6.10 Challenges of Urban Changes

In the 1930s, the federal Home Owners' Loan Corporation drew maps rating neighborhoods for lending risk, marking many areas with Black or immigrant residents in red as 'hazardous.' The Federal Housing Administration, which insured mortgages, refused or limited loans in such areas and encouraged racial covenants in new suburbs. This practice of denying loans or services based on where people live, often along racial lines, is called redlining. Historians still debate how much the maps themselves drove decisions, but federal lending policy clearly steered investment away from Black neighborhoods for decades.

Blockbusting was a tactic used from the 1940s to the 1960s. Real estate agents played on white homeowners' racial fears, warning that Black families were moving in, so they would sell cheaply. Agents then resold the homes to Black families at much higher prices, often on unfair contracts.

The Fair Housing Act of 1968 banned discrimination in housing sales, rentals and lending. But the effects lasted: lower home values, less wealth passed down to children, underfunded schools, and continued segregation, which, even when no law requires it, is called de facto segregation.

• Affordability: in many cities, rents and home prices have risen faster than wages, so many households spend more than 30% of income on housing, the common U.S. measure of being cost-burdened.
• Filtering: as housing ages, it often passes from wealthier to poorer residents, and if owners stop maintaining it, it can be abandoned.
• Access to services: some neighborhoods lack grocery stores, clinics, good schools or transit.
• Rising crime: when jobs, stores and residents leave a neighborhood, crime can rise. It's linked to concentrated poverty and disinvestment, not to any group of people, and U.S. city crime rates have risen and fallen over the decades.
• Fragmented government: responsibility for one metro area is split among state, county, city and neighborhood governments, plus special districts for things like transit, water and schools. No single body can tackle a region-wide problem like housing, transit or pollution, and wealthy suburbs can keep strong tax bases while poorer central cities have weak ones. Some cities respond by annexing nearby land or forming regional agencies.
• Environmental injustice: low-income communities and communities of color are more likely to be near highways, factories and waste sites. Examples include the Flint, Michigan, water crisis that began in 2014, and the industrial stretch of the Mississippi River in Louisiana that residents and activists call 'Cancer Alley.'
• Disamenity zones: the poorest, most hazardous parts of a city, such as steep hillsides, floodplains or land near dumps, often with little or no infrastructure. The term comes from the Latin American city model (6.5).
• Zones of abandonment: areas that people and businesses have largely left, with many vacant homes, lots and factories, often after deindustrialization, as in parts of Detroit (7.7).
• Informal (squatter) settlements: homes built by residents on land they don't legally own, often without water or sewer service, like Dharavi in Mumbai, Kibera in Nairobi or Rocinha in Rio de Janeiro. UN-Habitat estimates more than a billion people live in slums or informal settlements. Conflicts over land tenure, meaning who has the legal right to use land, are common: residents without titles can be evicted when governments or developers want the land. These are working communities with businesses and strong social networks, not just places of poverty.

Urban renewal was a mid-1900s U.S. program, funded by the Housing Act of 1949, in which cities cleared neighborhoods they labeled 'blighted' and replaced them with highways, offices or public housing. Boston's West End was leveled in the late 1950s, displacing thousands of residents.

Gentrification is when wealthier residents and new investment move into a lower-income neighborhood, renovating housing and raising property values. It can bring new businesses, safer streets and higher tax revenue. But rising rents can displace longtime residents and erase a community's culture, as in parts of Harlem in New York or the Mission District in San Francisco.

• Inclusionary zoning: requires or rewards developers for including affordable units in new projects. Montgomery County, Maryland, started one of the first programs in 1974.
• Upgrading informal settlements: adding water, sewers, paved paths and legal titles instead of bulldozing homes.
• Community land trusts and tenant protections to keep housing affordable.
• Local food movements, like urban gardens, that improve food access (5.11).