“Draw Me a Circle” and Where You Place Me Makes All the Difference
I like circles, don’t ask me why. Maybe I like them because they make me think about how a few inches, feet, or yards can make a world of difference. If you enclose me in a circle, you may destine me for a lifetime (even generations) of disinvestment, lost opportunity, and lost hope. These are the vestiges of redlining, a historic process in which the federal government participated in racially segregated housing beginning in the 1930s by refusing to insure home mortgages in and near Black neighborhoods.
As I prepared to teach a housing law course this summer in Cambridge, England, I thought a lot about circles and in my research, I discovered Danielle Stokes’s recent article, From Redlining to Greenlining. The title of her article harkens to the old lending maps of the 1930s — the few inches on a map between green and red, blocks or miles on the ground, and untold lost opportunities or thwarted dreams for those enclosed in the thin red circle.
A red circle drawn around a neighborhood on a lender’s map signaled high lending risk and therefore an undesirable neighborhood. Place me on the outside of this thin red circle and my economic prospects (and my family’s prospects potentially for generations) are much improved. In fact, on these same color-coded maps, areas in green signified the lowest level of lending risk and were highly recommended for lending. They were also White, racially homogenous neighborhoods. Continue reading "“Draw Me a Circle” and Where You Place Me Makes All the Difference"
