CityLab Daily: The 2020 Candidates Take on Redlining

In the red: As presidential candidates pitch national housing policies, several include proposals to reverse the damage done by redlining, the system in which government and financial market forces conspired to keep black people trapped in segregated and under-invested neighborhoods. Plans from Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, and Pete Buttigieg would target help to homebuyers in neighborhoods once marked as “hazardous” in federal risk maps that still shape the racial wealth gap today.

But a new report from the Brookings Institution finds that those place-based policies may not address racial injustice the way the candidates intend, because many neighborhoods that were redlined in the 1930s no longer have the same racial make-up. CityLab’s Brentin Mock and Kriston Capps look at how each of the candidates’ plans would work and whether a more precise policy is possible. Read their story: Inside 2020 Candidates’ Plans to Address Redlining