Redlining rested on false assumptions and forced blacks to overpay

Evidence

In reality, there was no empirical data to support the belief that the mere presence of black Americans in a neighborhood caused homes to lose value. When black Americans integrated a neighborhood, property values initially rose—black families were paying more for their homes than their new white neighbors had paid. The FHA admitted as much in a 1948 report. … That left limited choices for prospective black homeowners, who were forced to pay a premium if they could find a home in a neighborhood that would accept them. The result was that by the end of the 1950s only 2 percent of the homes built with FHA support since World War II were occupied by blacks or other minorities. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 1230

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Directly supports the ‘saturated-system harm’ arm of the reparations case: a fake premise (black presence depresses values) driving real, calculable harm (overpaying for housing plus exclusion from subsidized stock).
• XREF: Echoes Rothstein’s The Color of Law, which Brown cites; also intersects homeownership data from The Whiteness of Wealth.