EOTO #4 Key Post

Redlining EOTO

https://www-tc.pbs.org/wnet/peril-and-promise/files/2020/01/redlining_extremeheat-Cropped.jpg

For this week's EOTO/Mock Trial I was on the EOTO side. Specifically the side teaching events that regressed African American rights in the civil rights era. My topic was redlining, which took a while for me to understand what any of it even meant, so I made sure to explain every aspect of it in my presentation. Here is the outline I used for the presentation:

"Hey, it's Brad. My topic is redlining, which is a very complicated so I'm gonna have to run you through a bunch of history. It has to do with housing prices. Now if you're like me then your high school never taught you anything about buying a house, so I have to do it now. So here we go, I'm gonna explain how to buy a house through a mortgage.

Alright so houses are expensive, really expensive. It's not reasonable to pay this all up front, so what you can do is take out a loan from a bank for the price of the house. You can then pay off this loan by starting with a small portion immediately, called the down payment, and pay the rest in the form of a monthly rate over several years. (nerdwallet.com)

Alright so let's go to the great depression, a time when many Americans were greatly depressed. Obviously with these people all depressed they aren't exactly gonna have the money to buy a house, especially when down payments were as high as 50%! Banks made these down payments so high because they were scared of people taking out the loan then not paying it off, causing the bank to lose a lot of money. So the government created Federal Housing Agency, which basically says "Hey, if that happens, we'll pay you back."

So banks start giving out much more loans and more people are able to buy houses. Woohoo! happy ending! nothing could possibly go wrong!

Okay so fast forward to now, the civil rights era. The federal housing administration has realized it can't just give out all these loans for free because it's losing a ton of money. So it just draws red boxes over all the houses it thinks are unlikely to actually pay off their loans, and denies them their loans. Now this is what the federal housing administration CLAIMED to be doing. But it turns out, the more common quality these houses shared was being owned by black people. So there you go, that's redlining. The government drew red lines around black people's houses to deny them loans. 

The practice led to a lot of black people not being able to afford housing the way white people could. The fair housing act of 1968 did outlaw the practice but damage had already been done. Redlining caused black families to be worse off overall and it's effects have echoed through the generations up to today, where there is still a large gap in home ownership between black and white people."

https://www.legalzoom.com/

So fun fact: I did not know what a mortgage was before this! So that's awesome! Thanks American education system. I decided to play on the fact that schools don't teach basic fundamental life skills like this by teaching it to the class myself, since it is very important to redlining. I hope some of my classmates learned what a mortgage is and that it's really not as scary or complicated as we think. Yes I vastly oversimplified it in my presentation, but come on. It's not that hard, schools could've easily taught me this. 

https://images.seattletimes.com/

Anyway I got carried away talking about mortgages there, just like in my presentation. So let's actually talk about redlining. Redlining is... just sad. Sometimes it feels like historically the U.S. government was taking on a personal challenge to be as racist as possible. Once they give black people some rights, they will look for the next system they can exploit to give them a disadvantage. It's also sad that these racist policies still, in a way, affect the black community to this day. As I showed in my presentation, there is still a wide gap between black and white homeownership, and I believe it can be traced back to this practice. It was only outlawed in 1968, fifty years ago. Not that much time in the grand scheme of things. The major disadvantage redlining caused to black people back then put them so far behind white people at the time that they still haven't caught up to this day, explaining the large gap in black and white homeownership.

This is my last blog post for an EOTO so I just wanted to give some final thoughts on this semester. My two EOTO's were this, and the freedmen's bureau. Two topics that I hadn't heard about before and that didn't appear to be that interesting. But being forced to teach the class about them, I wanted to make them interesting, somehow. So I just focused in on the fun parts of these two topics and added some goofy animations on my slideshows. I actually found myself interested in these topics by the end, which surprised me. Especially redlining. When I first started my research for redlining I saw a bunch of terms related to housing and mortgages, and I thought it would be super boring. But as I got into it, I found the interesting parts and stuck to them. So I guess I just wanted to say I'm glad I had this learning experience for these two topics.

Sources:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/17/realestate/what-is-redlining.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/24/upshot/how-redlinings-racist-effects-lasted-for-decades.html?action=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article

https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/redlining

https://www.huduser.gov/portal/pdredge/pdr_edge_frm_asst_sec_081114.html

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Federal-Housing-Administration

https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/mortgages/what-is-a-mortgage