Onlining about Redlining: MLK Day 2022

1930s HOLC map of Cedar Rapids at National Archives (Author's photo)

If it already had felt strange to have the celebration of inclusive community that is the annual Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration online, technology added insult to injury when the Facebook Live feed of the evening event at Coe College was inaudible. Pastors Stephanie and Keeyon Carter, who started Wellington Heights Community Church, gave the keynote address. Linn-Mar High School senior Kayla Purchase and student assistance counselor Janessa Carr (co-founder of the Marion Alliance for Racial Equity) received the Dr. Percy and Lileah Harris "Who is My Neighbor?" Award (King 2022). I trust "Lift Every Voice and Sing," one of the greatest songs ever written, was sung. (See video of the event, below.)

Gathering at St. Paul's Methodist in January 2020 ("the before-times")

In the afternoon, participants in a powerhouse panel on housing issues argued that while redlining in its purest form has been outlawed for more than 50 years, its impacts continue to be felt today, in spite of a broad array of ameliorative programs in which the City of Cedar Rapids is participating. Years of exclusion from housing opportunity, along with violent suppression, put blacks and other Americans of color at a substantial disadvantage in terms of economic opportunity (with spillover effects into all aspects of daily life). That's the essence of systemic racism.

 

L to R: Betty Johnson, Clint Twedt-Ball, Tonyamarie Adams, Jeff Pomeranz

 

Clint Twedt-Ball, Executive Director of Matthew 25 in Cedar Rapids, cited the book Know Your Price by Andre Perry (Brookings Institution, 2020) which found houses in white neighborhoods fetched prices 48 percent higher than comparable houses in predominantly black neighborhoods. Over the decades that added to a huge amount of lost money, which, Twedt-Ball noted, could have been spent on solving social problems. It also means that blacks have a more difficult time securing home loans even today.

Tonyamarie Adams, Cedar Rapids realtor and Neighborhood Building Assistant at Matthew 25, noted that today more energy goes into new construction than on poor neighborhoods where people need help like the Taylor Area and Time-Check, and that she has yet to find a lender of African descent. Where, she asked, are lenders who are willing to work with people who are struggling? 

Moderator Anne Harris Carter read from a 1930 description of Cedar Rapids neighborhoods

Cedar Rapids City Manager Jeff Pomeranz noted that, as problems persist and he and others have a lot to learn about them, this year, for the first time, Martin Luther King Jr. Day is an official city holiday. (Really? The first?) The city participates in a number of programs designed to help disadvantaged people, including Paving for Progress, which invests in infrastructure maintenance according to perceived need not the value of the neighborhood; Neighborhood Finance Corporation, which provides home loans and down-payment assistance; Community Development Block Grants; Section 8 Housing Assistance, which provides rental assistance in hopes that stability can lead to homeownership in the long run; low-income housing credits for developers; PATCH, which helps people fix up their homes; Urban Dreams, which creates opportunities for younger people by connecting them to jobs; and a two-year plan to use American Recovery Act money to fund scholarships to Kirkwood Community College. (A complete list of housing services available in Cedar Rapids is here.)

And yet, problems persist. Assessment of some of the programs show they're not widely known, and don't reach many of the people they're intended to reach, Pomeranz said. Moreover, if the programs were more widely used, they would quickly run out of funding. It seems that, if we take the problems of housing opportunity and overall economic opportunity seriously, we're going to have to do more than incremental fixes. Maybe we need an approach like that cited in the chat by Karla Twedt-Ball of the Greater Cedar Rapids Community Foundation: Evanston, Illinois, has started a reparations fund to compensate for housing discrimination between 1919 and 1969.

 

Martin Luther King Jr. is a day to start thinking outside the policy box. Washington Post columnist Robin Givhan notes that "while [King] was more liberal than radical, it's hard to imagine that he would be so revered if he were a 30-something activist today--a Black man marching in the streets and advocating for fair wages, voting rights, racial justice and a more equitable form of capitalism" (Givhan 2022). King's true legacy, Givhan argues, is not the glossy picture of "a warmhearted preacher who just wanted everyone to get along," but those people who today continue to "advocate for change [and] do the hard work of organizing." 

The ongoing impacts of redlining is only one fundamental problem of housing policy. It is widely acknowledged that, as Mayor Tiffany O'Donnell noted in the chat, "Home ownership = generational wealth." This is a true--at least for most people whose families were able to buy homes in the mid-20th century with help from the Federal Housing Administration, 30-year mortgages, and suburban development--but problematic statement. Besides the question of how equitable is an arrangement where certain children inherit wealth, it is not clear how long this arrangement is financially sustainable for anyone. As homes appreciate in value, they become less affordable for homebuyers and sometimes depending on property tax rates even for current owners (Phillips 2020: 61). On the other hand, when wealth is tied up in home values, even kind-hearted people have strong incentives to resist racial and economic integration, and increased density, which threaten the value of their houses (Cortright 2017).

"Dr. King was bold," writes E.J. Dionne (2022). The racial wealth gap is the result of decades of systemic inequity; it demands that we be bold, too.

SEE ALSO: 

"Housing Policy," 1 July 2021

"MLK Against the Mob," 21 January 2021

Linda Evans, "MLK Jr. Day," Vegan Linda, 18 January 2022

Shane Phillips, The Affordable City: Strategies for Putting Housing Within Reach (And Keeping It There) (Island, 2020)

Jeana Quinlan, "Commemorating Martin Luther King Day," The Cosmos (Coe College), 21 January 2022, 1-2

Allen Vandermeulen Jr., "A Prayer of Invocation Based on King's 'Letter from a Birmingham Jail," The Here and Hereafter, 17 January 2022