I want you to close your eyes for a second. Well,
actually, keep them open if you're driving or
operating heavy machinery safety first. Yeah,
yeah, please do. But if you can, I want you to
picture a map, specifically a vintage map of
Philadelphia. from 1937. It looks like your standard
city planners, grid streets, avenues, rivers.
Sure. But it's color coded. It looks almost like
a paint by numbers puzzle that someone gave up
on halfway through. You've got these patches
of green, some areas washed in blue, a fair amount
of yellow, and then starkly contrasting against
the rest, you have these aggressive, solid blocks
of red. And that map isn't just a piece of history
or a cool vintage aesthetic you'd find in an
antique shop. That map is a smoking gun. Those
colors, green, blue, yellow, red, they weren't
just categorizing architecture or traffic flow.
They were determining the financial destiny of
the human beings living inside those lines. And
that red ink, that is the origin of the term
we are unpacking today, redlining. Exactly. We're
doing a deep dive into redlining. And I know
you've probably heard the term. Oh, yeah. It
gets thrown around a lot. It gets thrown around
a lot in political debates or on Twitter threads.
You might have a rough idea that it means banks
being racist in the past. But today, our mission
is different. We aren't just looking at the definition.
We are going to look at the machinery. And that
distinction is vital. It is incredibly easy to
think of redlining as a few bad Apple bankers
making prejudiced choices in a back room. But
the reality, when you actually look at the source
material, the government manuals, the sociological
studies, the lawsuits, is that this was a systemic
government sponsored engine. It was policy. It
was policy. It was a machine designed to separate
specific people from capital based on the color
of their skin. OK, so before we start taking
that machine apart to see it. how it works. Let's
get the official definition on the table. When
we say redlining, what are we actually defining?
Strictly speaking, redlining is the systemic
denial of services. And I mean, a whole range
of services. Not just loans. Not just loans.
We're talking financial, health care, retail,
insurance. The denial of those services to residents
of specific neighborhoods, usually based on significant
numbers of racial and ethnic minorities. And
usually we hear about this in the context of
black history in America. That's sort of the
main narrative. Predominantly, yes, that's the
primary context. But the sources point out that
the scope is actually broader. This practice
also targeted Mexican Americans in the southwestern
United States. And this part actually surprised
me during the research. You too. It was prevalent
in Canada, specifically Ontario, from the 1930s
to the 1950s. I didn't realize it went north
of the border. We tend to think of Canada as
exempt from this specific brand of housing segregation.
Not at all. The mechanics were slightly different,
but the outcome segregation and capital starvation
was the same. And the term itself, redlining,
is actually credited to a sociologist named John
McKnight in the 1960s. He was describing the
practice in Chicago where banks would literally,
physically draw a red line on a wall map to mark
areas they considered hazardous. So it's not
a metaphor? No, not originally. It was literal.
If you lived inside the red line, you were cut
off. Period. So that's the definition. But I
want to get to the how, because you don't just
wake up one day and have an entire national banking
system agree to discriminate in the exact same
way without some coordination. Who were the architects?
Who built the machine? To understand the architects,
we have to travel back to the Great Depression.
It's the 1930s. The U .S. housing market is in
absolute freefall. People are defaulting on mortgages
left and right. Total chaos. Total chaos. Now,
here is a detail most people miss. Before the
1930s, the mortgage, as we know it, didn't really
exist. What do you mean by that? People bought
houses, didn't they? They did, but the terms
were brutal. You usually had to put 50 % down.
50. 50%. And the loan was a short -term balloon
payment due in three to five years. You paid
interest for a few years, and then boom, you
owed the whole principal. So it wasn't amortized.
You didn't pay it down slowly. No. It was a rich
man's game. If you were working class, you rented.
End of story. Okay, so the concept of paying
a little bit every month for 30 years, the standard
American mortgage, that wasn't a thing. No, that
was an invention. The federal government, trying
to save the economy, stepped in. In 1935, the
Federal Home Loan Bank Board asked a group called
the Homeowners Loan Corporation, or HOLC, to
survey 239 cities. HOLC, okay. They wanted to
figure out how to stabilize housing. And to do
that, they needed to know which neighborhoods
were safe for this new type of long -term lending
they were inventing. So they were essentially
auditing the real estate of the entire nation.
Precisely. They wanted to create residential
security maps. And this is where that... color
grading system comes in it is chillingly simple
they divided every neighborhood into one of four
categories okay let's break them down type a
was outlined in green these were the best areas
typically affluent usually suburban on the outskirts
of cities okay so green is go green means money
green is go then you have type b outlined in
blue these are considered still desirable still
a good bet okay then type c yellow labeled declining
You're starting to see some warning flags for
the bankers. Exclining. Okay. And finally, type
D outlined in red. These were labeled hazardous.
Hazardous. That is such a loaded word to use
for a neighborhood. It sounds like a toxic waste
dump or a place where a volcano is about to erupt.
It doesn't sound like a place where families
live. Well, the toxicity they were worried about
wasn't chemical. It was racial. Uh -huh. This
is where the explicit racism of the criteria
becomes undeniable. We are inferring this from
dating patterns. It is written in their manuals.
The source material references a Philadelphia
map specifically. It lists the detrimental influences
of a red zone. And what do they list? Do you
know what they listed as a detriment to property
value? I'm almost afraid to ask, but lay it on
us. Concentration of Negroes and Italians. Wow.
It's just right there in black and white. In
black and white. They literally listed human
beings, specific ethnicities as a detrimental
influence. on par with i don't know a sinkhole
or a flood zone or being next to a factory or
something Exactly. And this wasn't just the HOLC.
This is key. The Federal Housing Administration,
or FHA, formalized this process. They had a chief
land economist named Homer Hoyt. He helped develop
the first underwriting criteria for mortgages.
So he wrote the rulebook. He wrote the rulebook.
And the FHA manuals explicitly warned banks to
steer clear of areas with inharmonious racial
groups. Inharmonious racial groups. It sounds
so bureaucratic, so sterile. But the impact is
devastating. That's how systemic racism works.
It hides behind jargon. But play devil's advocate
for a second. If I'm a banker in 1940, isn't
it my job to avoid risk? If the government says
these areas are risky, isn't it just smart business
to not lend there? That's the argument they used.
Of course, they cloaked it in the language of
actuarial risk. But here's the catch. And it's
the whole point. The risk was a self -fulfilling
prophecy created by the map itself. Walk me through
that. How does the map create the risk? Okay,
imagine you live in a neighborhood that gets
marked red. Suddenly, no bank will give you a
loan to buy a house there. More importantly...
No bank will give you a home improvement loan,
so your roof starts to leak. You can't fix it.
You can't fix it. The landlord who owns the building
next door, he can't get a loan to update the
plumbing, so he lets it rot. Business owners
can't get loans to open shop. Right, because
capital has been cut off. The money stick it
has turned off. Exactly. So the physical stock
of the neighborhood deteriorates. Property values
tank. Because nobody can get a mortgage to buy
the homes, meaning you can only sell for cash,
usually at a loss. Which shrinks the pool of
potential buyers to almost nothing. Almost nothing.
Five years later, the surveyors come back, look
at the peeling paint and the crumbling porches
and say, see, we were right. This area is hazardous.
But it's hazardous because they choked it. It's
like tying a tourniquet around someone's leg
and then blaming the leg for turning purple.
That is the perfect analogy. And the FHA didn't
just passively observe this. They enforced it.
To get that lucrative FHA mortgage insurance,
which protected the bank if the borrower defaulted,
the bank had to follow the map. Ah, so there
was a financial incentive to discriminate. A
huge one. If you wanted the government's backing,
you had to play by their rules. And their rules
were racist. And what did that look like in terms
of numbers? The numbers are staggering. Between
1945 and 1959, less than 2 % of all federally
insured home loans went to African Americans.
Less than 2 % during the post -war boom. The
biggest economic expansion in modern history.
The biggest housing boom in American history.
The era that built the white middle class. The
GI Bill, the suburbs, Levittown, all of that
wealth creation was subsidized by the government.
And black Americans were systematically locked
out of the building. So the American dream was,
by design, not for everyone. By design. And it
wasn't just mortgages, was it? If you mark a
neighborhood as red, as hazardous, that signal
travels. It's not just the bank manager looking
at the map. That's right. Once you draw a hazardous
line around a community, other industries take
note. The web of denial spreads. Let's talk about
insurance. Right, because you can't really have
a mortgage without home insurance. It's the safety
net. If the house burns down, the bank wants
to know they get paid. Exactly. Post -World War
II, homeowners insurance became standard. But
urban historians like Bench Annsfield have found
that insurance companies instituted rigid redlining
policies. So they had their own maps. They had
their own maps or they used the government's.
There's a specific piece of evidence from 1964,
an Aetna Billiton advising underwriters to literally
use a red line around questionable areas on their
maps. So even in the swinging 60s, long after
this was supposedly known to be a problem, they
were still using the red pen. They were. And
the New York Urban Coalition put it perfectly
in 1978. They said, a neighborhood without insurance
is a neighborhood doomed to death. Doomed to
death. That's bleak. It is, because if you can't
insure a property, you can't sell it, you can't
buy it, and you certainly can't build wealth
from it. It freezes the real estate market completely.
It's a death sentence. It even trickled down
to things that seem totally unrelated to high
finance. I saw a note in the research about pizza
delivery. It sounds trivial compared to mortgages,
but yes, this is about the daily indignities
of living in a redlined area. It's about the
quality of life. The sources mentioned that grocery
chains and even pizza delivery companies would
redline areas refusing service or investment.
They literally wouldn't deliver. They wouldn't
deliver. Or, more systemically, if you can't
get a grocery store to open in your neighborhood
because corporate HQ has redlined the zip code,
what do you get? You get a food desert. You get
gas station food and convenience stores. Exactly.
Or what activists now call food apartheid because
desert implies it's a natural phenomenon. This
was a man -made decision. It forces residents
to travel further and pay more for basic nutrition.
It's the poverty tax. Yeah. It is expensive to
be poor. It's expensive to be poor and it's exhausting.
So you can't buy a house. You can't insure the
house if you manage to buy it. And you can't
even get a fresh vegetable or pizza delivered
to your door. It's total isolation. It is economic
suffocation. And that creates a deep systemic
desperation. And that desperation leads us to
the next and arguably darker phase of this history.
Because eventually the laws changed. The civil
rights movement happened. The Fair Housing Act
of 1968 made redlining denying loans illegal.
But the banks didn't just say, OK, we'll treat
everyone fairly now. They figured out a new strategy.
And this is where it gets really interesting
or really infuriating. We move from redlining
to reverse redlining. Correct. It's a pivot.
Classic redlining is, I won't lend to you because
of where you live. Reverse redlining is, I will
specifically target you because of where you
live, but I'm going to give you a terrible, expensive,
predatory loan. So instead of starving the neighborhood,
they decided to poison it. That is a very apt
way to put it. The mechanism works because, remember,
these neighborhoods had been starved of credit
for decades. There was no competition. If you
lived in a black neighborhood in Chicago or Baltimore,
you didn't have five banks competing for your
business. You had no options. You had no options.
So when a lender finally showed up offering money,
people were desperate to say yes. They'd been
told no their entire lives. But why would a bank
want to give out bad loans? I thought the whole
point of banking was lending to people who can
pay you back. If you give someone a loan they
can't afford, don't you lose money when they
default? Ah, see, that's the old model of banking.
By the 2000s, the banking model had changed.
This is the era of securitization. Okay, that's
a big word. Break it down. Banks weren't keeping
the liens they made. They weren't holding them
on their books. They were bundling them up by
the thousands, good loans, bad loans, all mixed
together and selling them to Wall Street as bonds,
as mortgage -backed securities. The big short
stuff. Exactly. The bank made its money off the
fees for originating the loan. Once they sold
it, the risk wasn't theirs anymore. It was some
pension funds problem in Norway. So they had
no incentive to make sure the loan was actually
a good one. They had an incentive to make as
many loans as possible as quickly as possible.
And this created a perverse incentive called
the yield spread premium. Yield spread premium.
That sounds like jargon designed to hide something
nasty. Break that down for us. It was nasty.
Essentially, it was a kickback, a bonus paid
to loan officers if they could get a borrower
to sign a loan with a higher interest rate than
they actually qualified for. Wait, pause. You're
saying if I walk into a bank with perfect credit
and I qualify for a 4 % interest rate, the loan
officer gets a bonus for tricking me into a 7
% rate? Yes, that's exactly what it means. They
made more money by selling you a worse product.
It's like going to a doctor who gets a bonus
for prescribing you a drug that makes you sicker.
That's just fundamentally corrupt. And this is
where the racial targeting becomes surgical.
The Wells Fargo investigation is the smoking
gun here. It showed that they specifically targeted
emerging markets, their internal code word for
black communities. Emerging markets. Right. They
knew these communities had been historically
excluded and might not have the financial literacy
or the. generational experience to spot a bad
deal. They saw vulnerability and exploited it.
They exploited the desperation created by the
original redlining. Explicitly. The evidence
in the affidavits from former loan officers is
stomach -churning. Wells Fargo cultivated relationships
with centers of influence, specifically black
churches. The churches. Yes. They held wealth
-building seminars after Sunday service. The
pastor, trusting the bank, would endorse them
from the pulpit. The bank would make a donation
to the church for every application filled out.
That is distinctively evil. Using the pulpit
to sell subprime toxic assets to your own congregation.
It was a betrayal of trust on a massive scale.
And here's the data point that destroys the it's
just economics argument. A high income black
borrower, someone earning over $68 ,000 a year
in the 2000s, was almost twice as likely to get
a subprime loan as a low income white borrower.
Let me say that again. A high income black person
was a bigger subprime target than a low income
white person. It wasn't about income. It wasn't
about credit score. It was a race tag. It was
about race. And the internal communications proved
it. The lawsuit revealed that loan officers referred
to black borrowers as mud people and called the
subprime products ghetto loans. Mud people. That
is just it's pure hate masked as banking. It
means you realize that the mentality of the 1937
map didn't die. It just put on a different suit
and learned some new jargon. It did. And while
Wells Fargo settled that lawsuit for one hundred
and seventy five million dollars regarding discrimination
between 2004 and 2009, they weren't the only
ones. This was an industry wide practice. Right.
Who are the others? Associated Bank settled for
two hundred million for rejecting black and Latino
applicants in Chicago and Milwaukee. Hudson City
Savings Bank settled for thirty three million
for avoiding majority minority communities. That's
classic redlining. And for their broker. election
practices. And there was a recent one too, right?
Yes. City National Bank paid $31 million just
last year in 2023 to resolve redlining allegations.
2023. That's what I want listeners to catch.
We started talking about 1937, but we are talking
about settlements happening now. This is an ancient
history. It's current events. Because the practice
creates a legacy that is very, very hard to undo.
And that brings us to the economic fallout. We
need to talk about the racial wealth gap. Because
wealth isn't just about income, what you make
in a year. It's about assets, what you own and
what you pass down. Home equity, stocks, savings.
Right. It's the difference between being able
to pay rent and being able to pay for your kid's
college without loans. It's the safety net. Exactly.
There's a study on intergenerational mobility
that highlights a stuck -in -place phenomenon.
It shows that black children born in the bottom
income quintile, the poorest 20%, have only a
2 .5 % chance of rising to the top quintile.
Only 2 .5%. For white children born in that same
bottom quintile, that chance is 10 .6%. That
is a massive difference in opportunity. It basically
says the American dream. The idea that if you
work hard, you rise up works four times better
for one group than the other. And the raw wealth
numbers are even starker. For every $100 in wealth
that a white family holds, the average black
family holds just $5 .04. $5 .04 versus $100.
That's not a gap. That's a chasm. It's almost
nothing. Think about what that $100 represents.
It's a down payment on a first home for your
kid. It's a safety net if you lose your job.
It's the capital to start a small business. And
if you only have $5? If you only have $5, you
have no margin for error. One flat tire, one
medical bill, and you spiral into debt. And a
huge chunk of that disparity comes from home
equity. Because the homes in those red line type
D neighborhoods from the 30s... They still have
lower values today. So the government effectively
subsidized wealth creation for white families
in the suburbs while suppressing it for black
families in the cities. And now we are seeing
the compound interest of that decision over 80
years. Precisely. It's the compound interest
of discrimination. And it affects business, too.
A study by Dan and Mergluck showed that black
neighborhoods receive fewer commercial loans
even when you account for business density and
credit quality. So you can't build a business
to close the gap either. The machinery is still
grinding. It just has different gears now. It
feels like every deer is locked. Yeah. But it's
not just money, is it? We have to talk about
the physical toll. This is the part of the research
that really surprised me. I knew about the money,
but I didn't know about the health impact. If
I walk from a historically green -lined suburb
to a red -lined neighborhood today, what am I
physically experiencing? You are experiencing
a different environment entirely. And this is
where we get into environmental racism. Okay.
It turns out... Those hazardous red lines didn't
just signal financial risk. They invited environmental
hazards. African -Americans are 75 percent more
likely to live near hazardous waste facilities.
75 percent. That's not a coincidence. That's
city planning. That's a choice someone made.
It is. If you are a city planner in the 50s or
60s deciding where to put a highway, a waste
treatment plant. Or a refinery. Where do you
put it? You face the least political resistance
in the area with the least political power and
the lowest property values. You put it in the
red zone. You put it in the red zone. The source
material mentions a specific refinery in Philadelphia
Gray's Ferry. Yes, responsible for the majority
of the city's toxic emissions. And who lives
there? It's a community that was historically
marginalized. A 2022 study looked at 202 cities
and found that redlined areas had consistently
higher levels of nitrogen dioxide and fine particulate
matter in the air. So you are physically breathing
worse air because of a map drawn. 80 years ago.
Every single day. And it's not just the air,
is it? It's the heat. The urban heat island effect.
I've heard of this. Right. In many cities, the
redlined neighborhoods are on average 5 to 12
degrees hotter than the greenlined ones in the
summer. 12 degrees. That's the difference between
a hot day and a dangerous, life -threatening
heat stroke. Why is it so much hotter? It comes
down to impervious surfaces. Concrete, asphalt.
Brick. These materials absorb solar radiation
all day and radiate it back out at night. Like
a giant radiator. Exactly. Green neighborhoods
were designed with setbacks, lawns, and tree
canopies. Red neighborhoods were zoned for high
density, mixed use industry, and pavement. They
have far less green space. So the city didn't
plant trees there. And they often don't maintain
the ones that are there. Cities often use property
taxes to fund local maintenance, like parks departments.
If you suppress the value of the homes via redlining,
the tax base crumbles. No tax base means no budget
for pruning trees or cracking up concrete to
plant new ones, so you get a concrete oven. And
that heat isn't just uncomfortable, it kills.
It acts... as a stress multiplier. If you have
asthma, which you're more likely to have because
the zoning laws allowed the diesel bus depot
to be built next to your house, the heat exacerbates
it. We see higher rates of cardiac arrest during
heat waves, specifically in these zip codes.
This brings us to that shocking stat about life
expectancy, the death gap. It's the most visceral
outcome of all of this. In Baltimore, neighborhoods
that were rated red have a life expectancy five
years shorter than the green neighborhoods. Five
years is a lot. It is. But in Richmond, Virginia,
the gap is 21 years. Wait, what? 21 years? 21
years. Between a historically black neighborhood
and a nearby white one, it's one of the most
extreme examples in the country. That is an entire
generation of life lost. That's hard to even
process. How is that possible? It includes higher
odds of late -stage cancer diagnoses, lower screening
rates. The sources say 64 % lower for colorectal
cancer in redlined areas. And science is starting
to look at this through the lens of epigenetics
and allostatic load. Break that down. Epigenetics.
Basically, the constant chronic stress of living
in a loud, hot, polluted, financially precarious
environment literally weathers the body. It keeps
your cortisol levels, your stress hormone high
constantly. Over time, that changes your DNA
expression. It accelerates aging at a cellular
level. So the map isn't just influencing your
wallet. It is rewriting your biology. That's
what the evidence is pointing towards. And then
COVID -19 happened. And I imagine that just laid
all of this bare. It was a perfect storm. It
was a tragic real world experiment. When researchers
overlaid maps of high COVID -19 impact infection
rates, death rates, they matched almost perfectly
with the 1930s HLC redlining maps. Because of
everything we just said. Everything. overcrowding
due to housing segregation, a higher percentage
of essential workers who couldn't stay home and
work on Zoom, and all those pre -existing conditions
we just discussed, like asthma and heart disease
caused by the environmental racism. So the machinery
of redlining weakened the collective immune system
of these neighborhoods, making them tragically
vulnerable when the pandemic hit. That's a perfect
way to put it. So we've covered the history,
the economics, and the health. But now I want
to pivot to the present. Because you mentioned
earlier that the map has changed form. It's not
paper anymore. It's digital. This is one of the
most insidious mutations of redlining. Digital
redlining. We think of the internet as this great
equalizer, right? Information wants to be free.
But you're saying the algorithms have learned
the same bad habits. Algorithms are trained on
data. If the historical data is biased, if it
reflects decades of biased lending decisions,
the algorithm learns that bias. It sees a correlation
between a certain zip code and defaults, and
it perpetuates the pattern without a human ever
making a racist choice. The machine learns to
be racist. Exactly. But it's also about how ad
platforms work. Take the Facebook case from 2019.
HUD, the Department of Housing and Urban Development,
charged Facebook with housing discrimination.
How does a social network discriminate in housing?
That seems strange. Facebook allowed advertisers
to target or, more importantly, exclude users
based on affinity groups. So if I'm a landlord
and I want to rent an apartment, I could tell
Facebook, show this ad to people, but exclude
anyone with an affinity for Hispanic culture.
Wow. So they aren't drawing a red line around
a neighborhood. They are drawing a red line around
a user profile. It's redlining the person. not
the place. Exactly. It's non -geographic redlining.
It uses proxies. They might not have a checkbox
that says race, but they use your interests,
your likes, the zip code you log in from, and
your browsing history to achieve the same exclusion.
And it happens in milliseconds inside a black
box that no regulator can easily say. And this
extends to politics too, right? This isn't just
about ads for apartments. Absolutely. The sources
call it political redlining. Campaign managers
use the same kind of data to decide who is worth
talking to. They might restrict political information
to specific demographics they see as likely voters.
Or worse. Or worse, they identify communities
to discourage from voting voter suppression efforts
targeted with surgical precision based on data
that correlates with race. They can micro target
disinformation to specific groups to lower turnout.
It's terrifying because it's invisible. At least
with the old maps, you could go to the library,
you could find the map, you could see the red
line. With an algorithm, you don't even know
you're being excluded. You just don't see the
ad for the house. You don't see the ad for the
job. Your world is quietly curated for you. That
is the challenge of the 21st century. How do
you audit a black box? How do you prove intent
when the intent is just a mathematical correlation?
Okay, we've been pretty heavy on the doom and
gloom, and rightfully so. This is heavy stuff.
But we can't talk about redlining without talking
about the people who fought back. Because there
were people who saw this machinery and tried
to throw a wrench in the gears. Absolutely. We
have to talk about the grassroots movements,
specifically National People's Action, or NPA.
This started in Chicago in the 1970s. And the
leader was... wasn't a politician or a banker,
right? She was just a regular person. No, it
was Gail Sincotta. She was a mother, a Chicago
housewife from the Austin neighborhood. She and
a community organizer named Shell Trap realized
something crucial. They looked around their neighborhood,
which was changing rapidly, and they saw things
decaying. But they realized it wasn't just bad
landlords or bad neighbors. They saw the invisible
hand of the banks. They did. They realized the
banks were taking the community's deposits, their
savings accounts, their paychecks, and refusing
to lend that money back to the neighborhood for
mortgages or homework. repairs. They were exporting
the capital to the new Green Line suburbs. So
what do they do? How do you fight a bank? They
got loud. They organized protests. They did things
that were considered really radical at the time.
They would bus hundreds of people to the private
homes of bank presidents on Sunday mornings to
demand answers. Oh, wow. They took it right to
their doorstep. They embarrassed the establishment
and they fought for a specific tool disclosure.
Transparency. Right. They knew they couldn't
win if the data was secret. They demanded that
banks reveal where they were lending. This pressure
is what led directly to the Home Mortgage Disclosure
Act, or HMDA, in 1975. HMDA. And the Community
Reinvestment Act, the CRA, in 1977. The Community
Reinvestment Act. That's the one that requires
banks to serve the communities they are physically
located in. Right. It sounds so obvious. It sounds
obvious, but it was revolutionary. It essentially
made redlining illegal. It forced banks to demonstrate
that they were lending in low to moderate income
areas if they wanted regulatory approval for
things like mergers or new branches. It was a
massive victory. It didn't fix everything, but
it gave activists the data they needed to sue.
And there were banks that tried to do it right,
too. We should mention SureBank. Shore Bank is
a fascinating case study. Founded in 1973 in
Chicago, their entire mission was to combat redlining
by lending specifically in black communities.
So they were a greenlining bank. You could call
them that. They proved that you could lend in
these neighborhoods and be profitable. They debunked
the myth that these areas were inherently hazardous.
They showed that if you provide capital, the
neighborhood thrives. Proved that the risk was
manufactured all along. And today... The fight
continues in new ways. I saw notes about covenants.
Yes. Many old property deeds, I mean thousands
of them all over the country, still have racially
restrictive covenants written on them. What does
it mean? It's language that says, for example,
this property shall not be sold to anyone of
African or Asian descent. Now, those are unenforceable
by law since the Supreme Court struck them down
in 1948, but they are still physically written
on the paper deeds in county offices. It's a
ghost in the paperwork. A remnant of that old
machinery. It is, and it's a painful reminder
for homeowners. States like California, Washington,
and Minnesota are now passing laws to help homeowners
formally remove that racist language from their
deeds. It's symbolic, but it's about cleaning
up the historical record. And there is also work
being done in the medical field. This loops back
to the health impacts we discussed. This is really
encouraging. Wayne State University in Detroit
has a course called Healing Between the Lines.
Healing Between the Lines. I like that. They
are teaching medical students about redlining.
The idea is that a doctor needs to understand
that a patient's asthma isn't just biology, it's
geography and history. If you treat the asthma
with an inhaler, but send the patient back to
a moldy apartment in a heat island next to a
refinery, you aren't really healing them. That's
powerful. Treating the patient means understanding
the map they live in. You have to treat the environment,
too. Exactly. It's about a more holistic view
of public health. So we've gone from 1935 to
today. We've seen the maps, the devastating statistics,
the health impacts, and the digital future. If
we have to boil this down, what does this all
mean for the listener? Why does this matter to
someone who maybe just bought their first house
or is just renting an apartment today? I think
the most important takeaway is destroying the
myth of the level playing field. You often hear
this sentiment of pull yourself up by your bootstraps.
It's a core American ethos. Sure. But when you
look at the history of redlining, you see that
for 80 years, the government and the financial
sector actively conspired to steal the boots
from entire communities. They stole the boots
and then they charged extra for the laces. Right.
It explains why we see the disparities we see
today. It's not a culture problem. It's not an
effort problem. It's a structural problem. The
machinery was designed to produce this result.
And the machine is still humming in the background,
just maybe a little quieter now, hidden behind
algorithms and credit scores. And that leads
me to my final thought for everyone listening.
We talked about algorithmic redlining. The original
redlining was done with pen and paper, and it
took 50 years of activism to outlaw. Today? Decisions
about your mortgage, your job application, your
insurance rates are made by AI. In a fraction
of a second. So the question I want to leave
you with is, how do we police redlining that
happens in milliseconds inside a black box? If
we don't figure out how to audit the code, are
we just doomed to repeat 1937 forever, but at
the speed of light? It's the question of our
time. Awareness is the first step, but vigilance
is the price of fairness. On that note, thank
you for taking this deep dive with us. It wasn't
a light topic, but it's an essential one if you
want to understand how our cities and our society
actually work. Always a pleasure to connect the
dots. We'll see you on the next deep dive. Keep
asking questions.