Friday, August 17, 2018

Redlining the Fruitvale Neighbourhood of Oakland





















Cristo Rey De La Salle High School is located within the Fruitvale neighbourhood. This article gives an excellent overview of how the redlining affected this community.

An excerpt from the article: "In the 1930s, as the country was recovering from the Great Depression, the federal government wanted to encourage homeownership in cities that had suffered from waves of foreclosures. So it established the Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC), to refinance mortgages at risk of default. As part of that effort, HOLC created maps of cities, to identify which neighborhoods were good investments and which were bad investments.


HOLC assigned each neighborhood a grade, according to the "favorable" and "detrimental" influences in the neighborhood. The presence of minority communities was among the so-called detrimental influences. Take Oakland's Fruitvale neighborhood, for instance. A 1937 HOLC map of the area indicated these so-called detrimental influences: "Odors from industries. Predominance of foreign inhabitants. Infiltration of Negroes and Orientals.

Fruitvale and other neighborhoods given low grades were colored red on the maps, which spawned the term "redlining."
https://www.kqed.org/news/11648307/has-oaklands-fruitvale-neighborhood-recovered-from-redlining

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