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Comment by karlshea | Hacker News Reader

I'm sort of dumbfounded that your comments are even controversial... this exact same thing played out in dozens of cities in the 30s-50s. In the upper midwest Minneapolis, St Paul, and Milwaukee all had/have exactly the same issues for the same reasons.

U of M has a whole website mapping racial covenants[0] here in the Twin Cities, and the Wikipedia article about redlining[1] is pretty thorough, discussing exactly what you're bringing up.

Do people just not actually believe how racist everything used to be? And how decades of disinvestment leading to violence just might possibly lead to generational issues?

[0] https://mappingprejudice.umn.edu

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining

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> Do people just not actually believe ... how decades of disinvestment leading to violence just might possibly lead to generational issues?

It's a bit fuzzy, yes. It would clarify the argument to replace "generational issues" with a specific concept, and skip the performative hedge.

The bailey seems to be "poverty implies violence." What's the motte?

I'm not making a general "poverty equals violence" argument. I'm saying that you can look at a redlining map and a Chicago crime map and see the pattern plain as day.

You can skim the Wikipedia article I linked if you're actually interested in the (heavily researched) consequences of redlining, many of which happened up into the 2000s and all of which urbanists are still trying to mitigate today.

My reaction is literally one of confusion, not "performative hedging". The charitable read of most of the comments here is a profound lack of historical knowledge ("these areas were classified as hazardous, and the violence there is why white people left"), and an uncharitable one is thinly veiled racism ("minorities by definition are violent").

Given that the areas they moved out of now have problems with crime, maybe it was a rational decision to move out?

The movement of white people out of neighbourhoods with black people, and the use of redlining to concentrate a marginalized group within those neighbourhoods led to a disinvestment of both private and public capital in those neighbourhoods, creating and later perpetuating the cycle of poverty that leads people to turn to crime to survive. It does make sense for people with the means to leave a neighbourhood (from a personal safety standpoint) when it starts to have an increased crime problem but that is not what is being described here. Instead, the people left due to the racism that was prevalent in the mid-20th century, well before the rise in crime that resulted from their leaving.

85% of the people in the redlined neighborhoods were white. That was around of half of all urban households. Why didn't redlining lead to the same cycle of poverty and violence for white people?

Because they moved to neighborhoods where they were allowed to get fucking home loans and open businesses.

The majority of people who currently live in the redlined neighborhoods are white. Why didn't redlining lead to the same cycle of poverty and violence for those white people?

What the hell are you talking about? The neighborhoods we're talking about are overwhelmingly Black. You can't have set foot on the south or west sides of Chicago and not know that.

31.8% of the redlined neighborhoods in Chicago are currently black. The north side was redlined too.

Lincoln Park was redlined. Gold Coast was redlined. Old Town was redlined. Wicker Park was redlined.

Oh, for fuck's sake. Wicker Park was redlined. Then it was gentrified. Everything on the North Side has been gentrified. You know what wasn't gentrified? West Garfield Park. Miss me with whatever weird next comment you've got locked and loaded about "well why wasn't Garfield Park gentrified".

The redlined neighborhoods on the north side also weren't black (Lincoln Park was Puerto Rican). People have written books about how the gentrification of the north side happened; you can consult them.

The north side was completely white when the redlining maps were made. That was late 1930's, the black population of Chicago even by 1940 was only 8%, almost exclusively on the south side east of State Street. The west side was also almost exclusively white then too, there were a couple of black neighborhoods (not West Garfield Park at that time).

In the 1930's there weren't many Puerto Ricans in Chicago, the ones that were there lived on the south side. They didn't start coming in numbers until the late 1940's, they moved into Lincoln Park in the 1960's.

So, Wicker Park was white when it was redlined, Lincoln Park was white when it was redlined, West Garfield Park was white when it was redlined.

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