Building Equity in the Construction Trades Section I: Part A
Section I History of Racial Discrimination in Syracuse Assessing the upcoming I-81 Viaduct Project requires historical perspective. The original I-81 project was a major cause of the racial segregation and concentrated poverty Syracuse suffers from today. For this report, we will focus on three significant historical events that shaped Syracuse:
A.
redlining,
urban renewal, and
I-81.
The Policy of Segregation – Redlining In 1934, as part of a widespread effort by then President Franklin Roosevelt
to pull the U.S. out of the Great Depression, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) was established1. The FHA’s job was to increase the building of homes and stabilize the mortgage market by insuring loans made by private lending institutions against default. Unfortunately, the FHA guaranteed mortgage program encouraged lending institutions to discriminate against black people and foreignborn white people – even when solvent and with good credit – entrenching racial segregation in cities across the country, both North and South2. In 1936, Congress set up the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) allowing homeowners to refinance their mortgages over longer periods of time. This launched the standard 30-year mortgage Americans have been accustomed to ever since. The HOLC was tasked with surveying nearly 250 U.S. cities between 1936 and 1945 to assess mortgage loan risk. The HOLC devised highly confidential 7|Page