew mask-wearing and social distancing. We certainly cannot blame sky-high covid rates in North Dakota on a remote history of red-lining.
Wow! You pretty much just did in every paragraph the very thing TXRunner argued against -- took random statistics and jammed them all together to justify conclusions you'd already reached. Don't know where you get your food prices, but not around here. And what do you think people used to eat in the past -- organic tofu and bean sprouts? Nope, it was bacon, and pork, and fired chicken, and meatloaf. Pinto beans cooked with fatback for seasoning. Most things were cooked with bacon grease or lard. Black or white, that's what you ate. A big bag of Doritos isn't cheap; that's a rare treat to buy one of those. The one thing you got right is corn syrup brought down the price of soft drinks. Those used to be expensive but now are cheap.
It is a complicated issue, certainly not something I'mgoing to be able to address in a post on City-Data!
My response to the article you posted is irritation - I wish the media were more intellectually honest. It was such a lop-sided article. I've seen several articles with exactly the same talking points, but different data, in my local paper.
I am old enough to remember the racism of the 50s, and it was real. I remember the Fair Housing Initialive in California in the 60s, which made it illegal for someone using public money to discriminate for racial reasons. if you sold your house privately, you could discriminate, but not if you were using a listing service, or using any public agencies.
This article started out by saying that the neighborhood went into decline in the 70s, but that when the redlining was stopped. Redlining was in the 30s, a time when the article described her neighborhood as thriving.
What happened in the 70s was the introduction of drugs, and the massive expansion of welfare benefits.
I've livied in formerly red-lined neighborhoods, mostly black, and I've definitely seen that for most homeowners, keeping the yard up is a very low priority. I remember a co-worker complaining to me that his girlfriend bought a house in a very nice, tree-lined street in an upscale, close-in neighborhood where the average price of a home is over a million dollars, and he was complaining that she had gone all "middle-class" and wanted him to help with yard work. He considered keeping a nicely manicured lawn to be unspeakably, awfully Bourgeois. And I totally recognized where he was coming from. In the black part of town, where he and I lived, nobody bothered to keep their grass green in the summer, or plant flower beds, or even pick up the candy wrappers and soda-cups passers-by threw on the lawn.
He was totally unsympathetic to the desires of his girlfriends' neighbors who wanted all the homes on the street to have well-maintained garden yards.
I understand the plural of "anecdote" is not "data", but having lived in widely different neighborhoods over my many decades of life, I can definitely see the difference between the attitutes of people who live in the higher income neighborhoods and those who live in the lower income neighborhoods, regardless of race. Same thing with grocery stores.
The grocery stores in the girlfriend's neighborhood were very nice. The one grocery store in my neighborhood was terrible, and then, after years of shoplifting and petty vandalism, they shut the doors, and now there's no grocery store. Well, there probably is now, since for the last ten years, the area has been being gentrified. And even when I lived there, it wasn't far to go to another grocery store. They were a few miles away, instead of a few blocks away.
Yeah, 80 years ago, there was redlining, but now, we've got two generations of people who have been trained that if they scream and protest loud enough, they'll get stuff, and so, that's what they do.
If one black family leaves the crappy neighborhood, and moves to a high-income neighborhood, it's highly likely the family will try to fit in, and emulate the neighbors. But if a bunch of low-income people move into the neighborhood, the neighborhood will change, and all you've done is ruin a nice neighborhood, and made the city crappier.
It isn't the geography, it isn't the zip code that produces people with no pride of place, it's the culture, and unless the culture changes, which can only be done if people want to change, they won't.
That's the only place in the city where people just walk down the street and throw their trash on the ground, and then the property owners just leave it. I don't see what redlining 80 years ago has to do with that.
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Redlining not only affected mortgages but services. I grew up in the segregated south. Paved roads ended at the African American neighborhood next to ours, they did not get sewers. Now, decades later, that neighborhood is gone, replaced by big houses, paved roads and full services. It was systemic. There were two African American children who went to our elementary school, one's father was a lawyer, one's was a physician; their houses were split levels, the others were painted cinder block. But even they were forced to submit to bussing and instead of going to the school down the road they were bussed over 15 miles.
When you consider that neighborhoods were redlined, that basic services were not equal, that schools, from elementary to university, were not equal, that hospitals were segregated, redlining was part of the equation.
Bayview VA is an African American town on VA's Eastern Shore. They only got running water and sewers in the 1990's after organizing and getting publicity.
And what do you think people used to eat in the past -- organic tofu and bean sprouts? Nope, it was bacon, and pork, and fried chicken, and meatloaf. Pinto beans cooked with fatback for seasoning. Most things were cooked with bacon grease or lard. Black or white, that's what you ate.
All of those things are healthy foods. Bacon grease and lard in moderation are not bad for people. What is making people fat today that they did not used to eat was HUGE portions, processed junk foods, and all that sugar and vegetable oil. Those did not used to be in everything and people didn't drink soda and eat chips and cookies all day long.
Everyone knows that unhealthy ingredients like corn syrup and low quality vegetable oils are used as fillers in most US processed foods because they are cheap, and that they are major factors in the obesity problem. If people went back to cooking their own pork and pinto beans, they'd be a lot healthier.
Perhaps. But family wealth isn't something that occurred only during that period when redlining was a thing. Most people were not in a position to take advantage of growing wealth during those times. This is one piece of a complicated puzzle, made even more complicated when it's focused on race by people trying to make direct connections between a and z without considering the rest of the alphabet.
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