Jackson, J., dissenting
the federal Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC), created in 1933.[1] HOLC purchased mortgages threatened with foreclosure and issued new, amortized mortgages in their place.[2] Not only did this mean that recipients of these mortgages could gain equity while paying off the loan, successful full payment would make the recipient a homeowner.[3] Ostensibly to identify (and avoid) the riskiest recipients, the HOLC “created color-coded maps of every metropolitan area in the nation.”[4] Green meant safe; red meant risky. And, regardless of class, every neighborhood with Black people earned the red designation.[5]
Similarly, consider the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), created in 1934, which insured highly desirable bank mortgages. Eligibility for this insurance required an FHA appraisal of the property to ensure a low default risk.[6] But, nationwide, it was FHA’s established policy to provide “no guarantees for mortgages to African Americans, or to whites who might lease to African Americans,” irrespective of creditworthiness.[7] No surprise, then, that “[b]etween 1934 and 1968, 98 percent of FHA loans went to white Americans,” with whole cities (ones that had a disproportionately large number of Black people due to housing segregation) sometimes being deemed ineligible for FHA intervention on racial grounds.[8] The Veterans Administration operated similarly.[9]
One more example: the Federal Home Loan Bank Board
- ↑ D. Massey & N. Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass 51–53 (1993); Oliver & Shapiro 16–18.
- ↑ Rothstein 63.
- ↑ Id., at 63–64.
- ↑ Id., at 64; see Oliver & Shapiro 16–18; Baradaran 105.
- ↑ Rothstein 64.
- ↑ Ibid.
- ↑ Id., at 67.
- ↑ Baradaran 108; see Rothstein 69–75.
- ↑ Id., at 9, 13, 70.
