Economy
Are Reparations Baltimore’s Fix for Redlining, Investment Deprivation?
The solutions to Baltimore’s inequitable financing problems must be as radical as the policies that segregated the city in the first place, says Lawrence Brown.
On December 19, 1910, the city of Baltimore passed an ordinance that a New York Times writer called “the most remarkable … ever entered upon the records of town or city of this country.”
The ordinance made it illegal for any black person to live in a white neighborhood, and vice-versa, codifying the existing racially segregated residential patterns in the city into law. Although the ordinance was eventually dismantled, it had already enshrined racial neighborhood compositions such that when the Federal Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) drew up maps for where banks could or couldn’t make loans, it easily zoned black neighborhoods into the couldn’t column—what we know today as redlining.