Redlining

Redlining is a discriminatory practice in which services (typically financial services) are withheld from neighborhoods that have significant numbers of racial and ethnic minorities. Redlining has been most prominent in the United States of America, and has mostly been directed against African-Americans. While the best-known examples involve denial of credit and insurance, denial of healthcare and the development of food deserts in minority neighborhoods are also sometimes described as redlining.

Reverse redlining occurs when a lender or insurer targets majority-minority neighborhood residents with inflated interest rates by taking advantage of the lack of lending competition relative to non-redlined neighborhoods. The effect also emerges when service providers artificially restrict the supply of real estate available for loanable funds to nonwhites, thus providing alternative pretext for higher rates. Neighborhoods which were targeted for blockbusting were also subject to reverse redlining.

In the 1960s, sociologist John McKnight originally coined the term to describe the discriminatory practice in Chicago of banks classifying certain neighborhoods as "hazardous," or not worthy of investment due to the racial makeup of their residents. In the 1980s, a Pulitzer Prize-winning series of articles by investigative reporter Bill Dedman demonstrated how Atlanta banks would often lend in lower-income white neighborhoods but not in middle-income or even upper-income Black neighborhoods. Blacklisting was a related mechanism employed by redlining institutions to keep track of areas, groups, and people that the discriminating party intended to exclude. In academic literature, redlining falls under the broader category of credit rationing. The documented history of redlining in the United States is a manifestation of the historical systemic racism that has had wide-ranging impacts on American society, two examples being educational and housing inequality across racial groups. Redlining is also an example of spatial inequality and economic inequality.