Madison Rose
Redlining
Redlining: Discriminatory financial practice aimed at ethnic and racial minorities in certain areas that limit members to access services such as low-interest loans and mortgages, access to health and mental care, quality education, and create other roadblocks like food deserts (Jackson, 2021). Redlining creates minority-majority areas where community issues are increased. Those issues are used to justify the practices that financial institutions and businesses engage in to further marginalize the communities
While redlining is often used in terms of real estate practices, there is much more history and structural racism that created the word and its current meaning. The term gained attention in the 1930s when government homeowner associations gave “government-insured mortgages” to struggling individuals during the Depression (Jackson, 2021). The associations evolved and continued to make new rules that determined who was allowed to qualify for their program, and this involved using “color-coded maps” that revealed which neighborhoods were worthy of loans on a ranking of least to most risky (Jackson, 2021). Due to structural racism, the riskiest neighborhoods were where most Black individuals resided, and they were the ones who were disqualified from receiving loans during the Depression (Jackson, 2021).
Although there were laws and policies such as the Fair Housing Act of 1968 and the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 that recognized these issues and attempted to ban housing discrimination, there are still racial disadvantages in the number of interest rates and approvals that persist to this day (National Community Reinvestment Coalition, 2020). Redlining is one component of segregation that showcases how minority communities have been disadvantaged from the start of seeking government assistance and continues to portray itself in the deprivation of resources, life satisfaction, and housing for those communities.
In terms of community psychology, the racial discrimination that lies beneath the core of redlining has impacted many groups of people and their life satisfaction. For instance, a study done in Richmond, Virginia, and Greensboro, North Carolina, found that the redlined areas located in those cities had “lower per 1000 population counts” of mental health professionals, such as psychologists, counselors, and therapists, compared to areas that were outside of the redline (Erikson et al., 2022). In other words, the redlined areas had much less access to mental health resources compared to other cities. Additionally, another factor that impacts the life satisfaction of these individuals within the redlined areas is their lack of resources and environmental hazards. Due to the lack of economic funds the government provides to these areas, the environment can impact the residents’ physical and mental health (National Community Reinvestment Coalition, 2020). Individuals in these redlined areas may experience the effects of the health-wealth gap as they struggle with these environmental hazards both mentally, physically, and financially.
The 1938 Home Owners’ Loan Corporation map of Brooklyn.Credit…National Archives and Records Administration, Mapping Inequality (Jackson, 2021)
What is Redlining? Redlining Explained, A Brief History (youtube.com)
References
Erikson, C. E., Dent, R. B., Park, Y. H., & Luo, Q. (2022, April 28). Historic Redlining and Contemporary Behavioral Health Workforce Disparities. JAMA Network Open, 5(4), e229494. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2022.9494
Jackson, C. (2021, August 17). What Is Redlining? The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/17/realestate/what-is-redlining.html
National Community Reinvestment Coalition. (2020, September 10). Redlining and neighborhood health» NCRC. NCRC. https://ncrc.org/holc-health/
