Redlining Revisited

New research suggests that discriminatory lending practices that disadvantaged Black homeowners, popularized with the term “redlining,” preexisted and were much more widespread than the color-coded maps that gave rise to the term. A new research paper written by Price V. Fishback, Jonathan Rose, Kenneth A. Snowden and Thomas Storrs and published by the National Bureau of Economic Research concluded that while the infamous maps created by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) in the late 1930s were shared with the Federal Housing Administration, the latter agency had implemented its own discriminatory practices based on city-block level data independent of the HOLC maps.