In every way imaginable, the consequences
of redlining to many black and brown communities
across America meant that those communities had the least
and the last of everything. So I want to talk about redlining,
because this is a term you may have heard, but most people don't
actually know the history. In 1933, in the midst of America's
Great Depression, when unemployment rates were 25% and millions of people
were not only out of work, but many of them were houseless,
the federal government under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt established an agency
called the Home Owners Loan Corporation. Basically, it tried to make home buying
much more affordable by subsidizing the cost of building
and lending such that people would be able
to afford to buy for the first time. Millions of Americans participated,
except that when the Home Owners Loan Corporation began to issue mortgages, it came up with a scheme to decide which communities were deserving of loans
and which ones weren't. They made maps
and used a color coded scheme. Green meant this was a community that
you could lend to and red you could not. The basic decision they made
was to determine that any community with the presence of black people
or brown people or people who, perhaps, spoke Italian, in certain
parts of the country could not receive support
from the Home Owners Loan Corporation. This created a system
that came to be known as redlining because communities that were deemed risky by the mere presence of people of color,
most especially black people, were disqualified
from getting direct support from the federal government
to purchase homes. This policy lasted until 1968,
when the federal government passed the Fair Housing Act,
which made all forms of discrimination in the buying and selling
or renting of homes illegal. But the truth is that the legacies of
redlining from that moment to the present meant that black people were subjected
to other forms of exploitative lending. A system called contract
buying grew up as a way to sell black people
homes on a layaway plan. You made set payments
over an extended period of time, but you never owned the home
until the very last payment. It was very common
for unscrupulous sellers to withhold that final payment
in an effort to take back the home from a person
who had worked incredibly hard to buy it. Home ownership
has been the most important asset that a typical white family has in order
to do simple things like borrow money
to send a child to college. But most importantly,
they have financial freedom. But for communities
that have been subjected to redlining, they didn't have those advantages. Not only that, the very communities that
they lived in suffered from divestment, including the lack of grocery
stores, the lack of businesses, the imposition of federal highways
that often bisected their communities. In every way imaginable, the consequences of redlining to many black
and brown communities across America meant that those communities had the least
and the last of everything. And to this day, the median wages
and income of those communities, and the financial insecurity
that people who live in redlined communities
face, has long term health consequences for families, has educational consequences
for young people whose schools often
don't have the tax basis to give them the same resources that communities
that were never redlined actually have.