It’s difficult for many people to buy a home in Milwaukee, even if they have a stable job. Some of those challenges can be traced back to the discriminatory practice of redlining.
Redlining created historic barriers to homeownership for people of color and contributed to segregation we still see today. The practice was in use from the 1930s to 1968. It’s named for the maps that the federal Home Owners’ Loan Corporation drew to indicate largely Black and brown neighborhoods that the organization deemed too be too risky for home loans.
Redlining prevented many people of color from obtaining mortgages and building equity and generational wealth.
Redlining stemmed from efforts to promote housing stability during the Great Depression. But the way those efforts were carried out was rooted in racism, according to Dr. Kirk Harris, a UW-Milwaukee professor and director at the Center for Equity Practice and Planning Justice. WUWM’s Eddie Morales talked to Harris to learn more about the lasting impact of redlining.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Eddie Morales: What is the history of redlining?
Dr. Kirk Harris: Redlining emerged directly from governmental practices. Government stepped in and said, we're going to guarantee these loans that are issued by banks so that the average American can now afford a home with a small down payment. That actually accelerated the development of what we now know as suburbanized housing. It provided opportunities for demand for housing at a much higher rate, and it provided the expansion of single-family ownership by the average American. When I say the average American, [I mean] the average white American, because the initial efforts in this approach did not support for mortgages to areas that were for Black buyers or buyers of color.
The government created the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, which essentially was the body that served as the guarantor of these loans and constructed the policies which restricted the availability of loans based on race. The assumption was that where you had communities that were potentially racially integrated or had Black folks in it, it created a decline in the property values and created uncertainty as to the stability of said investment, which made those investments — from the bank vantage point — not secure investments.
As such, governmental policy then sought to ensure that housing was essentially not available to communities of color with the assumption that was not built on any research or any evaluative study, that communities that tend to be Black or brown were less stable and less worthy of investment. The strategy was to essentially, through these practices, create areas that were redlined: those areas in which the investment was considered to be risky, in which case those areas were not subject to support by banks.
How are those impacts still felt today? And which neighborhoods and groups of people were most affected in Milwaukee?
Well, people that are most affected by redlining in Milwaukee and other places typically are Black communities. Milwaukee is one of the most highly segregated cities in the country. You can look at the communities in which many Black communities exist, and you can see the stark segregation that exists between them and their peer white communities.
Pick a community that's Black in Milwaukee. It's segregated. I think that that history is just endemic because of the structural challenges that exist that undergird how that racial segregation initiated and how it continues to maintain itself over time.
Is there anything else that you feel is important to include?
As a planner, I always like to talk about solutions and how to address some of these larger structural issues. I think one of the ways to begin to address this racialized placemaking and the impacts that uneven distribution of opportunities has created as a function of racial segregation is to begin to think about the roles that community can play in addressing these issues.
I've been doing a lot of discussion and thinking about what we call community wealth building. What community wealth building is, it says, let's look at the ways in which we can draw on some of the opportunities for strengthening communities. For example, talking about living wages and the opportunities to move people into opportunities so that they can actually support themselves, their families, (and) have discretionary income to maybe even save to buy a home.
There needs to be a reality that in order for people to gain ground in this economy, they have to be paid a fair and living wage. So, thinking about the role that governmental policy and economic development can play in creating better and more secure living wage jobs is a really important element to advancing the opportunities and breaking the cycle that we see in segregated communities.
There's a lot of land that exists in those communities. For example, there's large amounts of vacant land in communities. One of the problems with that is that there's an affordability crisis in many cities, including Milwaukee. People can't afford housing. Why can't they afford the housing? Because the land that exists that is vacant is being subject to speculation. Homes are being gobbled up by external out-of-town investors. And that has, for example, pushed up rents and other things artificially.
In some of the economic development practices that have tended to that, have also created pressures for displacement and gentrification. So how can we solve that problem? One of the things that we can do is we can give communities more control over land. I've been having some conversations about the role that land trusts can play in giving communities much more control over the land that exists in their community, having them to be the arbiters of the ways in which that land is used, and mitigating this speculation, which often leads to the displacement that vulnerable communities experience.
Support for Seeking Solutions: Keys to Homeownership is provided by Educators Credit Union, Greater Milwaukee Association of Realtors and Geis Garage Doors.
