Last Friday’s Wall Street Journal published a front page story about the difficulties of getting a mortgage in Detroit. The front page includes the following statement: “Detroit is making a comeback after years of decline…But large swaths of the city are left behind, starved of the housing credit needed to revive them…. The impact runs disproportionately along racial lines in the majority Black city. Detroit’s Black residents are largely shut out of access to financing, making it tougher to attain home ownership the key to building wealth for most Americans.”

A full interior page was devoted to this topic with four
maps showing that Detroit neighborhoods that were red lined in 1939 were not places of origination for mortgages in 2019. The author’s contention is that the federally and state chartered fiscal institutions do not well serve those who wish to buy moderate or low priced homes in Detroit meaning that African Americans often cannot get mortgages and are thereby blocked for the normal route to wealth accumulation.

There are certainly no suggestions of racial discrimination but
there are suggestions that the current operation of way people
get financing to buy homes has a systematic racial impact which impedes the revitalization of many Detroit neighborhoods. The work of organizations seeking to alter the current system is mentioned.