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Destin Jenkins, Rebecca K. Marchiel. After Redlining: The Urban Reinvestment Movement in the Era of Financial Deregulation., The American Historical Review, Volume 128, Issue 1, March 2023, Pages 507–508, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhad093
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After Redlining is an important contribution to the robust literature on twentieth century US housing policy and divestment from America’s cities. Focusing on the period between the late 1960s and mid-1980s—between the urban uprisings and the triumph of financial deregulation—Rebecca K. Marchiel explores how the National People’s Action (NPA), a loose federation of neighborhood organizations composed of white, Black, and Latinx working- and middle-class residents, sought “better versions” of federal housing programs (89), first through base-building, power-mapping, and social movement campaigns, and later by lobbying their allies in Congress.
The book is also about the changing banking landscape in post-1970s America. Marchiel traces the development of “financial common sense,” the belief that because banks were different from “typical for-profit firms” (5), they had an obligation to extend credit to communities in which they did business. Inculcated by the New Deal and reinforced by postwar popular culture, by the late 1960s, this financial common sense ran up against the vanishing act of local banks and their unwillingness to issue new mortgages. As neighborhoods began to “transition,” a euphemism for the arrival of Black and brown residents in white urban enclaves, local savings and loan associations either reneged on their obligation or decided that since access to “their services … hinged on whiteness,” the compact had been broken by the settlement of clients they were never intended to serve (42, 45).
