Redlining was made illegal under federal law - i.e. by the government - in the 70s, not least because the private sector had absolutely no interest in doing anything to stop it.
Did government bureaucrats micro-managing the economy stop being racist in that time?
> Redlining was made illegal under federal law - i.e. by the government - in the 70s, not least because the private sector had absolutely no interest in doing anything to stop it.
Redlining was invented by the government! The term refers to markings on FHA maps. The FHA massively distorted the mortgage market by insuring mortgages, but refusing to insure mortgages in Black neighborhoods. That made such mortgages vastly riskier for private sector lenders.
The Black-white income and wealth gaps are as large today as they were in the 1960s: https://images.app.goo.gl/s1YD3sxKeuG289GfA. While the reasons for that are complex, New Deal programs that redlined African Americans, strengthened unions that excluded them, introduced segregation through the WPA into northern cities that hasn’t been segregated before, etc., played a significant role.
I’m not objecting to the government doing things. My objection is to OP’s invocation of the New Deal as the template for action. Last time we tried empowering white central planners to construct housing and infrastructure, they played out their prejudices in their decisionmaking to the detriment of non-white people.
There’s lots of things you can do that aren’t in the New Deal model. For example, if you’re worried about homelessness, instead of having the government build public housing (the New Deal approach) you can give people money to buy housing (the Nixon-Ford Section 8 voucher model). That’s what the government is doing now. It’s just giving people money and stabilizing the economy. (That’s also what every OECD country is doing.) It’s a better approach.
