Redlining's Ripple Effects Go Beyond Humans

Short Wave

NPR

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4.7 • 6K Ratings

🗓️ 9 January 2023

⏱️ 14 minutes

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Summary

When Dr. Chloé Schmidt was a PhD student in Winnepeg, Canada, she was studying wildlife in urban areas. She and her advisor Dr. Colin Garroway came across a 2020 paper that posed a hypothesis: If the echos of systemic racism affect the human residents of neighborhoods and cities, then it should affect the wildlife as well. Short Wave Scientist in Residence Regina G. Barber talks to Chloé and Colin about their findings of how redlining and biodiversity are intertwined.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.
0:05.7	Think about your neighborhood.
0:07.2	Can you see it now?
0:08.6	Are there lots of trees, parks, sidewalks?
0:12.0	Or is there a lot of concrete?
0:14.0	Are you close to a highway?
0:15.8	What animals do you see in your backyard?
0:17.9	Who lives near you?
0:19.2	Well, if you live in the US, odds are your neighborhood may still be experiencing the
0:23.2	aftermath of a policy called redlining.
0:26.0	Dr. Chloe Schmitts at the German Center for Integrative Biodiversity Research says it
0:29.9	started in the 1930s.
0:31.6	That was when this homeowners loan corporation was established and they essentially said
0:38.6	agents out across cities in the US to write reports on and grade the quality of different
0:46.5	neighborhoods.
0:47.5	And so there were just a lot of zoning and loan and mortgage practices that were all
0:54.7	based on these grades.
0:56.8	And so if you were, for instance, a black person and you were trying to buy a house in an
1:02.6	area that was graded A, you still just were not able to buy a home in those areas.
1:08.7	And so it was finally outlawed in 1968 with the Fair Housing Act, but a lot of the times
1:14.6	the racial composition has still persisted from these practices.
1:21.9	When Chloe was a PhD student in Winnipeg, Canada, she was studying wildlife in urban areas.
	...

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