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Housing Segregation and Redlining in America: A Short History | Code Switch | NPR - YouTube
Channel: NPR Podcasts
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Chris Rock: You know what's so sad, man?
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You know what's wild?
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Martin Luther King stood for nonviolence.
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Now what's Martin Luther King?
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A street.
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And I don't give a f*** where you at in America,
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If you on Martin Luther King Boulevard
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there's some violence going down.
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Gene: That, of course, is Chris Rock’s famous joke
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about streets named for Martin Luther King Jr.,
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which tend to be in -- let's say distressed areas.
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And he’s not wrong, because if you look
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at the way housing segregation works in America
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you can see how things ended up this way.
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Once you see it, you won't be able to unsee it.
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OK, let’s look at MLK Boulevard in Baltimore.
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I want to show you how to see housing segregation
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in schools, in health, in family wealth, in policing.
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But first, an explanatory comma.
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It’s the 1930s in the wake of the Great Depression.
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FDR is president.
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He wants to bring economic relief
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to millions of Americans
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through a collection of federal programs and projects
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called The New Deal.
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One part of that "new deal"
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was The National Housing Act of 1934,
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which introduced ideas like the 30-year mortgage
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and low, fixed interest rates.
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So now you have all these lower-income people
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who can afford homes,
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but how do you make sure
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they don't default on their new mortgages?
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Enter the Home Owners Loan Corp.
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The HOLC created residential security maps.
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And these maps? They're where the term redlining comes from.
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Green meant “best area, best people,” aka businessmen;
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blue meant “good people,” like white-collar families;
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yellow meant a “declining area,” with working class families;
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and red meant “detrimental influences, hazardous,"
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like “foreign-born” people, “low-class whites,"
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and -- most significantly -- “Negroes.”
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Again and again on these HOLC maps,
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one of the most consistent criteria for redlined neighborhoods
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is the presence of black and
brown people.
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Let’s be clear.
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Studies show that people who lived in redlined areas
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were not necessarily more likely to default on their mortgages.
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But redlining made it difficult —
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if not impossible — to buy or refinance.
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So landlords abandon their properties.
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City services become unreliable.
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In most places, crime increases.
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And property values drop.
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All of these conditions fester for 30 years
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as white people flee to the brand new suburbs
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popping up all over the country.
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Many of those suburbs institute rules, called covenants,
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that explicitly forbid selling homes to black people.
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And all of this was perfectly legal.
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Now it’s 1968.
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And MLK is assassinated.
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News Report: Good evening.
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The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, 39 years old,
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The apostle of nonviolence in the civil rights movement
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has been shot to death in Memphis, Tenn.
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Martin Luther King was shot and was killed tonight in Memphis, Tenn.
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In the aftermath,
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Congress passes the Fair Housing Act of 1968.
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It's a policy meant to encourage equal housing opportunities
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regardless of race, or religion or national origin.
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And it offers protections for future homeowners and renters,
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but does little to fix the damage already done.
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Over the next 50 years,
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the Fair Housing Act is rarely enforced.
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So you can still see housing segregation and its effects,
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in Baltimore and often along any MLK Boulevard in any U.S. city.
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Like its effects on wealth.
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So homeownership is the major way Americans create wealth, right?
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Well, discrimination in housing is the major reason
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that black families up and down the income scale
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have a tiny fraction of the family wealth that white families do --
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even white families with less education and lower incomes.
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For almost 30 years, 98 percent of FHA loans
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were handed out to white borrowers.
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Not only were black neighborhoods redlined,
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and not only was the Fair Housing Act selectively enforced, if at all,
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but it is still today much harder
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for a black person to get a mortgage or home loan
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than it is for a white person.
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John: Families are fearful of speaking up
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about a basic human right
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that should be afforded to everyone in the world
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but definitely in the richest country in the world.
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And housing segregation in schools.
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The primary way that Americans pay for public schools
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is by paying property taxes.
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People who live in more valuable homes
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have better-funded local schools,
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better-paid teachers, better school facilities and more resources.
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Here’s a feedback loop: The better the schools in a neighborhood,
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the more those homes in that neighborhood are worth.
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And the higher the property values of those homes,
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the more money there is for schools.
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And so on and so on.
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And housing segregation in health.
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Because of urban planning that benefited
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those richer, whiter neighborhoods,
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people of color are more likely
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to live near industrial plants that spew toxic fumes;
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they're more likely to live
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far away from grocery stores with fresh food,
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and in places where
the water isn’t drinkable.
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They're more likely to live in neighborhoods
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with crumbling infrastructure,
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and in homes with toxic paint.
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Karen: When you're living with rats, roaches,
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and things like that -- that's deplorable.
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You cannot have that kind of stuff
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with children running around in the building.
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A building that may be full of lead.
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And, not coincidentally,
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people of color have higher incidences of certain cancers,
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asthma and heart disease.
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And housing segregation in policing.
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Housing segregation means we are having
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vastly different experiences with crime
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and vastly different experiences with policing.
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Because our neighborhoods are so segregated,
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sometimes racial profiling can be camouflaged
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as spatial profiling —
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where living in certain areas can make you more likely
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to be stopped by the police.
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And it means people have a lot of unnecessary contact
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with the criminal justice system just because of where they live.
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Reggie: The problem in our city?
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The police and the citizens are fighting.
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They keep targeting my brothers and sisters
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who don't really have nothing.
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And that heavy, aggressive kind of policing
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that you see in black neighborhoods in particular
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makes people feel like they can’t trust the police.
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And when people don’t trust the police,
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crimes go unsolved and people have to find
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other ways to keep themselves safe.
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But, of course, it’s not just Baltimore.
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Because housing segregation and discrimination
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fundamentally shape the lives of people
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in nearly every major American city.
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It really is in everything.
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To hear more about how race shapes American life,
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visit npr.org/codeswitch.
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I'm Gene Demby. Be easy.
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