The Study On Racial Discrimination And Redlining Of Residential Mortgage Lenging In The United States(1930-2000)

Although the history of the development of America’s residential mortgage market is not long, it has experienced many large fluctuations, where racial discrimination and redlining is a striking problem in the twentieth Century.The first part of the paper describes the development of mortgage market, in which Roosevelt’s new deal had greatly promoted the development of the mortgage lending industry, and left precious wealth for the future generations, including the Federal Housing Administration, secondary mortgage lending market and so on.The second part explores the racial discrimination and redlining in residential mortgage. The redlining is divided into two kinds, the spatial one and the racial one, which is defined as a process which loan or finical services are made unavailable, or are available only less than favorable terms, to people because of where they live regardless of their relevant characteristics. In the mortgage market, the mortgage lender, the insurance company, the assessors, the real estate agents and the secondary mortgage lending market were always carrying out redlining. By researching the Chicago housing market, we further verified the existence of redlining.The third part discusses that the racial discrimination and redlining have a great impact on the minorities, and it is an important factor leading to the phenomenon of housing racial residential segregation, the blacks can not enter the whites’communities, which led to racial segregation and ultimately changed the appearance of the America’s communities with the declining of the central city. At the same time, racial discrimination and redlining have a great influence on education, employment and income.In the fourth part, the federal government would not turn a deaf ear to redlining, in order to resist the adverse effects caused by racial discrimination and redlining and discrimination, the government enacted many laws, such as Fair Housing Act, Home Mortgage Disclosure Act and Community Reinvestment Act, etc. However, these laws can not put an end to such phenomena, although they played an important role in resist the redlining system and ease racial segregation.