Seminar Vol. 170
Title: The Physical Legacy of Racism: How Redlining Cemented the Modern Built Environment
Speaker: Anthony W. Orlando, California State Polytechnic University
Time: July 14th, 2019 13:30–15:00
Venue: Conference Room 106B, Zhonghui Building (IESR, JNU College of Economics)
About the speaker:
Anthony W. Orlando is an Assistant Professor in the Finance, Real Estate, & Law Department at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. He is a Faculty Affiliate of the Bedrosian Center on Governance and the Public Enterprise at the University of Southern California. He is a contributor to the “Bill of Health” blog at Harvard Law School. His writings have appeared in the Huffington Post, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, and the Hazleton Standard-Speaker. He serves as the Managing Partner of the Orlando Investment Group, as well as the Co-Advisor of the Cal Poly Pomona Finance Society. Orlando conducts research at the intersection of business and public policy. He is trained as an applied microeconomist with a focus on housing policy, health policy, and environmental policy. He holds a Ph.D. in public policy and management from the USC Price School of Public Policy.
Abstract:
Recent research demonstrates that land use choices, which date back to a century ago still powerfully shape the current development patterns. With advances in digitization, scholars have started studying the long-term effects of historic federal placed-based policies. One such area that has drawn attention from the housing and real estate community is “redlining,” designated by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation in 1930s. Scholarly evidence suggest that neighborhoods graded poorly decades ago still face challenges in access to mortgage credit, homeownership rate, and housing value. However, the literature is not clear about the mechanisms through which the placed-based policy in the past affects the current neighborhood performance. In this paper, we unravel one of these mechanisms. We argue that redlining has shaped the geography of housing segregation, not just that of racial segregation, by delineating the predominant location of single-family and multi-family stock. We then hypothesize that these built environment effects persist even while redlining-related racial segregation diminished over time. Specifically, we explore how and why poorly-graded multi-family neighborhoods became locked in a continued cycle of impoverishment, with continued under-resourced and underinvested housing stock. We test this idea for ten U.S. cities for which digitized maps and 1930-2010 census data are available. By instrumenting the geography of housing segregation through the redlining policy, we find the connection between redlining policy nd contemporary neighborhood outcomes in local housing markets with a mechanism identified.
