For about a two- or three-mile stretch there were at least two to three empty lots on each block. Not to mention there were quite a few abandoned houses on those same blocks. It seems there is a historic reason why this exists that still is going on to this day.
According to a new study by Chicago’s Cook County’s Treasurer’s office, there were housing lines created by elected officials and civic leaders to keep Blacks, Whites and Latinos segregated. These redefined lines were created in the 1930s and still exist to this day.
The study released this week was called “Maps of Inequality: From Redlining to Urban Decay and the Black Exodus.” “It was like an ahha moment or an oh my God moment, where we said these two are correlated,” said Cook County Treasurer Maria Pappas.
The study was authored by Hal Dardick, director of research affairs for the treasurer’s office and a former Chicago Tribune reporter. “Vast swaths of vacant lots abandoned homes, and boarded-up businesses in minority neighborhoods lie in areas where the U.S. government had discouraged mortgages,” according to the study. “Government-sanctioned redlining from the 1940s led to today’s urban decay in many Black and Latino communities.”
The report also concluded that these racist practices affected how and to who banks issued home loans.. Nearly 57% of Cook County properties included on those maps were “redlined” in 1940 — warning banks those areas would be “hazardous” to invest in, with an additional 40.5% “yellowlined” — warning banks those areas were “declining.”
“Neighborhoods today are suffering because of what the government did 80 years ago,” said Dardick, who stated that the problem of vacant and abandoned properties is a “monumental problem that doesn’t just affect Black folks or Latino folks, it affects the whole city, the health of the whole city.”
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