ecoRI News, August 8, 2022, Mind the Gap: R.I.’s Affordable Housing Stock Fails to Meet Need
A 2018 study by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition examined how neighborhoods were evaluated for lending risk by the HOLC, and compares their recent social and economic conditions with city-level measures of segregation and economic inequality. The study revealed:
Underwriting practices institutionalized by the Federal Housing Administration acted to further cement residential segregation in the urban structure of the United States…
The economic and racial segregation created by redlining persists in many cities to this day…
Persistent economic inequality. There is significantly greater economic inequality in cities where more of the HOLC graded high-risk or hazardous…
Persistent residential segregation. Both Black and Hispanic residents of “hypersegregated” cities are unevenly distributed and have lower levels of interaction with non-Hispanic whites. People of color also tend to be more clustered in areas of cities where there were more HOLC-labeled high-risk or hazardous neighborhoods.
