The Effect of Mortgage Redlining in the 20th Century on Economic Inequality Today

In response to the Great Depression, the New Deal established governmental programs to stabilize the struggling mortgage lending industry and decreasing housing prices. These programs installed regionalized maps which evaluated the level of risk associated with home mortgages and directly affected the decision of agents and lenders who denied loans to potential buyers located in areas coined as hazardous or declining for over thirty years in a process called Redlining. Our empirical study focuses on the effect of mortgage redlining in the 20th century on economic inequality in 111 major cities today.