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
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Content: Summer temperatures in redlined zones averaged 6 degrees higher than in other neighborhoods. The article attributes the temperature difference to the lack of trees and green spaces in these neighborhoods. Wealthier, primarily white neighborhoods in Baltimore feature more green spaces, including trees, gardens, and rain gardens. These cooler neighborhoods have higher average household incomes than redlined areas and the financial ability to incorporate green spaces, which work to clean the air and water, along with providing temperature regulation. Redlined neighborhoods populated by lower-income residents of color miss out on these benefits. 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.