4.5 Redlining and Housing Discrimination

In the 1930s, the federal Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC) made maps rating city neighborhoods for mortgage lending, from green ('best') to red ('hazardous'). Neighborhoods with Black residents were routinely marked red, regardless of the actual condition of the homes. The required source is the HOLC's 1937 'Residential Security' map of Philadelphia and Camden.

Redlining means refusing mortgages, or charging much more for them, to people in a defined area under the excuse that the area is a financial risk. Lenders practiced it throughout the twentieth century, peaking in the mid-1900s. The Federal Housing Administration's Underwriting Manual (1938) built segregation into federal mortgage insurance, and racially restrictive covenants in property deeds barred Black people from living in many communities.

For most American families, a home is their biggest source of wealth. Homes usually gain value over time, and families pass them, or the money from selling them, to their children. When Black families were shut out of homeownership in growing suburbs and neighborhoods, they were also shut out of that wealth, while many white families, helped by federal loans and the G.I. Bill (4.3), built it up.

Housing discrimination also deepened other gaps. Many Black neighborhoods had less public transportation, more pollution, fewer parks, less access to healthy food and fewer health care services. These conditions contributed to health disparities along racial lines. Where transportation was lacking or segregated, African Americans organized their own: they ran jitneys, small vehicles that worked like shared taxis, and started bus companies.

Black families who moved into mostly white, well-resourced neighborhoods sometimes faced hostility, threats and mob violence. The NAACP fought housing discrimination in court and in Congress. In 1948 the Supreme Court ruled that courts couldn't enforce racially restrictive covenants. The Fair Housing Act of 1968, passed days after Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, banned discrimination in the sale and rental of housing.

Lorraine Hansberry's play was the first by a Black woman produced on Broadway. It follows the Younger family, who share a crowded apartment on Chicago's South Side. When they receive an insurance payment after the father's death, the mother uses part of it to buy a house in a white neighborhood. A representative of the neighborhood then offers to buy the house back so the family won't move in. The play shows how housing discrimination blocked Black families' dreams of a better life.

Hansberry knew this firsthand: when she was a child, her family faced hostility after buying a home in a white Chicago neighborhood, and her father fought the restrictive covenant all the way to the Supreme Court. The play's title comes from Langston Hughes's poem 'Harlem', about what happens to a dream deferred.