a macaulay honors seminar taught by prof. gaston alonso

Slum Clearance and Redlining

As I pored over the readings this weekend, I couldn’t help but think of a video I had watched about redlining by the informative or irritating (depending on how you see the man) Adam Conover on the TV show Adam Ruins Everything. A video that I believe I had to watch for one of my other seminar classes, although I could be completely wrong.

If you don’t know already, redlining can be traced all the way back to the 1930’s when the government created programs to provide people with loans to finance their homes. In order to get these loans however, you had to be considered a low risk borrower and to determine such borrowers, color coded maps were created to outline high risk neighborhoods. Such neighborhoods were outlined in red, and if you lived in the red area, it was nearly impossible to get a home loan on your mortgage.

Unfortunately, many blacks and other minorities lived in these red areas, so loans were not exactly in their future. As a result, they were trapped in poverty as those who were able to get loans enjoyed the fruits of their wealth and new properties.

Reading about slum clearances in the 50’s that Robert Moses spearheaded simply reminded me of the dirty practices of redlining. The point of these slum clearances was to create better housing altogether yet many minorities were left in the dust and kicked out of their homes to do so. Even when these new buildings were complete, in many cases, they weren’t affordable. Much like properties that were developed in non-red areas in the 1930’s. They were left to move into different areas of squalor, trapping minorities in poverty and rewarding white privileged folks with better housing.

Questions

1.) Being many years removed from these racist policies, how do they still affect our city today?

2.) Is it the city’s responsibility to help minorities who may have been affected by such practices even though they occurred many years in the past?

3.) What are some of the ways this city has improved upon such practices and made the city a much better place for minorities to live in?

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