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Professor says red-lining of the 1930s set stage for poor health outcomes
By Ed Runyan
HOWLAND
An Ohio State University professor gave a startling example Monday of red-lining, what he called a “racially-ethnically-motivated form of policy that had disastrous outcomes for neighborhoods.”
The example was a 1930s “assessment” of an area of Southeast Warren where loans for purchase or construction of housing were discouraged.
The area designated to receive “limited” mortgage funds for home purchase or construction is off of Niles Road. The assessment said the reason for ranking it that way was because of an “influx of negroes ... to attend Francis Willard School.”
Jason Reece, assistant professor of city and regional planning, said he brought up red-lining as a reason why health outcomes can be different depending on the place where a person lives, a concept called health inequity.
Health inequity or equity was one of the topics presented at a conference called “Building Healthier Communities” at The Avalon Inn Grand Pavilion. U.S. Rep. Tim Ryan of Howland, D-13th, also spoke. His topics were mindfulness and adopting a clean, green diet.
Reece said a study done in Cleveland found that you can predict the “health hot spots” – neighborhoods with poor health outcomes – “just by looking at red-lining maps over 80 years old.”
“We found that life expectancy was about a decade and a half lower in neighborhoods that had been red-lined,” Reece said. “We found that infant mortality was about 800 percent higher in neighborhoods that had been red-lined back then,” he said.
“We found that most of the sub-prime loans [a decade or so ago] occurred on those neighborhoods, most of the foreclosures occurred in those neighborhoods and most of the vacant properties.”
“The point is that these historical policies were very profound in setting the stage in creating that environmental context that is so influential to health today,” he said.
The point of showing the connection between policies such as red-lining and poor health outcomes is “to provide insight and also to acknowledge that policy produced these outcomes. Policy can also actually reverse these outcomes.”
“This was not a natural phenomenon in which neighborhoods declined,” he said. “This was very deliberate, and if we are deliberate in our response, we can have a profound impact,” Reece said.
He talked about a project on the south side of Columbus he has worked with that has tried to reverse “a century or so of anti-equity policies that shaped a lot of our communities.”
While some South Side neighborhoods have prospered, “Most of the South Side has continued to struggle,” he said. Around 2009 or 2010, there was a loss of 6,000 manufacturing jobs, arsons, vacant property, rising poverty and unemployment, plus opiate addiction.
It was a rallying point among corporations and people to do something – what Reece called the “virtuous circle of community development.” It led to a neighborhood that is beginning to stabilize.