FOO-HAHA – 366-4242–Channeling People’s Bank’s Legendary Time And Temp

Did Peoples Bank Redline Bridgeport?
So how many loans have they given out to people in Bridgeport vs. Trumbull, Fairfield and Redding?
Connecticut Department of Banking should ask the question before they start closing Banks!

The federal government was not involved in housing until 1934 when the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) was created as part of the New Deal. The FHA sought to restore the housing market after the Great Depression by incentivizing homeownership and introducing the mortgage lending system we still use today. Instead of creating policies to make housing more equitable, however, the FHA did the opposite. It took advantage of racially restrictive covenants and insisted that the properties they insured use them. Along with the Home Owner’s Loan Coalition (HOLC), a federally funded program created to help homeowners refinance their mortgages, the FHA introduced redlining policies in over 200 American cities.

Beginning in 1934, the HOLC included in the FHA Underwriting Handbook “residential security maps” used to help the government decide which neighborhoods would make secure investments and which should be off-limits for issuing mortgages. The maps were color-coded according to these guidelines:

Green (“Best”): Green areas represented in-demand, up-and-coming neighborhoods where “professional men” lived. These neighborhoods were explicitly homogenous, lacking “a single foreigner or Negro.”
Blue (“Still Desirable”): These neighborhoods had “reached their peak” but were thought to be stable due to their low risk of “infiltration” by non-White groups.
Yellow (“Definitely Declining”): Most yellow areas bordered Black neighborhoods. They were considered risky due to the “threat of infiltration of foreign-born, negro, or lower grade populations.”
Red (“Hazardous”): Red areas were neighborhoods where “infiltration” had already occurred. These neighborhoods, almost all of them populated by Black residents, were described by the HOLC as having an “undesirable population” and were ineligible for FHA backing.
These maps would help the government decide which properties were eligible for FHA backing. Green and blue neighborhoods, which usually had majority-White populations, were considered good investments. It was easy to get a loan in these areas. Yellow neighborhoods were considered “risky” and red areas (those with the highest percentage of Black residents) were ineligible for FHA backing.

The End of Redlining Continued Impact of Redlining
The impact of redlining goes beyond the individual families who were denied loans based on the racial composition of their neighborhoods. Many neighborhoods that were labeled “Yellow” or “Red” by the HOLC back in the 1930s are still underdeveloped and underserved compared to nearby “Green” and “Blue” neighborhoods with largely White populations. Blocks in these neighborhoods tend to be empty or lined with vacant buildings. They often lack basic services, like banking or healthcare, and have fewer job opportunities and transportation options. The government may have put an end to the redlining policies that it created in the 1930s, but it has yet to offer adequate resources to help neighborhoods recover from the damage that these policies have caused and continue to inflict.