Title: America’s Legacy of Redlining - Lerner Center for Public Health Promotion – Syracuse University
Headings: America’s Legacy of Redlining: State-Sponsored Segregation and Disenfranchisement of Urban Minority Communities
America’s Legacy of Redlining: State-Sponsored Segregation and Disenfranchisement of Urban Minority Communities
References

Content: While Baltimore is one of the most extreme examples, this “urban heat island” phenomenon has been noted in redlined cities across the country. 7
A 2015 Washington Post article, published in the wake of the murder of Freddie Gray, discusses the ongoing history of destabilization in Baltimore’s black communities. The pattern emerges with government-sanctioned redlining and lending discrimination in the 1930s. Between the 1950s and 1970s, over 20,000 black families were forcibly displaced by the construction of housing projects and highways, like Interstates 83 and 95. 8,9 These same neighborhoods have been hit hardest by mass incarceration, the opioid and cocaine epidemics, and discrimination in housing loans and mortgages throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s. 10 Anyone who has watched HBO’s The Wire has seen these processes unfold. The municipal government of Baltimore has taken steps to ameliorate the cumulative inequalities created through nearly a century of destabilization. However, they have yet to provide seats at the table for representatives of the people their decisions will affect. This remains a barrier to effective policymaking and the empowerment of citizens living in redlined neighborhoods. 11
Recommendations for Mitigating the Effects of Redlining
The long-term effects of redlining are not isolated to Syracuse and Baltimore.