CityLab Daily: What Redlining Had to Do With the 2008 Financial Crisis

Mike Bloomberg’s presidential campaign is facing up to controversial comments that the candidate made at the height of the 2008 financial crisis, in which he blamed the victims of the housing market’s implosion for the crisis itself. At a forum in September of that year, the then-New York City mayor said the foreclosure crisis was the result of ending “redlining”—the discriminatory practice in which lenders denied African-American homebuyers access to loans in the same neighborhoods where white homeowners lived. "It all started back when there was a lot of pressure on banks to make loans to everyone,” he told attendees. His remarks continued: “And once you started pushing in that direction, banks started making more and more loans where the credit of the person buying the house wasn’t as good as you would like.”

Experts say that Bloomberg's view is informed by enduring myths about who received subprime mortgages and why black renters have been systemically locked out of the housing market. While the Bloomberg campaign is working to distance the candidate from his past comments about redlining, his understanding of the causes of the financial crisis matters a lot. The next person to occupy the White House may be responsible for rewriting fair lending rules. Today on CityLab: What Redlining Had to Do With the 2008 Financial Crisis