Nine recent, high-profile cases show the discriminatory practice of redlining is not a thing of the past. It’s even spread to your Facebook acco

Redlining has been around for a long time, but across the country, local, state, and federal agencies are filing complaints against banks and other corporations for creative and subtle new forms of discrimination.

No longer are redlining cases limited to the more traditional forms of geographic discrimination, such as denying housing loans or refusing to deliver food. Brentin Mock points to a series of recent cases that "show that not only is redlining alive today, but that it’s also evolved in many cases into racist practices that aren’t as detectable as they were during Jim Crow."

A recent settlement between the federal government and the Hudson City Bank is the largest of its kind in history. The Justice Department determined that the bank was engaged in redlining by its failure to open branches in and market to minority neighborhoods.1


Some recent cases, however, show that not only is redlining alive today, but that it’s also evolved in many cases into racist practices that aren’t as detectable as they were during Jim Crow.

Redlining can determine where people of color are able to live or even whether they can have pizza delivered to them. My colleague Laura Bliss has pointed to maps of Baltimore that show redlining effects lingering in the city today. The federal government has been ramping up its investigations of housing discrimination through its Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force, a partnership between the U.S. Justice Department and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The task force says you can count on more redlining cases coming up for investigation, which is starting to freak out some in the housing finance sector.

Cities have been trying to head off the nefarious housing practices and effects, too, with a number filing suits against banks and companies suspected of a variety of steering practices. One common form of this is predatory lending, where banks reserve high-interest loans almost exclusively for people of color, what’s sometimes called “reverse redlining.”Another comes in the form of a company’s refusal to deliver services, like utilities, to neighborhoods with large black and Latino populations.

Below are nine cases that demonstrate what we’re talking about here.

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