A Literature Search on Redlining

Posted on Author Pauline Lake

For this literature search assignment, I decided to conduct a literature search on “redlining.” I feel that redlining is a practice that has changed over time. Therefore, I looked for sources that contained  housing discrimination by means of redlining. From conducting this search, I found that documents containing redlining also contained information about housing discrimination in general. This reassured me that I was well on my way to conducting a useful literature search for the first essay assignment.

The first source that I found was an online book from a Congressional hearing about “reverse redlining,” which was published in 2009. 1 2 I later found the paperback version of the book on Amazon. From reading the first several pages, which are the transcripts of speeches, one can immediately gather that housing discrimination is still occurring despite acts, such as the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, that have been passed to aid the stop of such discrimination. In this document, it is noted that housing discrimination is most often affecting minorities that have low incomes, bad credit, and/or poor employment history. This document will be a great resource for background information regarding redlining and it’s current state of “reverse redlining.”

The second source I found was an article from the journal Challenge.   3 This journal article discusses the redlining controversy over time. This includes its relation to other housing barriers, as well as, banks and housing.  With the discussion of redlining and it’s relevance over time, this article will be helpful in arguing that housing barriers have changed over time.

My third source came from a 2008 issue of the Hartford Courant. The article discusses a new redlining that has been invented by mortgage lenders. 4 This new method or redlining is explained as rating zip codes by how they appear to be declining. The article explains how this kind of redlining is affecting the Hartford area in terms of purchasing homes. This article would be a good source to show that redlining is still existent, as well as, to compare how the types of redlining have changed over time.
The fourth source I looked into was the Outside the Neatline blog.. 5 Although I have seen the maps as part of past assignments, I thought that this would be a great source to use since it contains a lot of information about redlining since 1937. The website/blog seems to be an easy, but interesting, read that will allow me to interact with the maps of data that are included with the text. A source like this will be useful for explaining any changes over time that have occurred in specific areas around Hartford.

  1. United States. 2010. Predatory lending and reverse redlining: are low-income, minority and senior borrowers targets for higher-cost loans? : hearing before the Joint Economic Committee, Congress of the United States, One Hundred Eleventh Congress, first session, June 25, 2009. Washington: U.S. G.P.O. http://purl.access.gpo.gov/GPO/LPS122104. ↩
  2. Joint, United States Congress. Predatory Lending and Reverse Redlining: Are Low-income. Books LLC, Reference Series, 2011. ↩
  3. Dreier, Peter. “Redlining Cities: How Banks Color Community Development.” Challenge. Volume 34, No. 6 (November 1, 1991): 15–23. ↩
  4. Harney, Kenneth. “Mortgage Lenders Invent a New Way of Redlining.” Hartford Courant. Hartford, Conn., United States, February 3, 2008, sec. HOME & REAL ESTATE. ↩
  5. Curtis. “Outside the Neatline: Redlining in Hartford Area, 1937: A Web-Based Map with Linked Documents.” Outside the Neatline, July 12, 2011. http://outsidetheneatline.blogspot.com/2011/07/redlining-in-hartford-area-1937-web.html. ↩

Published by

Pauline Lake

Trinity College '13 Majors: Computer Science and Educational Studies