Redlining is Gone but Entrenched Practices Remain

By Barrington M. Salmon Special to The Informer

In the 1930s, the federal government, states, real estate brokers, mortgage lenders and others, engaged in a practice – redlining – that kept African Americans out of white neighborhoods. The practice led to denial areas, and neighborhoods where Black people could not get loans and investments because their areas were labeled as high risk and too sketchy to insure.

In addition to keeping communities white, redlining had the effect of robbing African Americans of countless millions– maybe billions– of dollars, since the practice was codified because of lending and real estate discrimination and disinvestment.

It would be safe to assume that in 2023, redlining is a thing of the past consigned to the proverbial dustbin of history, but to think so would be wrong.

“Now it’s not as obvious or explicit but redlining is extremely pervasive and prevalent in society today,” an official from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) told the Washington Informer. “The prevalence hasn’t changed. We fight every day to effect change. We have to be diligent in our efforts to fight it.”

Redlining’s corrosive legacy persists in discriminatory lending, inequities and disparities in housing practices and how homes are financed. Ultimately, all this has a broad impact on homeownership, the value of homes and especially in the net worth of African American families and individuals.

There are numerous accounts that at the end of the Second World War, the United States faced a large housing demand as American servicemen and women wanted to buy homes and raise their families. In response, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) expanded its ability to provide financing and insure loans. With the feds backing lenders and developers, that reduced risk to banks and those offering mortgages and construction loans.

“The lower risk to lenders resulted in lower interest rates, which granted middle-class people the ability to borrow money to purchase homes,” said Rajeh Saadeh, a real estate and civil rights attorney, in a Banknote story about redlining. “With the new lending policies and larger potential homeowner pool, real estate developers bought huge tracts of land just outside of urban areas and developed them by building numerous homes and turning the areas into today’s suburbs.”

However, many of these new developments had restrictive covenants that barred Black people from buying these homes. Meanwhile in those parts of cities where large numbers of non-whites lived, the redlining, Saadeh explained, made “them ineligible for federally backed mortgages (which effectively meant, for affordable mortgages, period).”

“Consequently, people of color could not get loans to buy in the suburbs, nor could they borrow to purchase homes in areas in which they were concentrated,” the attorney, who is also a former real estate law professor, said.

Saadeh said the ramification of America’s “systemic, codified policy by the government, mortgage lenders, real estate developers and real estate agents as a bloc to deprive Black people of homeownership … been generational.”

Andre M. Perry, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and his colleague Da- vid Harshbarger, a former research analyst with the Metropolitan Policy Program, co-wrote in a 2019 report titled: “America’s Formerly Redlined Neighborhoods Have Changed, and So Must Solutions to Rectify Them.” The report explained the past continues to haunt the present.

“Together with racially restrictive housing covenants that prohibited Black Americans from buying certain properties, redlining prevented generations of families from gaining equity in homeownership or making improvements to homes already owned,” the report read. “These unjust practices form part of a long history of discrimination, which has contributed to the disparities in homeownership and wealth still observed between the Black and white populations of the country today.”

Even with passage of the Fair Housing Act in 1968, a range of other forms of discriminatory housing practices have reared their ugly heads. For example, housing experts have documented what some characterize as “reverse redlining,” where banks have engaged in predatory lending in Black and Latino neighborhoods that once were legally redlined. One of the primary reasons for the housing crash in 2008 was mortgage lenders enticing low-income borrowers with hundreds of thousands of risky subprime loans, including "no doc" and balloon-payment loans. As a consequence, about a half of Black homeowners and a third of Latino homeowners lost their homes and both communities have yet to fully recover.

The HUD representative said agency officials and staff use analytical metrics to uncover evidence of redlining. Where HUD finds lenders aren’t lending to marginalized communities, they go in and force the implementation of remedies as well as investments in affected communities. The official said HUD has also taken a wider, more comprehensive look at different elements of the housing ecosystem, such as appraisals. Recently, there have been several stories about appraisers who value the homes and land of African Americans for hundreds of thousands of dollars less because the owners are Black.

“Redlining is just one of many aspects of Fair Lending aspects. “Appraisals,” the HUD official said, “inform the lender of what the property is worth. There has been a historic undervaluing of communities of color and that continues to be pervasive. We’re looking at agents and brokers. It’s a big task.”

“HUD is definitely taking a hard look at the appraiser ecosystem looking for unnecessary barriers to entry, ways to increase diversity and how to make it easier for Blacks to get into an almost all-white industry.”

D.C., PG County Both Get Failing Grades for Air Quality

By Kayla Benjamin WI Climate & Environment Reporter

Air quality in the D.C. region has continued to improve over the last year, but parts of the metro area remain highly polluted by ground-level ozone smog, according to the American Lung Association’s “2023 State of the Air Report,” released on April 19. Prince George’s County and the District both received ‘F’ grades for ozone pollution, which can cause respiratory issues and trigger asthma attacks. Recent research has also linked long-term exposure to increased risks for cardiovascular issues and metabolic disorders like hyperglycemia and diabetes. Three other Maryland counties—Anne Arundel, Baltimore County, and Harford—also received failing grades for ozone. The Washington region as a whole ranked 26th worst out of 227 metro areas, dropping four places down from last year’s report.

However, when it came to fine particle pollution, another common and harmful air pollutant, every Maryland county received an ‘A’ or ‘B’ grade from the American Lung Association. The District received a C. Across the region and the nation, air quality has improved dramatically since the organization first began tracking it in 1996.

Air Pollution And Environmental Injustice

However, the overall improvement in U.S. air quality has not touched all communities equally.

“The findings from this recent State of the Air report demonstrate that air quality has improved across the nation, which I think is great,” said Dr. Stephanie Lovinsky-Desir, a pediatric pulmonologist in New York City.

“But the problem is that there are still major differences existing between which neighborhoods and which people are exposed to worse air quality.”

Nationally, people of color are 3.7 times more likely to live in a county that fails on all three pollution measures used in the American Lung Association’s report. Lovinsky-Desir said that the disparity has actually widened somewhat in recent years.

“Lots of policies have been imple mented in order to improve air qual ity, but we know that these policies are not routinely experienced across all neighborhoods in all communities,” she said. “It might be easier, or there may be more advocacy, to comply with these policies in richer and whiter neighborhoods than historically mar ginalized communities.”

That national trend plays out in the District. One 2021 study published in the journal GeoHealth found that some neighborhoods in Southeast experience more than four times as many premature deaths related to pollution compared to some wealthy areas in Northwest.

Clean Air Fight In Ward 5 Illustrates The Nationwide Problem

Sebrena Rhodes, a community or ganizer with Empower DC and Ad visory Neighborhood Commissioner for Ivy City in Ward 5, has been fight ing for clean air in her community for years.

“Ivy City is one of the oldest Black communities in the District. We have a chemical plant that's been here since 1930 with no air quality permit,” Rhodes explained. Her ongoing fight to close that plant, National Engineering Products, became the subject of “People Rising: Ivy City,” a short documentary released at the D.C. En- vironmental Film Festival earlier this spring.

Ward 5 has the highest concentration of land zoned for industrial purposes in the city. Many of those industrial sites—including the chem- ical plant—sit right next to residential properties. The Brentwood neighborhood hosts a paving company, an asphalt plant and transfer stations for recycling and trash.

“Even on a good day, where you can breathe, residents are not able to open their windows or sit on their porches because it's almost like you're sitting next to your trash can,” Rhodes said. Read the full story on washingtoninformer.com. WI

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