My mom had a side gig selling real estate in the 1980s. She quit because her agency only wanted her to show black customers of ANY income, homes in majority black, mixed income Montbello where we lived, or working class-to-poor, nearly all black Five Points near downtown Denver.
Back then, Five Points had almost no services, even though there were lots of customers there. There was little investment and it was almost pushed to run down. Now it's gentrifying. Fast. And suddenly all the services, banks, stores, restaurants etc are there! That is redlining.
Redlining was not some banking "best practice." It was the systemmatic denial of loans, basic services and investment to parts of American cities that were deliberately made "all black" by herding black people of all income levels there and essentially locking them in.
This idea that ending redlining, to the extent it was formally ended, is what caused the housing crisis, was a common theme from Republicans and Wall Streeters after the Bush era economic crash. So it's no surprisep that Bloomberg, who was a Republican, repeated it.
But it is a stunner to hear a billionaire blame the victims of centuries of vicious racial, financial and economic discrimination, for an economic collapse produced by greedy Wall Street banks who turned the housing market into a casino and the politicians who deregulated them.
And it's not like no one warned the country about what was actually going to crash the economy (and hint: it wasn't black people): nowthisnews.com/videos/politic…
