Red Lining Practices
The HOLC started the practice of “red-lining,” the process of categorizing and grading neighborhoods based on factors such as the condition of the neighborhood, the age of the houses, the people who lived in the neighborhood, the proximity to industrial centers and other undesirable areas, and the amount of space surrounding the houses.
After assessing the neighborhoods based on these criteria, the HOLC assigned a letter grade to each area. “A” regions represented the best and most promising neighborhoods, while “D” zones designated the least desirable neighborhoods.
The classification requirements for the various areas were as follows:
A or First - new, homogeneous
B or Second - “still desirable,” “reached their peak”
C or Third - “definitely declining”
D or Fourth - things taking place in C areas have already happened
Racism and Housing
Once the ratings were given for each area, the HOLC created a “Residential Security Map” for a visual representation of the boundaries for the different categories. As time went on, the A sections were located farther and farther away from the center of the cities, placing a majority of the A areas in suburbia.
In his book Crabgrass Frontier, Kenneth T. Jackson notes that even small numbers of African-Americans often made the entire area “undesirable.”
Getting a Mortgage
These “red-lining” practices influenced private financial institutions who often defined their mortgage patterns by the classification system used in the Residential Security Maps. Therefore it was much easier for one to obtain a mortgage for a home in an A area, or perhaps a B area, but it was virtually impossible in a C or D area.
People were encouraged to develop high quality neighborhoods and avoid other areas.
The Federal Housing Administration and the GI Bill
The Federal Housing Administration (FHA) eventually adopted the HOLC appraisal methods and would only insure mortgages under the same guidelines. The Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, commonly known as the G.I. Bill, created a Veteran’s Administration (VA) program to help the 16 million soldiers and sailors of World War II purchase a home after the war. The VA followed the policies of the FHA as well.
The message to aspiring young families across the nation was clear: go to suburbia and build your dream.
Sources:
Chafe, William H. The Unfinished Journey: America Since World War II
Coontz, Stephanie. The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap
Katz, Donald. Home Fires: An Intimate Portrait of One Middle-Class Family in Postwar America
Jackson, Kenneth T. Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States
Read more at Suite101: Housing Practices in the 1950s | Suite101
http://suite101.com/article/housing-practices-in-the-1950s-a91327#ixzz2Ita20LtzSee also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RedliningRedlining, of course, continued well beyond the 1950s and became a really hot issue in the 1970s, after the whole civil rights/hippie/assassinations era. It certainly occurred in "Boston, the land of the bean and the cod, where the Lodges speak only to the Cabots and the Cabots speak only to God." And bankers who granted mortgages (or not) had little interest in speaking to minorities in Boston, where the housing stock was deterioriating.
The G.I. Bill and redlining intersected, so that Afrian American vets returning from WWII and Korea were treated differently in the mortgage market (and everywhere else) than returning white veterans, though, say, returning Italian Americans were not treated as well as returning WASPs and returning Japanese American veterans were not treated anywhere near as well as returning Italian Americans. i don't know where Jewish American veterans would have fallen in that mix, but it would not have been nearest to the WASP end.
Meawnhile, little Barney Frank, born 1940, was growing up a gay man in an anti-gay, anti African American society. From a somewhat rough family life in Bayonne, New Jersey, he went to Harvard College, aka Brahmin heaven. (From wiki, sounds like his family was minor mafia-ish.) The Brahmins would have turned up their noses at Barney Frank for oh, so many reasons.
Early life, education, and early career
Frank was educated at Harvard College, where he resided in Matthews Hall his first year and then in Kirkland House and Winthrop House, graduating in 1962. Frank’s undergraduate studies were interrupted by the death of his father, and Frank took a year off to help resolve the family’s affairs prior to his graduation.<7>
In 1964, he was a volunteer in Mississippi during Freedom Summer.<8>
He taught undergraduates at Harvard while studying for a PhD in Government, but left in 1968 before having completed the degree, to become Boston mayor Kevin White’s Chief Assistant, a position he held for three years. He then served for a year as Administrative Assistant to Congressman Michael J. Harrington. Frank later graduated from Harvard Law School, in 1977, where he was once a student of Henry Kissinger,<9> while serving as Massachusetts State Representative.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barney_FrankIt was then, in Boston, the height of "urban renewal," aka get the minorities out of the cities of the U.S. and replace them with white folks, preferably those who had come to the city to get college degrees. And part of that was accomplished by putting highways and tunnels through old neighborhoods, a reason to tear down the "slums," aka old neighborhoods, that housed the city's closely-knit Chinese, Jeiwsh, Italian and Irish neighborhoods. (Boston is still suffering from the aftershocks of "urban renewal."
Mayor White, to whom there is a statue in Boston's now very chi chi (then scary) waterfront area, opposed the tearing up of the neighborhoods of cities and towns.
Put all that together and it stands to reason that Barney Frank was going to do what he could about redlining, once he learned about it, especially if it involved discrimination against unpopular minorities, something he understood very well.
As an aside, his stint in Mississippi occurred the same summer that the Klan, on June 21, had lynched civil rights workers James Chaney, an African American from Mississippi, and Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, two Jews from New York, at some point after a patrol car had stopped them for allegedly speeding on a quiet country road.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippi_civil_rights_workers%27_murders Please know that every Jew in the greater New York metropolitan area, if not the entire U.S., would have been highly aware of that as soon as it first hit the papers. And that was when Barney Frank chose to go to Mississippi to volunteer for the summer as a Jewish civil rights worker from the greater New York area, and a gay one with a lisp to boot. If that was not a Profile in Courage, I don't know what would be.
Interesting aside: "As a boy, Schwerner befriended Robert Reich, later US Secretary of Labor, and served as his protector against bullies."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Schwerner Yeah, Barney Frank's fight against redlining. That's what caused the global economic meltdown in which bankers and brokers were making money hand over fist until they got bailed out, whereupon they continued making money hand over fist--and also continued selling crap mortgage derivatives because no one stopped them. Not Congress, not Dodd-Frank, not accomplice Timmeh Geithner or anyone else in the Executive Branch. The decisions by the banks to fund anyone who could fog a mirror had nothing to do with anything. It was Frank and the "liar loans" taken out by teachers, plumbers and assembly line workers who were getting applications shoved at them.
And the financial institutions that were too big to fail in 2008 are bigger than ever today.
I am sure there is something left of both the young Barney Frank and the younger Mayor White in the Barney Frank who wrote Dodd Frank. But, ah, the young Barney Frank who went to Mississippi and atteracked redlining in Boston and elsewhere with a righteous venegeance! He was a great and brave Democrat.
I would take him any day of the week and twice on Sunday.
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