Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from housework dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy the Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. So this episode of Stuffy miss and History Class is part of a two part series on the history of redlining. And often are two partners like they can stand alone reasonably well, but in this case, part one really is necessary to making sense of part two. So if you've skipped part one, hopefully like you're maybe a brand new listener to the show, we really really encourage you to pause this one, listen to our previous episode, and then come back to this one. Also, one of the things that we're going to talk about today is the language that it's the assessors used when making color coded maps of neighborhoods and segregated cities to use as a reference on whether mortgage lending in those neighborhoods was desirable or not. We're also gonna talk about the language of the instructions and language and other documents also, and some of this language is frankly offensive, and we are including it as part of exploring these maps and what they represented. Uh, we read from a couple of instructions in the previous episode that we're definitely the mildest of all of this. These maps at sort of demonstrate and also predict ongoing patterns of housing discrimination that have persisted since they were created. As we discussed in the previous installment, the Homeowners Loan Corporation was a Depression era government program in the United States that was meant to save the homes of people who had defaulted on their mortgages. In the h o l C started its City Survey program to map more than two hundred cities around the United States, creating color coded keys of where mortgage lending was desirable and where it was not. They looked at all aspects of the neighborhood, including the terrain, the buildings, the amenities, the residents, and the economic factors tying all of this together. The thought process that was kind of guiding the approach to all these maps was that neighborhoods go through a predictable and inevitable cycle. First, they would be shiny and new and desirable, with lots of affluent people moving into brand new houses in an area with lots of amenities. Then they'd get a little older, a little more dated, a little less well maintained. Then quote, undesirable elements would quote infiltrate these aging neighborhoods. Eventually, these undesirables would completely take over and the whole neighborhood would be ruined thanks to crime, vandalism, and the population living there. So, combining this overall view about how neighborhoods age with data about the neighborhoods themselves and the people who lived there, the h o LC made a collection of color coded maps. Grade A, the first grade was green. This was the best classification, and these were the most desirable neighborhoods. Grade D, the fourth grade, was read or hazardous. These were neighborhoods where mortgage lenders either did not operate or strongly preferred not to operate. The middle two grades, blue and yellow, which were also known as still desirable and definitely declining. We're not as desirable as green, but they were not off limits the way these red hazardous neighborhoods were either. So here's how the h o LC described the four categories. We're going to read them word for word. Quote. Green areas are hot spots. They are not yet fully built up in nearly all instances. They are the new, well planned sections of the city and almost synonymous with the areas where good mortgage lenders with available funds are willing to make their maximum loans to be amortized over a ten to fifteen year period, perhaps up to seventy five to eight percent of the appraisal. They are homogeneous in demand as residential locations in good time or bad hence on the upgrade. Blue areas, as a rule, are completely developed. They are like a n automobile, still good, but not what the people are buying today who can afford a new one. They are the neighborhoods where good mortgage lenders will have a tendency to hold loan commitments ten to fift under the limit. Yellow areas are characterized by age, obsolescence and change of style, expiring restrictions or lack of them, infiltration of a lower grade population, the presence of influences which increase sales resistance, such as inadequate transportation, insufficient utilities, perhaps heavy tax burdens, who a maintenance of homes, et cetera. Ferry built areas are included, as well as neighborhoods lacking homogeneity. Generally, these areas have reached the transition period. Good mortgage lenders are more conservative and the yellow areas and hold commitments under the lending ratio for the green and blue areas. As a side note before Holly reads the red part, if you're not familiar with the term jerry built, a jerry builder was a term for a speculator who would build a lot of houses out of very cheap, shoddy materials with kind of unsubstantial construction. Not even the Oxford English Dictionary is sure exactly how the name jerry got attached to it. But to go back to the description, we're going to hit red areas next quote. Red areas represent those neighborhoods in which the things that are now taking place in the yellow neighborhoods have already happened. They are characterized by detrimental influences in a pronounced degree, undesirable population or infiltration of it, low percentage of homeownership, very poor maintenance and often vandalism prevail. Unstable incomes of the people, and difficult collections are usually prevalent. The areas are rodder than the show called slum districts. Some mortgage lenders may refuse to make loans in these neighborhoods, and others will lend only on a conservative basis. So after a brief word from a sponsor, we're going to look at the maps of Richmond, Virginia as an example of what these maps actually said about the neighborhoods they were documenting. So to get back to these maps, when you look at all of the documentation that went into creating these maps, there are some clear and obvious patterns that emerge. We're going to look at the maps of Richmond, Virginia as a primary example because those maps and all of their supporting documentation have been digitized as part of a project by the Digital Scholarship Lab of the University of Richmond. We're gonna link to that from our show notes. Uh And to be clear, I looked at the maps for many, many, many other cities and their documentation as part of researching these two episodes. And the reason that we are using the Richmond maps for the bulk of the examples is because they WIYH that they have been organized online is extremely easy to jump back and forth between the maps and the documentation, and to go back and forth between the different parts of the documentation um, these same trends are definitely evident and other maps all over the country also. When it came to the inhabitants, assessors gave a basic description of the types of people living in each neighborhood. The instruction was, quote what is the general type of occupation i e. Executive businessmen, retired, professional, clerical, skilled mechanic or factory workers, laborers, etcetera. In Richmond, Virginia as our example, the residents of green sections were described as quote best people. Blue section inhabitants were some more of the best people, as well as salaried workers and quote responsible trades class. In the yellow section, most of the inhabitants are quote working people, mechanics, mill hands, and a number of other specific hourly wage jobs. I would say I did not find as much categorizing of the people in green as best people outside of Richmond, Like there were four specific things about them, being various affluent roles like executive people and people that were generally wealthier. So in the Richmond maps there are twelve red neighborhoods, and as we said before, these are the ones where mortgage lending was not seen as desirable. According to the assessor, they have the lowest annual income of all of the neighborhoods. They also have the highest percentage of renters, and seven of the red neighborhoods out of the twelve, As I just said, the inhabitants are described only as a Negro. Four of those descriptors are left blank. For comparison, there's only one left blank in each of the blue and yellow sections, both of which have far more sections than red. None of them are left blank in the Green section the one. There is one Red neighborhood that's marked as quote laboring whites. So while the white neighborhoods included information about what people actually did for a living, all that was noted about the black neighborhood's inhabitants was that they were black. There was a whole separate part of the Richmond assessment that was specifically about race. Richmond's green, blue, and yellow neighborhoods are all marked as zero Negro. All of the red zones are or more negro, apart from South Richmond, which was zero when this map was made. South Richmond was a working class white neighborhood almost entirely surrounded by two other neighborhoods, each of which had a black population. Richmond assessors were also to note, as all other assessors were, the infiltration of inhabitants. Here was the instruction to assessors quote any threat of infiltration of foreign born Negro or other low A grade population. If so, indicate these by nationality and rate of infiltration, like this Negro rapid. That's where the quote ends. In the Richmond map. The red zones that are not already a hundred percent black were noted with an infiltration of Negro, and one yellow section was noted as being infiltrated by renters working people. The Richmond maps also emit lots of other detail about any of the majority black neighborhoods. There's no description about the terrain or the buildings. It was enough to know that black people lived there. And while there were blanks left at various spots for other neighborhood types, this was really really disproportionate in terms of the black neighborhoods. It would be easy to write all of this off as the work of one rogue racist assessor who worked in the Richmond, Virginia area, but the same pattern is true in maps from all over the United States, the black neighborhoods are overwhelmingly marked in red, and the red neighborhoods are disproportionately skipped over in terms of actual detail. Other than the fact that black people live there. There's also the fact that the instructions themselves UH talked about noting an influx of black residents as a problem. As an example of a non Richmond map where these trends are equally apparent, in Acron Ohio assessment include includes this in a Grade Sea neighborhood made of predominantly Italian rubber workers, quote only three Negro families located in entire area, and these are better type colored and own their own homes. That's the end of that quote. A Great d neighborhood in Akron is described as being predominantly Jewish rubber workers and laborers, but with end quote, infiltration of colored fairly rapid, with quote present heavy Negro encroachment gradually increasing end quote. As we said earlier, we are going to link to so many of these maps in our show notes, and in many cases, people who find maps of their own cities at neighborhoods will see the same trends still present and who lives where, and which neighborhoods are considered nice. So there's some debate among historians about exactly where these maps fit in with the process of redlining. The maps themselves weren't discovered until nine seventy, long after they were made. They kind of disappeared from you for a while after the Great Depression. That's unclear how they were actually used in practice. One train of thought is that the h o LC maps started the practice of redlining, especially redlining black neighborhoods specifically. Another argument is that this practice was actually already in place, so these maps are a symptom and a documentation of something that was already happening, not the cause. A third argument is that none of this proves anything. It's impossible to tell whether lenders were really discriminating based on race or or whether their actual decisions were based on individual borrowers financial needs or not. One thing that's used to support that argument is that a lot of the h o LC's own original refinancing efforts, which like we said, we're part of mortgage relief during the Great Depression and started years before these maps were actually made, did happen in neighborhoods that were later coded to be in categories C or D, so yellow or red. However, these maps are also not the only evidence of racial discrimination in housing in the nineteen thirties and beyond. A Federal Housing Administration Underwriting Manual from nine five includes the instruction quote protection against adverse influences is obtained by the existence and enforcement of proper zoning regulations and appropriate deed restrictions. Important among adverse influences are the following infiltration of inharmonious racial or nationality groups, the presence of smoke, odors, fog, et cetera. The National Association of Real Estate Broker's Code of Ethics, as amended in nineteen fifty two, reads quote Realtors should never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood a character of property or occupancy, members of any race or nationality, or any individual whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values in the neighborhood. In other words, the instructions themselves made to map surveyors, underwriters, and real estate agents contained clear directions to discriminate against home buyers and neighborhoods based on race. So we talked to Part one about home buying being viewed as an investment. This can be hard to believe for people who lost lots of money or their homes in the most recent housing market crisis in the United States. I my home declined precipitously in value. Uh, that's my personal experience. But in the nineteen thirties, the median home price in the United States was about fifty thousand dollars. In it was more like a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. So these patterns of discrimination, which were either started by or documented by the h OLC neighborhood maps, excluded minorities, especially black people, from being able to participate in that long term investment. It also prevented predominantly black neighborhoods from making a transition from rental neighborhoods to owner occupied neighborhoods. As a general rule, owner occupied neighborhoods are better maintained and more stable than rental neighborhoods. The idea here is that people who own their homes are more deeply invested in the home itself and the good of the surrounding neighborhood than people who rent. This is not any tirade against renters at all. We have Tracy and I have both been renters. We have been there. But that is a statistical fact that renters just don't tend to have the same investment in their home. Also, sometimes the people that buy houses to rent out do not have the same investment in a neighborhood right there to collect rent. So again not knocking renters in the least. A two thousand fourteen study at Penn State put a dollar amount on the difference, uh, and that is that owner occupied neighborhoods benefit their neighborhood to the tune of one thousand, three d twenty seven dollars per home per year. So that's to sub that up again, meant that these neighborhoods that had been excluded from being eligible for mortgage lending meant that they were sort of trapped as being only rental neighborhoods without people who lived there being able to make the transition into being homeowners and to put more investment into their own surrounding area. So the h o l C ceased operations and its assets were liquidated in nineteen fifty one, and from the late nineteen forties through the late nineteen sixties, a number of court decisions and laws attempted to address the ongoing discrimination within the mortgage and homebuying process. Racely restrictive covenants were found to be unconstitutional. In the nineteen forty seven Supreme Court case Shelley versus Cramer, a black couple the Cramers had moved into the Shelleys neighborhood, which, per a restrictive covenant, was supposed to be all white. The Shelleys took the Cramers to court, and in a unanimous decision, the Court found that state's enforcement of racially restrictive covenants violated the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. The Fair Housing Act was passed in nineteen sixty eight, making it illegal for property owners, landlords, and real estate brokers to discriminate against people based on their race. The government also soon took steps to keep lenders from discriminating illegally. The Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, which was passed in nineteen seventy five, required lending institutions to report data about all of their mortgages, and in nineteen seventy seven, the Community Reinvestment Act encouraged banks to reinvest money in the neighborhoods where they did business. However, even though redlining is illegal now, lenders, insurance companies, and other businesses have continued to engage in it. And that's in spite of a surgeon lending to minorities in the nineteen nineties that seemed like it might close that gap. We're going to spend a few minutes talking about some examples. A study of Detroit, Michigan, which is a majority black city, looked at two thousand census data and compared the proportion of black residents in the census tracts against mortgage lending in the same area. It found that quote, despite the identification of other significant factors such as educational attainment, the presence of independent effects associated with race demonstrated that in the city of Detroit, redlining occurs in the contemporary period. At two thousand eight, paper and the Journal of Economic Issues looked at loans in Mississippi and found denial rates for minorities to be exceptionally high in a way that wasn't explained by actual economic factors. And that study, black and Hispanic borrowers actually did have generally weaker credit histories than white or Asian borrowers, but the denial rates for black and Hispanic borrowers were really out of whack compared to the actual number and extent of that difference. There have also been investigations of actual lenders and financial institutions. In eleven, the Department of Justice settled a case against Prime Lending, a wholly owned subsidiary of Plains Capital Bank, for a nationwide pattern of discriminating against black borrowers. In May of the U s Department of Housing and Urban Urban Development announced a two hundred million dollars settlement in red lighting claims against Associated Bank in a for unfair lending practices that went on between two thousand and eight and quote. The settlement stems from a HUD secretary initiated complaint alleging that from two thousand eight, the Wisconsin based bank engaged in discriminatory lending practices regarding the denial of more gage loans to African American and Hispanic applicants and the provision of loan services in neighborhoods with significant African American or Hispanic populations. And of course, this pattern is not confined to mortgage lending. Accusations of redlining have also been leveled at the insurance and student loan industries. In terms of insurance specifically, some people argue that the increased premiums charged in minority neighborhoods are appropriate because those neighborhoods are more expensive for the insurer, But studies of that idea are actually conflicting in their results, and the term is also used today to describe retailers whose prices are higher in the lowest income neighborhoods. So if I set at the very top of this two partter that it was inspired by a conversation where somebody demanded that we explained to them something, and the explanation that was in demand was why have Asian people succeeded more? It was actually grosser than that. It was why is there no racism against Asians if there's so much racism? And I was like, well, because there is racism against Asians, it just looks a lot different from racism racism against other minorities because of all these social factors that have gone on since the abolition of slavery a hundred and fifty years ago. And one of the things that I mentioned was redlining, and the person I was talking to clearly didn't believe that redlining was ever a thing, and thought I was talking about the more recent mortgage crisis, which is a different thing. Like his argument was that the whole mortgage crisis had been uh caused by giving loans to people who couldn't afford them, which is only one piece of that story. A lot of the loans that were given to people who couldn't afford them were in and of themselves predatory loans, Like the loans structure itself was wrong and was like setting people up for failure. They were people were doing or banks are doing things like giving people separate loans to cover just the interest, which is a whole bad situation. Like, there was a lot going on beside that. Um, this was not a case where the person actually later said thank you for explaining that to me. Uh. He actually went away after I gave him uh like a link to the Wikipedia page about redlining, because Wikipedia seemed to be the only source that he considered to be uh worthwhile it was a Yankee conversation, but this whole I had heard of redlining when I bought my house. Me too, right, because I bought my house through a program for first time homebuyers, and one of the things that they were specifically trying to combat was the ongoing problems in the housing market that came about because of redlining. And so that's where I heard about it for the first time. And when I started researching this, what I thought I was going to find was a lot of neighborhoods that had been redlined so people wouldn't provide mortgage there. And it was like, it happens to be that the poorest communities often were predominantly African American and it was like a weird chicken and egg thing. That is what I thought in my head I was going to find. I was completely forward when I actually found instructions on survey forms that were specifically like note if there's an infiltration of quote negroes like I was not. I did not. It was worse than I thought it was going to be. That's what I'm trying to say. Yeah, the wording makes it sound like you're sending like a spy out in wartime, like you have to look for these horrible people. No, but yeah, it makes my heart hurt. Frankly me too. So I have some listener mail to take us out on a much lighter note than this, uh, which we talked about things like this because they're important and because their examples of how history continues to affect people's lives today. So uh. This this listener mail, though, was about something much more light hearted. It's from Rebecca, Rebecca says, Oh, it's from Becca, It says Becca at the bottom. So I'll call Rebecca. Becca says, Dear Holly and Tracy. I really enjoyed the good humor versus popsical episode in my ears perked up at the mention of Frank Epperson in Oakland. I live in Alameda, an island, Yes, an island next to Oakland. I had heard the story of Frank Epperson, but had no idea about the intricacies between good humor and popsicle. Neptune Beach, where Everson sold some of the first popsicles, was an amusement park in Alameda. Alamada was a getaway for wealthy San Franciscans. They had vacation homes and visited by traveling on the ferry. There was not a bay bridge yet. Some of the homes built are still in Alameda and referred to as the Gold Coast. Unfortunately, in the seventies, a developer filled a huge portion of the estuary and built apartments that blocked the Gold Coast views. Neptune Beach is also gone, however, there are some remnants of little vacation cottages, now turned into homes. Neptune Beach operated from nineteen seventeen until nineteen thirty nine. The Strethlow family owned and operated the beach and filled in a section of bait at an Olympic sized swimming pool and a roller coaster with views of the bay. They had swimming races and a hand carved carousel and ferris wheel. The park closed in ninety nine, mainly because of the Great Depression. Also, the Bay Bridge was built and people lost the allure of traveling on the ferry. The main access point to the beach was via the ferry and also where one paid admission, but with cars, people were able to access the beach without paying, also leading to its demise. And then she sends a link of some neat pictures of the park which we will put in our show notes. Thank you again for your great podcast, Becca. Thank you, Becca. We didn't talk about Neptune Beach much at all except for impact things, so it is really cool to hear that first person account of various things from there from somebody who lives in the area. If you would like to write to us about this or any other podcast or at history podcast at how Stuffworks dot com. We're also on Facebook at Facebook dot com slash miss and History and on Twitter at miss in History. Are tumbler as miss in history dot tumbler dot com, and we're also on Pinterest at pinterest dot com slash miss in history our Instagram. We are also on Instagram at miss in history. UH. If you would like to go to our parent company's website, you can put in the word mortgage in the search bar and you will find uh information on how mortgages where a lot of which was inspired by these changes that were made in the industry after the Great Depression. Can also come to our website, where we're gonna have links to so many of these maps so you can see them for yourself. We also have show notes for all of our episodes. We also have an art I have of all of our episodes. I should say that the show notes are the for the episodes of Holly and I have worked on there. They don't really exist as much before, so you can do all that at and a whole lot more at how stuff works dot com, or missed the history dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics because it how stuff works dot com. M

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from housework dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy the Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. So this episode of Stuffy miss and History Class is part of a two part series on the history of redlining. And often are two partners like they can stand alone reasonably well, but in this case, part one really is necessary to making sense of part two. So if you've skipped part one, hopefully like you're maybe a brand new listener to the show, we really really encourage you to pause this one, listen to our previous episode, and then come back to this one. Also, one of the things that we're going to talk about today is the language that it's the assessors used when making color coded maps of neighborhoods and segregated cities to use as a reference on whether mortgage lending in those neighborhoods was desirable or not. We're also gonna talk about the language of the instructions and language and other documents also, and some of this language is frankly offensive, and we are including it as part of exploring these maps and what they represented. Uh, we read from a couple of instructions in the previous episode that we're definitely the mildest of all of this. These maps at sort of demonstrate and also predict ongoing patterns of housing discrimination that have persisted since they were created. As we discussed in the previous installment, the Homeowners Loan Corporation was a Depression era government program in the United States that was meant to save the homes of people who had defaulted on their mortgages. In the h o l C started its City Survey program to map more than two hundred cities around the United States, creating color coded keys of where mortgage lending was desirable and where it was not. They looked at all aspects of the neighborhood, including the terrain, the buildings, the amenities, the residents, and the economic factors tying all of this together. The thought process that was kind of guiding the approach to all these maps was that neighborhoods go through a predictable and inevitable cycle. First, they would be shiny and new and desirable, with lots of affluent people moving into brand new houses in an area with lots of amenities. Then they'd get a little older, a little more dated, a little less well maintained. Then quote, undesirable elements would quote infiltrate these aging neighborhoods. Eventually, these undesirables would completely take over and the whole neighborhood would be ruined thanks to crime, vandalism, and the population living there. So, combining this overall view about how neighborhoods age with data about the neighborhoods themselves and the people who lived there, the h o LC made a collection of color coded maps. Grade A, the first grade was green. This was the best classification, and these were the most desirable neighborhoods. Grade D, the fourth grade, was read or hazardous. These were neighborhoods where mortgage lenders either did not operate or strongly preferred not to operate. The middle two grades, blue and yellow, which were also known as still desirable and definitely declining. We're not as desirable as green, but they were not off limits the way these red hazardous neighborhoods were either. So here's how the h o LC described the four categories. We're going to read them word for word. Quote. Green areas are hot spots. They are not yet fully built up in nearly all instances. They are the new, well planned sections of the city and almost synonymous with the areas where good mortgage lenders with available funds are willing to make their maximum loans to be amortized over a ten to fifteen year period, perhaps up to seventy five to eight percent of the appraisal. They are homogeneous in demand as residential locations in good time or bad hence on the upgrade. Blue areas, as a rule, are completely developed. They are like a n automobile, still good, but not what the people are buying today who can afford a new one. They are the neighborhoods where good mortgage lenders will have a tendency to hold loan commitments ten to fift under the limit. Yellow areas are characterized by age, obsolescence and change of style, expiring restrictions or lack of them, infiltration of a lower grade population, the presence of influences which increase sales resistance, such as inadequate transportation, insufficient utilities, perhaps heavy tax burdens, who a maintenance of homes, et cetera. Ferry built areas are included, as well as neighborhoods lacking homogeneity. Generally, these areas have reached the transition period. Good mortgage lenders are more conservative and the yellow areas and hold commitments under the lending ratio for the green and blue areas. As a side note before Holly reads the red part, if you're not familiar with the term jerry built, a jerry builder was a term for a speculator who would build a lot of houses out of very cheap, shoddy materials with kind of unsubstantial construction. Not even the Oxford English Dictionary is sure exactly how the name jerry got attached to it. But to go back to the description, we're going to hit red areas next quote. Red areas represent those neighborhoods in which the things that are now taking place in the yellow neighborhoods have already happened. They are characterized by detrimental influences in a pronounced degree, undesirable population or infiltration of it, low percentage of homeownership, very poor maintenance and often vandalism prevail. Unstable incomes of the people, and difficult collections are usually prevalent. The areas are rodder than the show called slum districts. Some mortgage lenders may refuse to make loans in these neighborhoods, and others will lend only on a conservative basis. So after a brief word from a sponsor, we're going to look at the maps of Richmond, Virginia as an example of what these maps actually said about the neighborhoods they were documenting. So to get back to these maps, when you look at all of the documentation that went into creating these maps, there are some clear and obvious patterns that emerge. We're going to look at the maps of Richmond, Virginia as a primary example because those maps and all of their supporting documentation have been digitized as part of a project by the Digital Scholarship Lab of the University of Richmond. We're gonna link to that from our show notes. Uh And to be clear, I looked at the maps for many, many, many other cities and their documentation as part of researching these two episodes. And the reason that we are using the Richmond maps for the bulk of the examples is because they WIYH that they have been organized online is extremely easy to jump back and forth between the maps and the documentation, and to go back and forth between the different parts of the documentation um, these same trends are definitely evident and other maps all over the country also. When it came to the inhabitants, assessors gave a basic description of the types of people living in each neighborhood. The instruction was, quote what is the general type of occupation i e. Executive businessmen, retired, professional, clerical, skilled mechanic or factory workers, laborers, etcetera. In Richmond, Virginia as our example, the residents of green sections were described as quote best people. Blue section inhabitants were some more of the best people, as well as salaried workers and quote responsible trades class. In the yellow section, most of the inhabitants are quote working people, mechanics, mill hands, and a number of other specific hourly wage jobs. I would say I did not find as much categorizing of the people in green as best people outside of Richmond, Like there were four specific things about them, being various affluent roles like executive people and people that were generally wealthier. So in the Richmond maps there are twelve red neighborhoods, and as we said before, these are the ones where mortgage lending was not seen as desirable. According to the assessor, they have the lowest annual income of all of the neighborhoods. They also have the highest percentage of renters, and seven of the red neighborhoods out of the twelve, As I just said, the inhabitants are described only as a Negro. Four of those descriptors are left blank. For comparison, there's only one left blank in each of the blue and yellow sections, both of which have far more sections than red. None of them are left blank in the Green section the one. There is one Red neighborhood that's marked as quote laboring whites. So while the white neighborhoods included information about what people actually did for a living, all that was noted about the black neighborhood's inhabitants was that they were black. There was a whole separate part of the Richmond assessment that was specifically about race. Richmond's green, blue, and yellow neighborhoods are all marked as zero Negro. All of the red zones are or more negro, apart from South Richmond, which was zero when this map was made. South Richmond was a working class white neighborhood almost entirely surrounded by two other neighborhoods, each of which had a black population. Richmond assessors were also to note, as all other assessors were, the infiltration of inhabitants. Here was the instruction to assessors quote any threat of infiltration of foreign born Negro or other low A grade population. If so, indicate these by nationality and rate of infiltration, like this Negro rapid. That's where the quote ends. In the Richmond map. The red zones that are not already a hundred percent black were noted with an infiltration of Negro, and one yellow section was noted as being infiltrated by renters working people. The Richmond maps also emit lots of other detail about any of the majority black neighborhoods. There's no description about the terrain or the buildings. It was enough to know that black people lived there. And while there were blanks left at various spots for other neighborhood types, this was really really disproportionate in terms of the black neighborhoods. It would be easy to write all of this off as the work of one rogue racist assessor who worked in the Richmond, Virginia area, but the same pattern is true in maps from all over the United States, the black neighborhoods are overwhelmingly marked in red, and the red neighborhoods are disproportionately skipped over in terms of actual detail. Other than the fact that black people live there. There's also the fact that the instructions themselves UH talked about noting an influx of black residents as a problem. As an example of a non Richmond map where these trends are equally apparent, in Acron Ohio assessment include includes this in a Grade Sea neighborhood made of predominantly Italian rubber workers, quote only three Negro families located in entire area, and these are better type colored and own their own homes. That's the end of that quote. A Great d neighborhood in Akron is described as being predominantly Jewish rubber workers and laborers, but with end quote, infiltration of colored fairly rapid, with quote present heavy Negro encroachment gradually increasing end quote. As we said earlier, we are going to link to so many of these maps in our show notes, and in many cases, people who find maps of their own cities at neighborhoods will see the same trends still present and who lives where, and which neighborhoods are considered nice. So there's some debate among historians about exactly where these maps fit in with the process of redlining. The maps themselves weren't discovered until nine seventy, long after they were made. They kind of disappeared from you for a while after the Great Depression. That's unclear how they were actually used in practice. One train of thought is that the h o LC maps started the practice of redlining, especially redlining black neighborhoods specifically. Another argument is that this practice was actually already in place, so these maps are a symptom and a documentation of something that was already happening, not the cause. A third argument is that none of this proves anything. It's impossible to tell whether lenders were really discriminating based on race or or whether their actual decisions were based on individual borrowers financial needs or not. One thing that's used to support that argument is that a lot of the h o LC's own original refinancing efforts, which like we said, we're part of mortgage relief during the Great Depression and started years before these maps were actually made, did happen in neighborhoods that were later coded to be in categories C or D, so yellow or red. However, these maps are also not the only evidence of racial discrimination in housing in the nineteen thirties and beyond. A Federal Housing Administration Underwriting Manual from nine five includes the instruction quote protection against adverse influences is obtained by the existence and enforcement of proper zoning regulations and appropriate deed restrictions. Important among adverse influences are the following infiltration of inharmonious racial or nationality groups, the presence of smoke, odors, fog, et cetera. The National Association of Real Estate Broker's Code of Ethics, as amended in nineteen fifty two, reads quote Realtors should never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood a character of property or occupancy, members of any race or nationality, or any individual whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values in the neighborhood. In other words, the instructions themselves made to map surveyors, underwriters, and real estate agents contained clear directions to discriminate against home buyers and neighborhoods based on race. So we talked to Part one about home buying being viewed as an investment. This can be hard to believe for people who lost lots of money or their homes in the most recent housing market crisis in the United States. I my home declined precipitously in value. Uh, that's my personal experience. But in the nineteen thirties, the median home price in the United States was about fifty thousand dollars. In it was more like a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. So these patterns of discrimination, which were either started by or documented by the h OLC neighborhood maps, excluded minorities, especially black people, from being able to participate in that long term investment. It also prevented predominantly black neighborhoods from making a transition from rental neighborhoods to owner occupied neighborhoods. As a general rule, owner occupied neighborhoods are better maintained and more stable than rental neighborhoods. The idea here is that people who own their homes are more deeply invested in the home itself and the good of the surrounding neighborhood than people who rent. This is not any tirade against renters at all. We have Tracy and I have both been renters. We have been there. But that is a statistical fact that renters just don't tend to have the same investment in their home. Also, sometimes the people that buy houses to rent out do not have the same investment in a neighborhood right there to collect rent. So again not knocking renters in the least. A two thousand fourteen study at Penn State put a dollar amount on the difference, uh, and that is that owner occupied neighborhoods benefit their neighborhood to the tune of one thousand, three d twenty seven dollars per home per year. So that's to sub that up again, meant that these neighborhoods that had been excluded from being eligible for mortgage lending meant that they were sort of trapped as being only rental neighborhoods without people who lived there being able to make the transition into being homeowners and to put more investment into their own surrounding area. So the h o l C ceased operations and its assets were liquidated in nineteen fifty one, and from the late nineteen forties through the late nineteen sixties, a number of court decisions and laws attempted to address the ongoing discrimination within the mortgage and homebuying process. Racely restrictive covenants were found to be unconstitutional. In the nineteen forty seven Supreme Court case Shelley versus Cramer, a black couple the Cramers had moved into the Shelleys neighborhood, which, per a restrictive covenant, was supposed to be all white. The Shelleys took the Cramers to court, and in a unanimous decision, the Court found that state's enforcement of racially restrictive covenants violated the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. The Fair Housing Act was passed in nineteen sixty eight, making it illegal for property owners, landlords, and real estate brokers to discriminate against people based on their race. The government also soon took steps to keep lenders from discriminating illegally. The Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, which was passed in nineteen seventy five, required lending institutions to report data about all of their mortgages, and in nineteen seventy seven, the Community Reinvestment Act encouraged banks to reinvest money in the neighborhoods where they did business. However, even though redlining is illegal now, lenders, insurance companies, and other businesses have continued to engage in it. And that's in spite of a surgeon lending to minorities in the nineteen nineties that seemed like it might close that gap. We're going to spend a few minutes talking about some examples. A study of Detroit, Michigan, which is a majority black city, looked at two thousand census data and compared the proportion of black residents in the census tracts against mortgage lending in the same area. It found that quote, despite the identification of other significant factors such as educational attainment, the presence of independent effects associated with race demonstrated that in the city of Detroit, redlining occurs in the contemporary period. At two thousand eight, paper and the Journal of Economic Issues looked at loans in Mississippi and found denial rates for minorities to be exceptionally high in a way that wasn't explained by actual economic factors. And that study, black and Hispanic borrowers actually did have generally weaker credit histories than white or Asian borrowers, but the denial rates for black and Hispanic borrowers were really out of whack compared to the actual number and extent of that difference. There have also been investigations of actual lenders and financial institutions. In eleven, the Department of Justice settled a case against Prime Lending, a wholly owned subsidiary of Plains Capital Bank, for a nationwide pattern of discriminating against black borrowers. In May of the U s Department of Housing and Urban Urban Development announced a two hundred million dollars settlement in red lighting claims against Associated Bank in a for unfair lending practices that went on between two thousand and eight and quote. The settlement stems from a HUD secretary initiated complaint alleging that from two thousand eight, the Wisconsin based bank engaged in discriminatory lending practices regarding the denial of more gage loans to African American and Hispanic applicants and the provision of loan services in neighborhoods with significant African American or Hispanic populations. And of course, this pattern is not confined to mortgage lending. Accusations of redlining have also been leveled at the insurance and student loan industries. In terms of insurance specifically, some people argue that the increased premiums charged in minority neighborhoods are appropriate because those neighborhoods are more expensive for the insurer, But studies of that idea are actually conflicting in their results, and the term is also used today to describe retailers whose prices are higher in the lowest income neighborhoods. So if I set at the very top of this two partter that it was inspired by a conversation where somebody demanded that we explained to them something, and the explanation that was in demand was why have Asian people succeeded more? It was actually grosser than that. It was why is there no racism against Asians if there's so much racism? And I was like, well, because there is racism against Asians, it just looks a lot different from racism racism against other minorities because of all these social factors that have gone on since the abolition of slavery a hundred and fifty years ago. And one of the things that I mentioned was redlining, and the person I was talking to clearly didn't believe that redlining was ever a thing, and thought I was talking about the more recent mortgage crisis, which is a different thing. Like his argument was that the whole mortgage crisis had been uh caused by giving loans to people who couldn't afford them, which is only one piece of that story. A lot of the loans that were given to people who couldn't afford them were in and of themselves predatory loans, Like the loans structure itself was wrong and was like setting people up for failure. They were people were doing or banks are doing things like giving people separate loans to cover just the interest, which is a whole bad situation. Like, there was a lot going on beside that. Um, this was not a case where the person actually later said thank you for explaining that to me. Uh. He actually went away after I gave him uh like a link to the Wikipedia page about redlining, because Wikipedia seemed to be the only source that he considered to be uh worthwhile it was a Yankee conversation, but this whole I had heard of redlining when I bought my house. Me too, right, because I bought my house through a program for first time homebuyers, and one of the things that they were specifically trying to combat was the ongoing problems in the housing market that came about because of redlining. And so that's where I heard about it for the first time. And when I started researching this, what I thought I was going to find was a lot of neighborhoods that had been redlined so people wouldn't provide mortgage there. And it was like, it happens to be that the poorest communities often were predominantly African American and it was like a weird chicken and egg thing. That is what I thought in my head I was going to find. I was completely forward when I actually found instructions on survey forms that were specifically like note if there's an infiltration of quote negroes like I was not. I did not. It was worse than I thought it was going to be. That's what I'm trying to say. Yeah, the wording makes it sound like you're sending like a spy out in wartime, like you have to look for these horrible people. No, but yeah, it makes my heart hurt. Frankly me too. So I have some listener mail to take us out on a much lighter note than this, uh, which we talked about things like this because they're important and because their examples of how history continues to affect people's lives today. So uh. This this listener mail, though, was about something much more light hearted. It's from Rebecca, Rebecca says, Oh, it's from Becca, It says Becca at the bottom. So I'll call Rebecca. Becca says, Dear Holly and Tracy. I really enjoyed the good humor versus popsical episode in my ears perked up at the mention of Frank Epperson in Oakland. I live in Alameda, an island, Yes, an island next to Oakland. I had heard the story of Frank Epperson, but had no idea about the intricacies between good humor and popsicle. Neptune Beach, where Everson sold some of the first popsicles, was an amusement park in Alameda. Alamada was a getaway for wealthy San Franciscans. They had vacation homes and visited by traveling on the ferry. There was not a bay bridge yet. Some of the homes built are still in Alameda and referred to as the Gold Coast. Unfortunately, in the seventies, a developer filled a huge portion of the estuary and built apartments that blocked the Gold Coast views. Neptune Beach is also gone, however, there are some remnants of little vacation cottages, now turned into homes. Neptune Beach operated from nineteen seventeen until nineteen thirty nine. The Strethlow family owned and operated the beach and filled in a section of bait at an Olympic sized swimming pool and a roller coaster with views of the bay. They had swimming races and a hand carved carousel and ferris wheel. The park closed in ninety nine, mainly because of the Great Depression. Also, the Bay Bridge was built and people lost the allure of traveling on the ferry. The main access point to the beach was via the ferry and also where one paid admission, but with cars, people were able to access the beach without paying, also leading to its demise. And then she sends a link of some neat pictures of the park which we will put in our show notes. Thank you again for your great podcast, Becca. Thank you, Becca. We didn't talk about Neptune Beach much at all except for impact things, so it is really cool to hear that first person account of various things from there from somebody who lives in the area. If you would like to write to us about this or any other podcast or at history podcast at how Stuffworks dot com. We're also on Facebook at Facebook dot com slash miss and History and on Twitter at miss in History. Are tumbler as miss in history dot tumbler dot com, and we're also on Pinterest at pinterest dot com slash miss in history our Instagram. We are also on Instagram at miss in history. UH. If you would like to go to our parent company's website, you can put in the word mortgage in the search bar and you will find uh information on how mortgages where a lot of which was inspired by these changes that were made in the industry after the Great Depression. Can also come to our website, where we're gonna have links to so many of these maps so you can see them for yourself. We also have show notes for all of our episodes. We also have an art I have of all of our episodes. I should say that the show notes are the for the episodes of Holly and I have worked on there. They don't really exist as much before, so you can do all that at and a whole lot more at how stuff works dot com, or missed the history dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics because it how stuff works dot com. M