Housing
Redlining is Alive and Well—and Evolving
Nine recent, high-profile cases show the discriminatory practice of redlining is not a thing of the past. It’s even spread to your Facebook account.
“Redlining,” the practice of banks and real estate agents steering black and Latino families away from predominantly white neighborhoods, is often spoken of in the past tense. We tend to think of it as a vestige of Jim Crow, of a thankfully bygone era when people wore racism on their sleeves and wove it into neighborhood engineering without repercussion.
Some recent cases, however, show that not only is redlining alive today, but that it’s also evolved in many cases into racist practices that aren’t as detectable as they were during Jim Crow.