Date: 2024-10-31 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00018964
US Race Relations
Appalling Lack of Progress
“systemic racism” ... symptomatic of a deeper societal dysfunction
Peter Burgess Thank you Nate Dexter ... the role of the real estate industry in making profit through all sorts of appalling practices has been in play all of my adult life time. IMHO every high profit activity which is good for financial wealth (economic capital) should be set off against the negative impact the activity has on people (social capital) and the environment (natural capital). Improving a neighborhood by gentrification has an appalling impact on those that once used to call the place home! More thoughtful community development is a vital change urgently needed.
Peter Burgess
If you’ve ever wondered what the term “systemic racism” means, or if you’re encountering it for the first time in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, allow me to explain an example from the City of St. Paul. I hope this helps to explain part of what it means that there is systemic racism in this country and this state, and that the effects of things that happened decades ago still matter today. I will be putting several sources and interesting links in the comments, so please read those also.
It came to my attention that there are many people who are completely unfamiliar with the practice of redlining, racial covenants, and how freeway construction and other so called urban renewal was used to destroy Black neighborhoods in the 20th century, and how the effects of those actions continue today. To me this issue is one of the most blatant and easy to understand examples of systemic racism in the United States. I only really learned about this in the last few years, when I moved to the areas of St. Paul greatly affected by these practices.
As part of the New Deal, the federal government created the “Home Owners’ Loan Corporation” (HOLC). What the HOLC is perhaps most famous for today is creating the “HOLC maps”, which assigned residential areas of cities a grade for risk to mortgage lenders. Grading criteria included property values, age of properties, depreciation, and racial/ethnic makeup as well as economic class of the residents. Throughout the country, Black neighborhoods were assigned D grades, meaning that they were considered hazardous for lending purposes.
An important local example from St. Paul are zones D3 and D4 (see the attached map, but if you want to explore the HOLC maps from around the country, there is a link in the comments to a helpful interactive map). Each zone in each city had a written description to accompany the grade. Here are some quotes from the descriptions:
D3: “Italians, colored people, Jews of the lower strata and other people of foreign descent of the lower classes reside here.”
“Very heavy racial encroachment throughout the entire district is prominent. The only redeeming feature is its accessibility to the downtown district.”
D4: “The laboring class with a large percentage of negroes live here.”
“The class of colored people in this area are somewhat better than other districts, many of them, due to the City of St. Paul being the General Headquarters for the Northern Pacific and Great Northern Railroads, are pullman porters who do acquire ownership of their homes.”
Both of these districts were subject to extensive “urban renewal” in the subsequent decades. Rondo still exists as a neighborhood to some extent, but the area covered by D3 is largely devoid of any residential neighborhoods, replaced with freeways, big box stores and light industrial zones.
Now, how were these maps used to enforce racist policies? The first and most obvious way is that by labelling predominantly Black districts as dangerous from a mortgage lending standpoint, Black people who may have been able to afford a home were often not able to get a mortgage in their neighborhoods. Why not just move to a different neighborhood? That’s where racial covenants come in. A covenant is a provision in a home deed or title that restricts sale of a property to anyone who isn’t white. They were commonplace in the 1920s-1950s in what were considered the most desirable neighborhoods, the As and Bs on the HOLC maps. The University of Minnesota’s “Mapping Prejudice” project is working on getting a picture of their prevalence in the Twin Cities (link in the comments). They were in fact so prevalent, that I would be surprised if my house was not subject to a covenant.
So, Black Minnesotans were both prevented from acquiring mortgages in the neighborhoods they already resided in and were boxed out of neighborhoods they could have afforded and moved to. As a result, they were prevented from the huge boom in home equity and wealth creation that middle-class white Americans were able to take advantage of. When people refer to the 50s and 60s as the “good old days”, a huge part of that is the home equity wealth that was new to many families at that time. If you are White and your parents or grandparents were able to purchase a home in these decades, that feeling of financial security is the direct result of economic benefits that Black Americans were not permitted to enjoy. Don’t take my word for it though. I’ll put a link to an excellent video titled “Segregated by Design” about the topic in the comments.
In some places the discrimination went a step further. The HOLC maps were used to aid in the planning of the interstate highway system. The route that was chosen for I-94 through St. Paul was specifically intended to drive a literal rift through Rondo (D4). That this route was chosen can be at best described as disregarding the thousands of residents in the neighborhood and can at worst be considered a deliberate effort to push Black people out. This didn’t have to be, however. St. Paul city planner George Herrold (who was still working on municipal projects at the age of 82 in 1945) expressed grave concern about the social impacts of the proposed freeway route. He suggested an alternate route using the railway corridor one mile to the North (see the alternative proposals map attached). Herrold’s efforts were unsuccessful. It’s worth noting that everything he predicted became true. Rondo was split with huge social consequences, and the resulting creation of a concrete moat cut downtown St. Paul off from the rest of the city. I should also add that Herrold’s plan would have required a negotiation with the railroads to place the freeway in that zone, and railroad companies don’t generally like sharing land. But what does it say about us that it’s politically more viable to displace thousands of people in hundreds of households than it is to negotiate with a railroad?
Now, all this happened decades ago. How does it affect us today? First, people alive today saw what happened to Rondo and remember what it was like before. I-94 wasn’t completed between the twin cities until 1968. The resulting decline of Rondo led to a loss in property wealth for its residents, leading to widespread poverty. Elsewhere, as I mentioned above Black Americans were legally prevented from participating in the wealth generation that White Americans were able to take advantage of in the middle of the 20th century. That is why there is such a wealth gap between White people and Black people today. This was racism by design. The very definition of systemic racism. The government of the United States put in place a legal framework permitting the ghettoization of Black people, and in some cases going a step further and allowing those neighborhoods to be destroyed. We see racial tension today because equality was never achieved. In fact it was prevented by a legal and social system. The system isn’t broken. This is how it was built.
EDIT: Since shares of this post do not contain the links I put in the comments of the original, here they are in the body of the post:
Mapping inequality (interactive): https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/…
Mapping prejudice: https://www.mappingprejudice.org/…
Segregated By Design: https://www.segregatedbydesign.com/…
Two links about Rondo specifically: https://streets.mn/…/the-birth-of-a-metro-highway-interst…/… and http://libguides.mnhs.org/rondo…
You and 3 others 1 Comment Like Comment Share Comments Peter Burgess Peter Burgess Thank you Nate Dexter ... the role of the real estate industry in making profit through all sorts of appalling practices has been in play all of my adult life time. IMHO every high profit activity which is good for financial wealth (economic capital) should be set off against the negative impact the activity has on people (social capital) and the environment (natural capital). Improving a neighborhood by gentrification has an appalling impact on those that once used to call the place home! More thoughtful community development is a vital change urgently needed. PeterB TrueValueMetrics.org