Federal Housing Policy, Redlining, & Discriminatory Lending
A major instrument of discrimination to emerge was redlining. Prior to the New Deal, a typical mortgage required a considerable down payment of around half of the property value and needed to be repaid within a few years. In response to the mass foreclosures of the Great Depression, the National Housing Act of 1934 created the Federal Housing Agency (FHA)[1] to supplement the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC), created in 1933.[2] The HOLC was a rescue program created to save households that were about to default on mortgages. It purchased existing loans that were close to foreclosure and issued new mortgages with extended repayment schedules upwards of 15 years. HOLC mortgages were also amortized, meaning when the loan was paid off the borrower would own the home.[3] The FHA, on the other hand, was to underwrite low-interest, long-term loans with low down payments to facilitate homeownership.[4]
As part of its development the FHA mapped all of the urban areas in the United States, including statistics like the percentage of foreign families, percentage of “Negros,” and indications of “shifting and infiltration.” With these factors in mind, neighborhoods were divided into several “grades” from first or ‘A’ to fourth or ‘D’. The ‘D’ grade neighborhoods were typically all or predominantly Black, given a low grade despite other factors that indicated stability. The HOLC did similarly using grades and colors. Red was the lowest grade or highest risk area which contributed to the moniker “redlining” decades later. This racially explicit grading system informed mortgage lending policy.[5]
Figure 1: 1937 HOLC Map & 2019 Concentrated Disadvantage Map
In figure 1, the map labeled “Then” is based on an HOLC map of the city from 1937, showing both the actual as well as the interpolated grading with the juxtaposed map labeled “Now” based on 2019 conditions of concentrated disadvantage. Note that the Fruit Belt is graded ‘C’, or yellow, in the 1937 map and also yellow, or ‘C’, in the 2019 map. Together the maps show that the areas marked as grades ‘C’ or ‘D’ tend to have a higher concentration of disadvantage today than those that had been marked with higher grades in 1937 thus illustrating the long-term effects of redlining.
Creating a positive feedback loop or cumulative causation, many neighborhoods, especially on the East Side of Buffalo, have been heavily impacted by redlining. The collective effect of sustained redlining has been the constriction of capital allotment in these spaces.[10] This means it was not poverty alone that made it difficult for African Americans to invest in their homes. It is unclear how much the HOLC itself is to blame but its maps were used in a way that led to an accumulation of discriminatory practices in the areas already identified as declining in the 1930s.[11]
White Flight
As early as 1930, a small group of African Americans lived in the Fruit Belt mainly clustered on the western side of Michigan Avenue. Between 1940 and 1970 over 70,000 African Americans poured into the City of Buffalo. By the 1950s, there was beginning to be a significant change in population composition in the Fruit Belt. The neighborhood was predominantly African American by 1970.[12]
Table 1: Total Population; Total White & Black Population of Census Tract 31
Figure 2: Map of demographic majority (1950) v. Map of demographic majority (2020)
Table 1 shows a significant change in neighborhood demographics over a 70-year span. Figure 2 illustrates the difference in demographic distribution from 1950 to 2020; showing the white population of census tract 31 (outlined) as making up roughly 99 percent of the total population in 1950 and African Americans making up about 81 percent of the total population in 2020 by contrast. This census tract was chosen because it encompasses the Fruit Belt. It is not a perfect representation, however, as it includes what used to be the North Oak neighborhood to the west which, as will be covered, was destroyed by urban renewal.
The decline in total population should be noted as well. There was a significant decrease in the total population between 1970 and 1980. This coincides with the overall decline of the City of Buffalo and its deindustrialization. Where there had been nearly 53,000 manufacturing jobs the city lost almost 80% of its manufacturing base by 2009.[13] The population reached its peak in the 1950s at around 580,000 people, the combination of white exodus to the suburbs and loss of employment opportunities resulted in the City’s total population shrinking by nearly half over the next 60 years.[14]
The white outmigration hit the Fruit Belt hard. The thousands of African Americans moving into the declining East Side community did not offset the significant number of whites moving out and this mismatch produced a housing vacancy and abandonment problem.[15] In the Fruit Belt, most of the demolition of aged housing stock happened throughout the 1960s and 1970s and even into the 1980s.
[1] Blatto, A City Divided: A Brief History of Segregation in Buffalo.
[2] Richard Rothstein, The color of law : a forgotten history of how our government segregated America, First edition. ed. (New York ; London: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2017).
[3] Rothstein, The color of law : a forgotten history of how our government segregated America.
[4] Blatto, A City Divided: A Brief History of Segregation in Buffalo.
[5] Blatto, A City Divided: A Brief History of Segregation in Buffalo.
[6] Edward W. Soja, Seeking spatial justice, Globalization and community series, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). Book review (H-Net) http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=30986.
[7] Russell Weaver, Part 1 – Geographies of Discrimination, Cornell University (2019).
[8] Rothstein, The color of law : a forgotten history of how our government segregated America.
[9] Hackworth, Manufacturing decline : how racism and the conservative movement crush the American Rust Belt.
[10] Hackworth, Manufacturing decline : how racism and the conservative movement crush the American Rust Belt.
[11] Weaver, Part 1 – Geographies of Discrimination.
[12] Taylor, A Historical Overview Of Blacks In The Fruit Belt: The Continuing Struggle To Build A Vibrant Community.
[13] Robert Mark Silverman, “Dawn of the Dead City: An Exploratory Analysis of Vacant Addresses in Buffalo, Ny 2008–2010,” Journal of Urban Affairs (2016),https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9906.2012.00627.x.
[14] Silverman, “Dawn of the Dead City: An Exploratory Analysis of Vacant Addresses in Buffalo, Ny 2008–2010.”
[15] Henry Louis Taylor, The Harder We Run: The State of Black Buffalo in 1990 and the Present School of Architecture and Planning & U.B. Community Health Equity Institute (Buffalo 2021).
DenCity 