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Research project looking at red-lining
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GARY WARTH
Staff writer
More blacks settled in southeast San Diego than in North County or other areas of San Diego, but was that by their choice?
Two UC San Diego students, Cristin McVey and Richard Marciano, are researching the county's history for the UCSD Civic Collaborative to examine whether San Diego was less hospitable than other counties toward blacks.
McVey said living near work had much to do with why blacks settled wherever they did, but racial restrictions and a government policy that resulted in minorities being eligible for mortgage loans also played a part.
Marciano is concentrating on a government policy called red-lining that was used to classify neighborhoods in the 1930s and 1940s.
As he explained, the Home Owners Loan Corporation devised a four-color rating system to determine which neighborhoods would be eligible for mortgage loans.
"Part of the theory in the '30s and '40s was that race and prosperity were interconnected," he said.
A green neighborhood meant low-risk, while blue and yellow neighborhoods were more risky. Red neighborhoods were considered the riskiest and were to be avoided.
As a result of that coding, less than 20 percent of FHA and VHA loans were made to people of color in the 1930s and 1940s, he said.
Covenant and deed restrictions may not necessarily have been sparked solely by racism, but they ended up becoming a way to ensure that the neighborhoods would continue to qualify for government home loans.
Just one black family was enough to get an entire neighborhood red-lined, Marciano said, so developers and homeowner associations who wanted to protect their ratings sometimes would make restrictions that allowed only white residents.
"It was double-pronged," Marciano said about the discrimination at the time. Because minorities could not move into certain neighborhoods, they were forced to move to places like southeast San Diego, where they could not get mortgage loans because the neighborhoods were red-lined.
Marciano and McVey will continue their research into racism in San Diego County over the next several months and plan to set up a Web site. There, people will have an interactive way to find out which neighborhoods were red-lined.
5/5/02
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