Urban disinvestment timeline 85 years off

Patrick Holden’s ‘Will South/West projects pay off?’ (Trib, Sept. 7) posits private development will avoid Chicago’s urban wastelands due to “what has transpired over the past several months". Holden is correct investment unlikely there but his timeline is 85 years off. In 1935, the Federal Home Loan Bank Board (FHLBB) directed the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) to look at 239 cities, including Chicago, to develop ‘Residential Security Maps’ identifying levels of security for real estate investment. HOLC came up with a 4 color scheme. Green was for affluent suburbs and outer city areas, blue for ‘still desirable city neighborhoods, yellow for declining neighborhoods and red for areas too dilapidated for loans. Thus was born America's infamous 'Redlining'. These redlined’ areas were virtually all poor minority communities. Private banking and home loan institutions took their cue from the Fed, resulting in nine decades of disinvestment which turned Chicago’s South and West Sides into violent urban wastelands. Whites living there also took the Fed’s cue, moving west toward green and blue lined areas where housing loans were readily available to those with the right color. That is institutional racism enshrined in a bureaucratic directive and it’s still at work today.

Private investment will never fix the problem. Neither will state and local initiatives. The federal government must acknowledge it fueled the creation of urban minority wastelands. It must institute a Marshall Plan for America’s inner cities to rebuild them, providing jobs, health care, healthy food stores; indeed all the resources only available outside their invisible walls. The U.S. spent $13 billion to reconstitute Western Europe after WWII ($140 Billion today). It was among the best initiatives America made last century. With wisdom, will and compassion, America can do it this century, right here in the Homeland.