THE BRONX: REDLINING

America was not a suburban nation. By the end of World War II only 18% of Americans lived in suburbs. Today that figure is over 54%. The suburban America we are familiar with is a product of a concerted govt effort to segregate that began in the 1930s with “redlining” maps like the one seen here.

Redlining was a practice whereby the govt created maps for every city, grading each neighborhood’s investment-worthiness—based on race. As noted in the official comments that accompanied these maps, even the smallest “infiltration of undesirable racial elements” would result in an area being redlined. One black family would be enough to label an entire area “fourth grade.” Because of this, redlining facilitated a practice known as “blockbusting,” in which speculators would purposefully rent to a black family in order to scare whites into thinking the neighborhood was declining so that they would sell their homes below market rate. Sometimes the tactics of blockbusting were as simple as hiring young black men to be present in a neighborhood.

The effect of redlining was to segregate. White people were able to get subsidized loans in the “First” and “Second” grade areas, while people of color had no choice but to remain in the redlined areas in the central city. Before WWII this resulted in the creation of small, whites-only “streetcar suburbs” built by private speculators at the edge of downtown.

After WWII came the automobile. Speculators, car companies, and road builders realized the profit to be made from mass suburbanization now possible because of the car. This time, however, the scale of their ambition—a nation of sprawl where every family owned two cars and had their own single-family home—could only be realized with govt help. And help the govt did, providing massive subsidies to build developments of unprecedented size (such as the famous Levittown, which became a model for the sprawl common today). In order to assure the govt that its investment was good, speculators assured the FHA the deeds and leases would all have a specific promise: “For members of the caucasian race only.”