GEOG 300: Urban Geography
Joshua Akers
The University of Michigan - Dearborn
Dearborn, Michigan
April 26th, 2018
With The Great Migration of the 20th century bringing millions of black Americans to the the northern United States, nearly half a million ended up in Chicago by the end of the 1940s. This sudden increase of a large black population into a mostly white city of immigrants during a Jim Crow law era wasn’t simple, and the government didn’t make it any easier.
Chicago Today
Chicago today is broken down into three areas: the North, South, and West side. The North side is referred to as the “white” side, while the South side is predominantly black. As seen in the University of Virginia’s…show more content… Practices such as redlining, where banks could refuse to give home loans to black, or other minority, residents who wanted to move into mostly white neighborhoods. This didn’t just happen to Chicago. Detroit, Milwaukee, Oakland, and Baltimore are just a few of some major cities that also experienced racist housing policies.
The results of redlining, construction of suburbs, and the federal-aid highway act of 1956 let to the formation of predominantly black urban neighborhoods, and predominantly white suburbs. However, it’s wasn’t just the doings of the government and banks that incentivized white people to move away to suburbs and sell their houses. Brokers would move a black family into a white neighborhood, spread rumors that bad things would happen to them either by the hands of the black family or because the black family was in the same neighborhood. This would then result in white families to sell their homes at low prices so that they could leave as soon as possible to suburbs. This was a tactic called “blockbusting.” These brokers would then resell these same houses at an inflated rate to blacks who wanted to move into neighborhoods. Even after the fair housing act of 1968, which prohibited discrimination when it came to the race of the person who wanted to buy a home, discrimination practices such as…show more content… Detroit, Milwaukee, Oakland, and Baltimore have all faced similar challenges when it comes to blacks trying to move in to the city. These are just a handful. Today, evidence is clearly seen through when we look at the subprime mortgage crisis in Great Lakes cities. Because of the large amounts of unsold homes due to a large amount of the white population of cities moving to the suburbs, this has led to the decrease in value of these homes, drastically. There are still a large number of these unsold homes on the market to this day because people will either only buy them for investment purposes, or simply won’t buy them because they’re in a bad condition or are located in a rough area. These homes are really the center of attention in being a contributing factor to the subprime mortgage crisis that occurred between 2007-2010. Similar to redlining and blockbusting, lenders were using a strategy called “predatory lending,” a lending practice that tries to convince people to accept loans that they may not even need/want through deceptive actions by the lender, was found to be a component that led to the housing bubble collapse and eventually the subprime mortgage
