Props to WTMJ-4 News and reporter Shaun Gallagher for airing a segment Monday evening about redlining in Milwaukee that adds context to ongoing protests about inequality and racism.
Redlining - a discriminatory real estate and lending practice that devalued property and limited the accumulation of wealth in African-American neighborhoods - is an important matter that deserves more attention across all media platforms.
Two related points:
1) Redlining was more than a practice implemented by lenders and real estate interests: it was official United States legal and governmental policy for decades. A discussion about some of that is here:
2) Redlining was related to a variety of discriminatory transportation, public planning and municipal boundary and governmental policies and politics in Wisconsin and the Milwaukee region, so let's not be satisfied with explanations of racial realities that focus on Milwaukee as if the issues begin inside the city border:
Redlining - a discriminatory real estate and lending practice that devalued property and limited the accumulation of wealth in African-American neighborhoods - is an important matter that deserves more attention across all media platforms.
Two related points:
1) Redlining was more than a practice implemented by lenders and real estate interests: it was official United States legal and governmental policy for decades. A discussion about some of that is here:
For the record, redlining was the systematic denial by the private sector and public officials of residential lending to African-Americans which enforced segregation and multiple levels of unequal opportunities from housing to employment to schools, and so on.
A 'Forgotten History' Of How The U.S. Government Segregated America
...the Federal Housing Administration, which was established in 1934, furthered the segregation efforts by refusing to insure mortgages in and near African-American neighborhoods — a policy known as "redlining." At the same time, the FHA was subsidizing builders who were mass-producing entire subdivisions for whites — with the requirement that none of the homes be sold to African-Americans.
I am adding to [a] post about environmental justice and government-enabled discriminatory planning in SE WI the schedule of an important television documentary about the destruction of African-American homes, business and neighborhood cohesion by I-43 construction from Milwaukee to the northern suburbs:
[Updated from 1/8/19 - - with news of litigation alleging racial profiling in a traffic stop on a stretch of interstate highway reminiscent of another outburst in Waukesha County which ended in hate crime convictions.]
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There should be widespread dissemination of yet another report focusing on Southeastern Wisconsin's worst-in-the-nation segregation, but let's add some history and information to the discussion - - especially with a new Governor more attuned to the needs of cities and their residents.
As I have noted often on this blog, the disparities have been fueled by multiple actions by multiple layers of government as far back as the 1950's - - and 50 years later - - and often involve transit, such the Robin Vos-led prohibition against regional transit authorities which can move people to jobs and housing across local jurisdictional lines, to repeated threats to the sparse bus connections which do link urban workers with suburban employers.
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| Transportation inequities, like discriminatory housing and educational policies practices, have fueled racism in SE Wisconsin and elsewhere. |
In fact, civil rights and public health organizations had to force the Walker administration via litigation to provide a welcome, but hardly restorative sum - - $13.5 million in a billion-dollar project - - for transit during Zoo Interchange construction that would put the work into compliance with federal law.
I am also calling attention to this 2008 item about regional segregation...More here, too: