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By Nigel Chiwaya and Janell Ross
Aug. 3, 2020
Ebony Jones thought she was one of the lucky ones. Jones, a Black woman in her 30s, inherited a home her grandfather, a World War II veteran, had bought nearly seven decades earlier with the help of his GI Bill benefits.

But when Jones and her two children moved into the house in Compton, California, which was paid off almost 40 years ago, they soon discovered that sewage sometimes backed up in the living room and that the plumbing needed to be repaired. The distressing process of securing a home equity loan introduced Jones to an American reality.

Despite Jones' good credit score, low debt-to-income ratio, better-than-average income and several thousand dollars of savings, lenders who immediately expressed interest stopped or went quiet when they got to two questions.

What was her ZIP code? Answer: 90220. That's Compton, 29 percent Black, 68 percent Latino.

Was she married? Answer: No.

Federal law prohibits lenders from using the answers to those questions to determine a borrower's ability to repay a loan.

"When I initially apply for a loan online, without fail, I get no problem," said Jones, 37. "They bombard me with emails and letters. Then they see the property address or ask me if I'm married, and everything changes."

The United States is in the midst of a racial reckoning as protests that began in the wake of George Floyd's death in Minneapolis police custody, as well as high Black unemployment due to the coronavirus pandemic, have prompted some Americans to contemplate the ways institutionalized racism and discrimination have constrained Black lives for centuries.

Advocates, scholars and officials say one of the clearest examples of that ongoing discrimination exists in the housing market, where the gap in homeownership rates between Black and white Americans is wider than it was before the Civil Rights movement.

Seventy-six percent of white households owned their homes at the end of the second quarter of 2020, compared to just 47 percent of Black households, according to the Census Bureau. That 29-percentage-point gap, perpetuated by decades of housing and economic policies favorable toward white buyers and designed to exclude Black buyers, has only been exacerbated by the pandemic and before it the 2008 financial crisis. Homeownership is the prime driver of America's ongoing wealth gap.

"We have a housing market with different components, including rentals and purchases and financing and insurance, that is really built on a structure that was explicitly racist," said Debby Goldberg, vice president of housing policy and special projects at the National Fair Housing Alliance, a consortium of nonprofit anti-housing discrimination organizations. "It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone looking around to see how segregated we remain. To see this enormous homeownership gap. And hand in hand with that to see the enormous wealth gap that exists."

In Jones' case, being able to live reasonably required access to a home equity loan. Ultimately, just one bank, Navy Federal Credit Union, offered her a loan, but only after making her wait eight months - supposedly to see whether any additional heirs would lay claim to the house, she said - and with the condition that her boyfriend co-sign. Even then, the credit union offered her only $185,000. That's far less than $248,000, or up to 80 percent of the equity Jones had in the home after earlier repairs. That's what lenders typically allow a person with good credit to borrow.

Navy Federal declined to comment on Jones' case, citing its obligation to protect borrowers' privacy. The credit union is "committed to serving all of our members as a trusted financial partner," a Navy Federal spokesperson said by email.

The consequences of not owning a home or of becoming a homeowner later in life are enormous, experts say. It often leaves a family unable to reach other pillars of the American dream, like tapping into home equity to start a business, survive a job loss or a medical emergency or pay for a child's college education. It is part of the reason a higher percentage of Black households owe student loan debt than white households. And experts say not owning a home makes it harder for Black children to become adult homeowners.

"Black Americans are locked in a vicious cycle," said Andre M. Perry, a fellow in the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution who is author of "Know Your Price: Valuing Black Lives and Property in America's Black Cities." "It is the lack of wealth that is the first and most fundamental barrier to homeownership for Black people in this country."

America's housing gap ballooned after the New Deal, experts say, when the federal government rolled out a suite of programs to boost homeownership and construction-industry employment in the wake of the Great Depression. Many of the programs, such as the Federal Housing Administration, an agency that oversees federal backing of private mortgage loans, the introduction of the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage and a tax credit for those with mortgages, made buying a home much more affordable for white families.

But Black households were often left out of the homeownership boom because of redlining, a practice in which the Federal Housing Administration refused to back loans in areas that were occupied predominantly by people of color. Those areas, often lined or shaded red on agency maps, were considered too risky.

Other discriminatory policies also proliferated. In several cities, including Minneapolis, St. Louis, Seattle and Chicago, it wasn't uncommon to see housing deeds that forbade the sale of specific properties to people of color.

As a result, by 1950 only about a third of Black households owned their homes, compared to more than half of white households.

"Housing is a story about wealth. Access to housing is one of the ways to generate wealth," said Skylar Olsen, senior principal economist at Zillow, an online real estate information platform that regularly analyzes market trends. "Not having access to housing in the past because of redlining, that really, really impacted generations of wealth building."

The 1968 Fair Housing Act outlawed redlining. But experts say the barriers between Blacks and homeownership didn't evaporate with the law. A Northwestern University study of bias in the housing market published in January found that while overt forms of discrimination - a real estate agent who won't return a phone call or who will deny that a listing is available - have decreased over the past four decades, discrimination in the mortgage market showed little change from 1968 to 2016.

And Minneapolis, one of the cities where racially restrictive deeds were prominent during the early 20th century, to this day has the largest homeownership gap in the United States.

Experts say the reasons for the lack of change are baked into the financial system. Black neighborhoods are less likely to have bank branches in them, depriving many households of a chance to build a personal relationship with a banker that can lead to loans and positive credit histories. On-time rent payments aren't tallied into credit scores, while late payments are, creating a system that punishes misfortune while ignoring positive behavior. Rent payments and lower incomes also make it difficult for Black households to save for down payments.

And Olsen said that in an era when nearly half of young homebuyers needed gifts from their families to purchase homes, the lack of existing home equity from Black parents makes it harder for their children to purchase homes.

Since the Great Recession, bank lending standards have tightened in a way that bars many moderate-income buyers and those looking to purchase low-cost homes from the world of homeownership, Perry said.

Even when they make it to the mortgage market, Black homebuyers are more likely to be denied mortgages than any other racial group, according to a 2019 report by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or CFPB.

When they are approved for mortgages, Black buyers remain more likely than any other racial group to be charged higher interest rates and to be steered toward predatory loans. And when unemployment rises, as it has during the COVID-19 pandemic, Black households are more likely to lose their jobs and homes. Black Americans were twice as likely to be foreclosed upon during the 2008 financial crisis, Olsen said. They were also far more likely to have been offered high-cost and therefore high-risk loans. Between the second quarter of 2004 and the second quarter of 2019, the Black homeownership rate fell 9.1 percentage points while the white homeownership rate fell 3.1 percentage points.

The homeownership gap between Black and white Americans on the cusp of retirement reached a 30-year high, according to a 2019 Harvard University Joint Center for Housing Studies Report. And among those ages 50 to 64, the Black/white homeownership gap is even larger, at 27 percentage points.

"Let's be clear about what those numbers really mean," said Odette Williamson, a staff lawyer who oversees the Racial Justice and Equal Economic Opportunity project of the National Consumer Law Center, a nonprofit advocacy group. "Not only is this a generation of Black people who have less than some before them, less to help cover medical and other expenses at the end of life, less to live on in retirement. This is yet another generation where many will have absolutely nothing to pass on."

During the Great Recession, a 2007 Rasmussen poll found that 54 percent of Americans believed greedy, dishonest borrowers were to blame for the last housing crisis. The idea, along with racism and a declining sense of white American power, helped to bind the tea party together. But Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., who proposed a wave of financial regulations before and after that crisis, blamed banks and Washington lawmakers.

"Part of the reason for the confusion is that the lenders first peddled their products in communities of color," Warren said in an interview. "They perfected their cheating ways by taking advantage of African Americans and Latinos all across this country. And that just didn't raise anybody's attention.

"The fact that Black families were being stripped of their homes didn't feel like an urgent problem to the regulators in the Bush administration," said Warren, who first proposed the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in 2007. It became a reality during the Obama administration. "The lenders ... figured out the most effective ways to cheat people and then sold those products in every community. And that's when they brought down the whole economy."

Banks also packaged and sold groups of high-risk, high-cost mortgages like securities.

Those who manage to buy their homes also face a gulf in how their home prices will grow. According to the most recent Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances, the mean net housing wealth for Black households was $94,400 in 2016, less than half the $215,800 mean for white households. And an NBC News analysis of home value estimations from May 2020 on Zillow found that homes in ZIP codes that were predominantly Black were valued at just 60 percent of the value of homes in predominantly white neighborhoods.

And prices of Black-owned homes have appreciated far more slowly, as well. An NBC News analysis of home valuations from Zillow from 2010 to 2020 found that price growth of homes in predominantly Black ZIP codes was about half of the growth in predominantly white ZIP codes.

Experts say the same fundamentals that prevent would-be homeowners from getting mortgages keep Black homebuyers from getting loans to perform maintenance on properties and make retailers less interested in setting up shop nearby. Even parks and other public facilities tend to be more common and better maintained by governments in predominantly white areas.

"So now, not only do I not have as much of an income boost, I also have a limited ability to improve the capital stock," said Olsen, of Zillow. "The quality of the homes becomes more and more disparate between Black and white communities."

Perry, of the Brookings Institution, said: "The long-standing narrative in America is that the conditions of Black neighborhoods and cities are a direct result of the residents in them. People are so ahistorical that they forget there has been a policy violence leveled against Black people that comes out in the wash of research. There has been violence in practice from the nation's appraisers, which are almost 90 percent white. You cannot discount that violence happening on paper and in communities, year after year after year."

"To this day, our American Dream looks like an isolated hope."
Ebony Jones

As in many other American industries, The Appraisal Institute, an industry trade group, has maintained a " Diversity Pipeline Initiative" and has committed to expanding the profession in January.

In Compton, Jones said, a regular topic of conversation is how happy people are that Compton has its very own big-box store, part of a national chain. That's a meaningful convenience that Jones said she still can't believe people in other parts of the Los Angeles area have the luxury and gall to protest.

While the Black homeownership rate has increased since mid-2019, advocates worry that the homeownership gap will only grow, not only because the pandemic has sent Black unemployment to its highest level since the 1980s, but also because federal agencies have walked back Obama-era efforts to combat discrimination.

The CFPB, the government financial watchdog created under President Barack Obama and proposed by Warren, has drastically scaled back its discriminatory enforcement actions against bank lenders. The agency filed 11 such actions during the Obama era. The actions reclaimed what former Director Richard Cordray, an Obama appointee, described as $12 billion for consumers. After substantial resistance, they created conditions in which lenders knew the agency was watching and behaved accordingly, he said. The agency has filed just one enforcement action since then.

In July, the Department of Housing and Urban Development terminated a 2015 regulation connected to the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing section of the Civil Rights Act. The rule, which required local governments and jurisdictions receiving HUD funding to analyze systemic barriers to fair and equal housing, was deemed "unworkable and ultimately a waste of time" by HUD Secretary Ben Carson, the only Black member of the Trump Cabinet.

In its place, HUD introduced a rule that lowered the requirements for jurisdictions, allowing them to continue certification as long as they take an "active step" toward promoting the agency's new definition of fair housing.

Goldberg, of the National Fair Housing Alliance, said the new rule disregards segregation and other systemic factors in housing.

"You look around us at what's been going on in this pandemic and you can see the conditions of neighborhoods of color that have been disinvested have put them in harm's way," Goldberg said. "This rule was one of the tools we had to try to tackle the inequalities. To take it away now is just inexplicable and inexcusable."

A senior HUD official said that fair housing remains a vital goal to the department and that freeing jurisdictions from paperwork compliance burdens would allow them to continue making progress in promoting fair housing.

But President Donald Trump in a series of tweets last week appeared to confirm that rescinding the rule was about preventing further racial and economic integration of suburban neighborhoods. Trump, who has repeatedly returned to the racist theme that the American way of life is under assault from Black protesters since the George Floyd protests began, said the rule change was aimed at protecting the "Suburban Lifestyle Dream" from "low income housing built in your neighborhood."

...Your housing prices will go up based on the market, and crime will go down. I have rescinded the Obama-Biden AFFH Rule. Enjoy!
- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 29, 2020

"In the time we were building new suburbs after World War II, we made low-cost credit available to white families and explicitly did not to people of color," Goldberg said. "This is how we thought about the American Dream at that time. That's the image the president is trying to conjure up."

Cities and states have tried to address parts of the gap. Minneapolis voted in 2019 to increase housing density and, with it, likely residential integration by eliminating single-family home zoning. That will allow apartments, condominiums and townhomes to be built in many more neighborhoods. A similar bill is pending in the California Assembly.

But advocates say real change must come from the federal government.

"The benefit of the federal action is that it can be larger-scale," Goldberg said. "It sets a floor for everyone. Everyone has some basic level of protection."

Without leadership from the government, advocates and regulators say, the gap will continue.

"What I fear," said Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., chair of the Financial Services Committee, which regulates banking, "is that in the absence of so many cops on the beat, now that Trump has installed his people over at the CFPB, at HUD and all the agencies, is that redlining may have returned, that new forms of discrimination are taking shape."

That possibility could distort the lives of generations of Black Americans to come.

"I think the issue for us is that we don't come from generations of wealth. Most Black people can't say that - they cannot say their parents and their grandparents, aunts and uncles all owned homes," Jones said. "So, to this day, our American Dream looks like an isolated hope."

"I'm trying to break cycles," Jones said. "I'm trying to assure that my children's goal is not survival but to thrive and flourish in a world full of possibilities that remain easier for some people, white people, to access."

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The American dream while Black: Locked in a vicious cycle

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By Nigel Chiwaya and Janell RossAug. 3, 2020 Ebony Jones thought she was one of the lucky ones. Jones, a Black woman in her 30s, inherited a home her grandfather, a World War II veteran, had bought nearly seven decades earlier with the help of his GI Bill benefits.

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Redlining still hurting minorities today

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Redlining still hurting minorities today

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Baltimore rowhouses in 1938. (John Vachon/Farm Security Administration/Library of Congress)

Racial discrimination in mortgage lending in the 1930s shaped the demographic and wealth patterns of American communities today, a new study shows, with 3 out of 4 neighborhoods "redlined" on government maps 80 years ago continuing to struggle economically .

The study by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, released Wednesday, shows that the vast majority of neighborhoods marked "hazardous" in red ink on maps drawn by the federal Home Owners' Loan Corp. from 1935 to 1939 are today much more likely than other areas to comprise lower-income, minority residents.

"It's as if some of these places have been trapped in the past, locking neighborhoods into concentrated poverty," said Jason Richardson, director of research at the NCRC, a consumer advocacy group.

The Senate rolls back rules meant to root out discrimination by mortgage lenders

Researchers compared the HOLC maps, the most comprehensive documentation of discriminatory lending practices, with modern-day census data to determine how much neighborhood demographics have changed in 80 years. The findings have implications for today's po litical debates over housing, banking and financial regulation, as well as civil rights, as Congress seeks to weaken the government's ability to enforce fair-lending requirements. Policies that influence access to capital and credit have long-lasting effects on residential patterns, neighborhoods' economic health and household accumulation of wealth, the report said.

In the 1930s, government surveyors graded neighborhoods in 239 cities, color-coding them green for "best," blue for "still desirable," yellow for "definitely declining" and red for "hazardous." The "redlined" areas were the ones local lenders discounted as credit risks, in large part because of the residents' racial and ethnic demographics. They also took into account local amenities and home prices.

Neighborhoods that were predominantly made up of African Americans, as well as Catholics, Jews and immigrants from Asia and southern Europe, were deemed undesirable. "Anyone who was not northern-European white was considered to be a detraction from the value of the area," said Bruce Mitchell, a senior researcher at the NCRC and one of the study's authors.

White families have nearly 10 times the net worth of black families. And the gap is growing.

Loans in these neighborhoods were unavailable or very expensive, making it more difficult for low-income minorities to buy homes and setting the stage for the country's persistent racial wealth gap. (White families today have nearly 10 times the net worth of black families and more than eight times that of Hispanic families, according to the Federal Reserve.)

"Homeownership is the number-one method of accumulating wealth, but the effect of these policies that create more hurdles for the poor is a permanent underclass that's disproportionately minority," said John Taylor, president and chief executive of the NCRC. "I think most people believe the problem is not with the rules but with the people. Most middle-class whites in America don't have empirical observations of what happens in underserved neighborhoods or understand the historical treatment of poor and minority communities."

The Federal Housing Administration institutionalized the system of discriminatory lending in government-backed mortgages, reflecting local race-based criteria in their underwriting practices and reinforcing residential segregation in American cities. The discriminatory practices captured by the HOLC maps continued until 1968, when the Fair Housing Act banned racial discrimination in housing.

Could the #BankBlack movement help African Americans close the wealth gap?

But 50 years after that law passed, the lingering effects of redlining are clear, with the pattern of economic and racial residential segregation still evident in many U.S. cities - from Montgomery, Ala., to Flint, Mich., to Denver.

Nationally, nearly two-thirds of neighborhoods deemed "hazardous" are inhabited by mostly minority residents, typically black and Latino, researchers found. Cities with more such neighborhoods have significantly greater economic inequality. On the flip side, 91 percent of areas classified as "best" in the 1930s remain middle-to-upper-income today, and 85 percent of them are still predominantly white.

Researchers found that redlined neighborhoods in the South and the West are more likely today to be home to a largely minority population. Neighborhoods in the South and Midwest display the most persistent economic inequality.

In Macon, Ga., 65 percent of neighborhoods were marked "hazardous" in the 1930s, making it the most redlined city in the United States, followed closely by Birmingham, Ala., and Wichita, Kan.

Here are the 10 U.S. cities with the highest percentages of neighborhoods marked "hazardous" in the 1930s:

The racial disparity is reflected in the city's poverty statistics. Nearly 35 percent of blacks in Macon live in poverty today, compared with less than 13 percent of whites, according to 2012 to 2016 census data.

In Baltimore, one of the earliest cities to officially adopt restrictive covenants limiting African Americans and Jews to certain neighborhoods, nearly every census tract labeled "hazardous" in the 1930s remains low-to-moderate income today, researchers found. The only exceptions are the areas surrounding Baltimore's harbor, a former industrial front that's been redeveloped to attract businesses and tourism.

Nearly 70 percent of formerly redlined communities in Baltimore remain predominantly minority, as well as lower income. Even neighborhoods in western Baltimore that had been rated as "desirable" subsequently became populated with minority, low-income residents as middle-class whites fled to the suburbs, researchers said.

A 2015 study of home mortgage and small-business lending in Baltimore by the NCRC found that race, more than income, affected mortgage lending in the city. Lending is greater in neighborhoods with larger white populations, with banks making more than twice as many mortgage loans to whites as they did to blacks.

Interactive: View and download NCRC maps for 114 metropolitan areas

A February report by the Center for Investigative Reporting showed that redlining persists in 61 metro areas - from Detroit and Philadelphia to Little Rock and Tacoma, Wash. - even when controlling for applicants' income, loan amount and neighborhood, according to its analysis of Home Mortgage Disclosure Act records.

Banks have largely blamed the racial lending discrepancies on borrowers' credit scores. Lenders were supposed to soon start reporting extra information about credit scores and other loan-pricing features. But the Senate recently voted to roll back the new reporting requirements for small lenders.

The researchers also analyzed 30 cities for patterns of gentrification, where once-redlined neighborhoods showed an increase in median home values and educational attainment between 2000 and 2010. They found that in cities with higher levels of gentrification, more redlined neighborhoods had become middle-to-upper-income neighborhoods. These areas saw a greater influx in economic activity and changes to their downtowns. They also now have lower levels of segregation, with more interaction between blacks and whites, as well as greater economic inequality between newcomers and those who have historically lived there.

Researchers ranked Portland, Ore., which has seen an influx of financial investment from the tech sector, as the most gentrified American city, with 58 percent of its census tracts having gentrified. It is followed by Minneapolis, Seattle, Atlanta and Denver.

Detroit was the least gentrified city, the research showed, with less than 3 percent of its census tracts having gentrified, and only around the downtown core. But artists and other "urban pioneers" have in recent years begun moving into more pockets of the city, researchers said.

Longtime residents of formerly redlined neighborhoods are often pushed out when the areas' economic fortunes are reversed, researchers said. Many can no longer afford the rising rents. Homeowners often can't afford the increases in property taxes, and as their home values rise, many are tempted to sell and cash out.

"Is gentrification promoting sustainable desegregation?" Mitchell said. "Or is it just a movement towards increased segregation in the next census period?"
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Analysis | Redlining was banned 50 years ago. It's still hurting minorities today.

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These government maps documented racist lending practices that gave rise to today's segregated neighborhoods.

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Lorraine Hansberry's Inspiration for A Raisin in the Sun

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Lorraine Hansberry's Inspiration for A Raisin in the Sun

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Fighting for Home: The Roots of A Raisin in the Sun | Huntington Theatre Company

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The Hansberry’s house in Washington Park still stands today.

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Torey Edmonds has lived in the same house in an African-American neighborhood of the East End of Richmond, Va., for all of her 61 years. When she was a little girl, she says her neighborhood was a place of tidy homes with rose bushes and fruit trees, and residents had ready access to shops like beauty salons, movie theaters and several grocery stores.

But as she grew up, she says, the neighborhood went downhill. By the 1970s, stores had disappeared; those that did return were corner shops selling cheap alcohol but "no real food," Edmonds says. Houses declined too, as homeowners - including her parents - were rejected for loans.

"If the bank's not loaning, she says, "then things deteriorate."

Today, Edmonds' neighborhood remains overwhelmingly African-American, with a poverty rate of nearly 60%. Many of her neighbors suffer chronic medical conditions like kidney disease and diabetes.

"They age differently," says Edmonds, who works for Virginia Commonwealth University promoting community health. "We have a lot of our neighbors that have health challenges."

But it's not just Edmonds' neighborhood. In city after city across the U.S., from Milwaukee to Miami, researchers have found a disturbing pattern: People who live in neighborhoods that were once subjected to a discriminatory lending practice called redlining are today more likely to experience shorter life spans - sometimes, as much as 20 or 30 years shorter than other neighborhoods in the same city.

Researchers from the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, the University of Richmond and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee analyzed historic redlining maps from 142 urban areas across the U.S. - these maps, created in the 1930s, classified Black and immigrant communities as risky places to make home loans.They compared the maps to the current economic status and health outcomes in those neighborhoods today and found higher rates of poverty, shorter life spans and higher rates of chronic diseases including asthma, diabetes, hypertension, obesity and kidney disease.

These once-redlined neighborhoods are also more likely to have greater social vulnerability, meaning they're less able to withstand natural and human disasters because of their more limited resources.

The researchers published interactive versions of these city-by-city maps online for the public to explore their own communities. If your neighborhood was mapped back in the 1930s, these graphics allow you to see how it ranked back then and how it fares today.

What makes these findings especially urgent today, the researchers note, is that these neighborhoods have higher levels of many conditions that raise the risk of severe COVID-19.

"That's a startling revelation, that this global pandemic is going to have a more serious impact on communities that were redlined by official policy in the 1930s," says Jason Richardson, research director for the NCRC and a co-author of the study.
Redlining: Federally sanctioned discrimination
The redlining maps originated in the aftermath of the Great Depression, when the federal government set out to evaluate the riskiness of mortgages in major metropolitan areas of the country. The maps, created by the federal Home Owners' Loan Corporation, color-coded neighborhoods by credit worthiness. Areas with African-Americans and immigrants were almost always considered the highest risk, and they were marked in red on maps... hence, "redlining."

That practice and other discriminatory housing policies of the time helped concentrate poverty in communities of color for generations.

"When banks and other actors are discouraged from lending in the community, you see a very kind of predictable arc of that community," Richardson says. "When I stop and think about it, I'm kind of shocked by the lingering impact of these policies."

Redlining made it difficult, if not impossible, to buy or refinance. A lack of investment meant houses fell into disrepair. That led to health hazards like mold and lead paint. Industrial sites were more likely to be located near redlined neighborhoods, which meant more exposure to pollution.

As areas declined, retailers left, including grocery stores, which meant less access to healthy food. These neighborhoods also had less access to parks and other green spaces, meaning fewer places to exercise. All of those factors combined to create an environment conducive to poorer health outcomes, the researchers say.

"Where we live impacts our exposure to health-promoting resources and opportunities,"says Helen Meier, an epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and co-author of the study. "Redlining has systematically shaped characteristics of the built environment in neighborhoods [in ways] that are impacting our health."

The findings come as no surprise to Edmonds. "Trust me, I know," she says.

The average life expectancy in her neighborhood is just 68 years. That's 21 years less than in a well-off predominantlywhite community a few miles away in the West End of Richmond - a community that got the highest rating on those government redlining maps back in the 1930s. At one point in the pandemic, Edmonds' zip code - 23223 - also had the highest number of COVID-19 cases in Richmond.

Dr. Lisa Cooper, a health disparities researcher at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, was not involved in the research. She says that people often think of health as the result of individual choices. But she says the redlining study's findings show how health is also a result of a lack of choices baked into the very fabric of American cities by racist policies made long ago.

"If you just happened to be born in that neighborhood, who's to say you wouldn't be in the same predicament?" Cooper says.

Cooper notes that there's a large body of research linking residential segregation to negative health effects. It's less about who your neighbors are than about the concentration of disadvantage."
Structural racism, illustrated
Redlining played a major role in shaping the demographics of modern American urban areas, says Robert Nelson, a historian at the University of Richmond who focuses on urban housing policy and race. And the racism underlying those redlining decisions is undeniable, he says. He's a co-author of the study on redlining and modern health outcomes.

As director of the Digital Scholarship Lab at the university, Nelson helped create an interactive project that visualizes the study's findings; it juxtaposes the comments made by federal surveyors who rated neighborhoods on those 1930s maps with their modern-day health indicators. "Infiltration of negroes" is a common reason cited to explain an area's rating as high risk.

"These are not just racist attitudes. This is policy that is being made by the federal government in these documents," Nelson says. He says redlining didn't create residential segregation but helped cement it, because the practice was a federal policy that set a standard which private lenders followed.

"If you want an example of what systemic or structural racism looks like, you really aren't going to find a better example" than these maps, he says.

Along with other federal segregationist housing policies of the time, redlining helped turn white families into homeowners and moved them into the suburbs, while leaving out many families of color, particularly African-American families, many of whom later ended up pushed into urban housing projects, he says.

"This is a way for white families to build intergenerational wealth, and black families are just cut off from those opportunities for generations," says Nelson. Although redlining was outlawed by the 1968 Fair Housing Act, the damage was already done, he says.
Links between redlining and health
The redlining maps were first digitized in 2016. Since then, several studies have examined the links between redlining and health outcomes today in specific cities or regions of the U.S., says Dr. Nancy Krieger, a professor of social epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. For example, Krieger's work has found links between redlining and preterm births in New York City and late-stage cancer diagnoses in Massachusetts.

Other work has found that formerly redlined neighborhoods tend to be hotter than non-redlined areas in the same city, with fewer trees, which also impacts health, as NPR has previously reported.

Krieger, who was not involved in the study from NCRC and its partner universities, says its findings are important because they offer the first nationwide look at the links between redlining and a range of public health outcomes. They also emphasize the ways in which racist policies of the past have ongoing ramifications.

"History never really says goodbye," Krieger says, quoting the Uruguyan writer Eduardo Galeano. "History says, see you later."

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In U.S. Cities, The Health Effects Of Past Housing Discrimination Are Plain To See

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Torey Edmonds has lived in the same house in an African-American neighborhood of the East End of Richmond, Va., for all of her 61 years. When she was a little girl, she says her neighborhood was a place of tidy homes with rose bushes and fruit trees, and residents had ready access to shops like beauty salons, movie theaters and several grocery stores.

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By Larry Buchanan, Quoctrung Bui and Jugal K. Patel

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Black Lives Matter May Be the Largest Movement in U.S. History (Published 2020)

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Recent polls suggest that about 15 million to 26 million people in the U.S. have participated in recent protests.

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The Journey to My American Dream | Diego Corzo | TEDxYouth@Austin

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Hansberry's Family - the inspiration for A Raisin in the Sun

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Hansberry's Family - the inspiration for A Raisin in the Sun

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Lorraine Hansberry | A Raisin in the Sun: Jim Crow, Home Ownership, and the American Dream | PBS LearningMedia

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Learn how Jim Crow laws impacted home ownership and the pursuit of the American Dream in this series of videos from the American Masters film, Lorraine Hansberry: Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart. Lorraine Hansberry's family was at the forefront of fighting segregation in Chicago in the 1940s, even taking the fight all the way to the Supreme Court.

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During the Republican National Convention, an ice sculpture at a Cleveland art gallery inspired passersby to consider the concept of the American dream.

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“Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage.”