After Redlining: The Urban Reinvestment Movement in the Era of Financial Deregulation

by Rebecca K. Marchiel

Focusing on Chicago's West Side, After Redlining illuminates how urban activists were able to change banks’ behavior to support investment in communities that they had once abandoned.

American banks, to their eternal discredit, long played a key role in disenfranchising nonwhite urbanites and, through redlining, blighting the very city neighborhoods that needed the most investment. Banks long showed little compunction in aiding and abetting blockbusting, discrimination, and outright theft from nonwhites. They denied funds to entire neighborhoods or actively exploited them, to the benefit of suburban whites—an economic white flight to sharpen the pain caused by the demographic one.

And yet, the dynamic between banks and urban communities was not static, and positive urban development, supported by banks, became possible. In After Redlining , Rebecca K. Marchiel illuminates how, exactly, urban activists were able to change some banks’ behavior to support investment in communities that they had once abandoned. The leading activists arose in an area hit hard by banks’ discriminatory actions and Chicago’s West Side. A multiracial coalition of low- and moderate-income city residents, this Saul Alinsky–inspired group championed urban reinvestment. And amazingly, it their efforts inspired national action, culminating in the federal Home Mortgage Disclosure Act and the Community Reinvestment Act.
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While the battle for urban equity goes on, After Redlining provides a blueprint of hope.

Genres: History, Race, American History

296 pages, Hardcover

Published September 2, 2020

Reviews

[Richard Wise · Rating 5 out of 5]

In her new book, After Redlining, The Urban Reinvestment Movement in the Era of Deregulation, Author Rebecca K. Marchiel, tells how a Alinsky style community organization discovered the economic underpinnings of urban disinvestment and developed a series of political strategies to successfully combat the forces that create urban slums. This is where the story begins, with The Organization for a Better Austin (OBA).

OBA’s initial steps and mis-steps, eventually leading to effective solutions reveal a process whereby a group of neighborhood leaders, aided by professional community organizers, identified a process that had destroyed urban neighborhoods all over the country and revealed solutions that had stumped professional planners and urbanologists for decades.

Led by an Austin homemaker, Gale Cincotta and an Alinsky trained organizer named Shel Trapp, the peoples’ organization expanded first to other Chicago neighborhoods. After determining that the solution required national legislation, organized a coalition of urban neighborhood groups called National People’s Action (NPA) and pushed two pieces of legislation through Congress against the opposition of the Savings & Loan industry.

Meticulously researched and well written, Dr. Marachiel has told a story which badly needed telling. It is a story of ordinary people analyzing a problem, developing solutions, taking control of their shared destiny and making significant social change. For decades, experts viewing urban decay saw only what was in front of them; minorities, welfare recipients, municipal neglect, slumlords, blockbusters. They failed to detect the underlying economic conditions that permitted some of these actors to thrive. It shows the extraordinary things that ordinary people can do. I was one of the community organizers, working in Boston, who had a ringside view of this struggle. I highly recommend After Redlining.

Richard W. Wise: Author: Redlined: A Novel of Boston

[Mills College Library]

332.72209 M317 2020