May 2014 – Daniel Kay Hertz

Redlining: A Clarification

Friend of the blog Ted Whalen asked me this on Twitter after my last post:

@DanielKayHertz large swaths of lincoln park and gold coast appear redlined on the map atop your latest post. what % of the city wasn’t?

— ted whalen (@tewhalen) May 27, 2014

Good point. If you look at the redlining map I posted, you’ll see that virtually all of the city (at least, what I clipped – you can see the full map here) is under some kind of mortgage insurance restriction, and a good deal of it is “redlined” – meaning the federal government refused to insure any mortgages of any kind. Even neighborhoods that today are quite well-off, including large parts of Old Town, Lincoln Park, and Wicker Park, were totally shunned.

A 1938 FHA map of Chicago. Note the loan guidelines for each color-coded zone on the bottom right.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with this history, you should go read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ essay. But the short version is that one of the most powerful and far-reaching New Deal-era policies, in terms of creating wealth among the working and middle classes, was reforming the way people bought houses. Prior to the New Deal, buying a house generally involved paying a huge lump sum up front, and/or taking on possibly multiple complicated, short-term, high-interest, generally unpleasant or financially dangerous loans. As a result, not very many people bought houses.

President Roosevelt changed that by creating federally-insured home mortgages that guaranteed certain buyer-friendly terms, including much smaller down payments and, crucially, 30-year payment periods. All of that dramatically lowered per-month payments, which were now affordable to the average member of the broad middle class. In essence, it was a massive subsidy program so that regular people could buy homes. Since homes, generally speaking, grow in value, and because they tend to be the single most valuable asset that most people have, it was also one of the single greatest generators of wealth in American history.

The problem for black people (and cities, and in a moral sense America itself) was that those subsidies were only available in certain areas. Basically, the federal government drew maps like the one above for the entire country, identifying neighborhoods that were too “risky” to insure loans in. One major indicator of “risk” was an aging building stock and “old-fashioned” urban design, which basically meant everything that today’s urbanists hold dear: mixed-use buildings, apartments instead of single family homes, etc.

But another major indicator was black people. Not some proxy for black people, or a sneaky back-door measure designed to exclude them: the federal government explicitly refused to insure any neighborhood that contained black people, or even neighborhoods adjacent to other neighborhoods that contained black people, for fear that soon some of the nearby black people might contaminate it. This was not a joke: in Origins of the Urban Crisis, Thomas Sugrue tells the story of a developer who wanted to build a white subdivision on the edge of Detroit in the 1940s. The problem was that the land he owned abutted a pre-existing black enclave, and the Federal Housing Administration was nervous about insuring loans in the area. To allay those fears, the FHA – the federal government – insisted that the new white development be separated from the black enclave by a six-foot-high concrete wall.

These policies didn’t begin to change until 1968, and private use of redlining wasn’t aggressively battled by federal law until the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act.

Anyway, the result of all this was that a) black people were excluded from the single largest wealth accumulation program in the history of the world to that point, and b) black neighborhoods – as well as many other inner-city areas – were systematically starved of capital that might otherwise have been used to keep buildings in a state of good repair. This was a major cause of their decline.

It’s notable, though, that lots of non-black neighborhoods were also redlined, as you can see in the map above. So if redlining was so important, why aren’t western Lincoln Park and Wicker Park facing the same kinds of problems as black neighborhoods?

I think there are a few answers to this question. The first is simply that up until relatively recently, they were. Wicker Park, before it was the commercial heart of the Northwest Side, was a downtrodden and largely Latino neighborhood with a crime problem. Before that, wealthy Lincoln Parkers near the lake were sure that redevelopment and gentrification would never make it west of Halsted – to the areas that had been redlined.

The second is that those areas became revitalized as a result of an influx of mostly white people whose families had mostly chosen to bring them up elsewhere, largely in outlying urban or suburban neighborhoods where they had been eligible to buy federally insured homes and become solidly middle class or upper middle class, with home-based wealth as an anchor for that economic status.

The third is that while some white people were subject to redlining, the majority weren’t, which created the huge supply of relatively well-off white people who could bring resources back to places like Wicker Park. On the other hand, anywhere a black person successfully bought a home was, by definition, redlined, so a much, much tinier group of them made it to the comfortable middle class. (Even where black income matches white income, black wealth – which plays a huge role in absorbing shocks that might otherwise send a middle-class person back into economic instability, or financing investments in future earnings like college tuition – is usually tiny compared to their white income peers.)

The fourth and final reason is that because of a variety of economic and social factors, white people have been extremely hesitant to move to black neighborhoods. (Read: Federal policy made black neighborhoods, on average, more run-down and unattractive to the average home buyer, and white people also are racist about living around black people.) Combined with Reason Number Three – the tiny supply of wealthy black households – that means that even after redlining was abolished, there was no large middle-class cohort ready to swoop in and bring money back into black neighborhoods. Rather, the legacy of disinvestment was left to fester, and the opening of the broader housing market meant that middle-class blacks could leave for greener pastures. Which was, of course, great for them, but it also meant that even more capital was leaving those already capital-starved neighborhoods.

This may or may not be exactly what Ted was getting at – maybe I just should have tweeted a link to the full map – but it’s important stuff anyway. Read on.

Reparations

By now, certainly, you’ve heard of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ landmark piece on reparations in The Atlantic. If you haven’t read it, the essay is less about reparations per se – writing checks and so on – and more about grappling with and acknowledging the basic sources of American racial inequality.

I won’t quote any of it here; you really just have to read it. Certainly you should read the middle sections, in which Coates lays out, better than anyone I’ve seen, the established facts: how federal housing insurance policies, contract buying, and good old-fashioned violence, both mob and state-sponsored, led to the segregated, deeply unequal world we currently inhabit. If you think you already know the story, and you are not a professor of 20th century American history, you are probably wrong. Go ahead and read it.

Pete Saunders and others have already said it better than me, but this is all central to the American urban story: not just if you care about housing disparities and the racial wealth gap, but if you’re interested in urban design choices that were made in and around inner city neighborhoods; or if you’re interested in why so many urban neighborhoods were locked out of loans to fund rehabilitation and reconstruction of aging buildings, condemning them to decline and setting the stage for gentrification once the artificial barriers to development were removed.

The bottom line is that, to a great extent, we don’t have to wonder about why Chicago is so segregated, and whether it matters. The research has been done. The answers, as Ta-Nehisi Coates likes to say, are knowable. And we all owe it to ourselves to know them.

The author of “Sprawl” returns

Generally speaking, I find the kind of broad “Cities: Yea or Nay?” culture-war debates pretty exhausting and pointless. And it is, for the most part, a culture war, fought by people who disdain or feel threatened by the social influence of others. Data point: the subhed on Robert Bruegmann’s recent op-ed in Politico, which reads: “Why urban yuppies have it all wrong.” It’s a tempting rhetorical trap, because so many people have chosen sides – or have had their side chosen for them – and because reducing transportation policy to a culture war allows everyone to feel like all they need to know about it is their own personal experience and feelings. It’s also, obviously, a totally symmetrical phenomenon: for every “urban yuppies” jab there’s an urbanist who makes some throwaway reference to suburbanites being fat, or rich, or whatever. It’s all very stupid, and as a general rule we should all stop judging each others’ choices. (We should also be more aware of the extent to which people don’t get to choose what kind of community they live in.)

If you want to live in a weird giant circle, that’s cool.

Anyway, I clicked on and read Bruegmann’s piece mainly because he’s the author of Sprawl: A Compact History, the reading of which I attempted to liveblog last fall. (See parts one, two, and three.) And I’m writing something about it partly because I’m too busy to write the longer thing I’ve been working on for a while, but also because I think there’s a really basic flaw to the column that’s both extremely important and not at all obvious to the casual reader.

Basically, Bruegmann’s argument is that sprawl is fine – good, even – because car travel is more efficient, timewise, than public transit, and so Atlanta shouldn’t be worried about its recent designation as the most sprawly city in the country. It certainly shouldn’t attempt to fix its problems with sprawl and congestion by building more public transit:

In any case, the remedy for the problem of traffic congestion is not some massive transit-building program… Atlanta, like virtually every American city, would probably benefit from an expansion of the transit system, particularly to accommodate those who cannot, for one reason or another, drive. Even a major expansion, however, is unlikely to alter in any fundamental way the fact that most people except for those traveling to or from a few very dense nodes are going to do most of their travel by private automobile because in greater Atlanta, as in greater New York or greater Paris, the automobile is simply so much faster and more convenient everywhere except at the very center. [my emphasis]

This is a really remarkable paragraph for a person who is an emeritus professor of urban planning to write, and then publish, without immediately requesting a retraction or addendum or something.

The reason, if you think about that bolded part for a just second, should be pretty clear: what Bruegmann is referring to as “the very center,” where “the automobile is simply so much faster and more convenient,” varies a crazily huge amount between New York, Paris, and Atlanta, both in absolute size but also more importantly as a proportion of the entire metropolitan area. That’s obvious to anyone who has been to these cities, or is even casually familiar with them, but we can get a pretty good estimate of how big each “very center” is by looking at each metro area’s mode share: the percentage of people who choose to take public transit to work. Presumably, after all, people choose transit mostly because it’s the most efficient way to get where they’re going, with some consideration also for the fact that it saves a ton of money.

In the Atlanta area, about 3.7% of people take public transit to work; in the New York area, it’s about 30%. Paris is skewed somewhat because a huge percentage of people walk, but the drive-transit split works out to about 67-33. So we can very roughly estimate that the “very core” makes up, respectively, 4%, 30%, and 33% of these cities.*

Why the huge difference? Because a much larger percentage of the New York and Paris metropolitan areas are built at a reasonably dense, pedestrian-friendly scale where it makes sense to walk to the nearest bus or train stop, and where, when you get off that bus or train, you are likely to be able to walk to your job without too much trouble, either. In those cities, what Bruegmann refers to as “a few very dense nodes” make up, in fact, a continuous fabric of urban neighborhoods that are home to a huge percentage of the metro area’s residents.

In other words, Bruegmann forgot to talk about land use. At all. He forgot to mention that Atlanta, like basically everywhere else in the country (including metropolitan New York!), has basically made it illegal to build neighborhoods that resemble the transit-friendly nodes that, in Atlanta as elsewhere, are some of the most popular parts of the metropolitan area. As a result, as greater Atlanta has grown over the last few decades, it has failed to produce the kind of neighborhoods that allow people to choose not to drive, regardless of the quality of the public transit network.

Midtown, an attractive neighborhood with a thriving retail, restaurant, and housing scene, as well as a decently-used MARTA station, is one of the only parts of the Atlanta region that has been allowed to develop like this.

Which makes the whole finger-wagging at urbanists pretty silly. It may be the case that Atlanta needs more roads; I don’t know. It seems very clear – as Bruegmann himself admits, pulling the kind of rhetorical underhandedness that bugged me in his otherwise thoughtful book – that Atlanta needs better public transit. But without spending hardly any money at all, it could make what transit it already has much more useful simply by changing its land-use laws and letting people build more housing and jobs around major bus and rail lines.

It’s a measure of just how invisible land use policy is, though, that Politico would publish an op-ed on urban form and transportation choices without thinking that it needed to spend a single word on the subject. It is my hope that one day this will not be possible.

* Obviously the Paris number is ridiculously low, since it’s unlikely that the 40% of people who walk, if they had to choose between driving and transit, would mostly choose to drive. But whatever, the broader point stands.