Washington Street in JP is redlined

I got the phrase "market rate housing" from TFA, bozo.

It's not comprehensible in any way. And if Boston had suffered wide-scale urban renewal like the West End, where neighborhoods were actually razed, then maybe the brick dust idea would have been clever, but it wasn't. Especially since the group is opposing new building, not decrying destruction.

And no, the red areas today have very little in common. The largest red area on the map covers a swath that includes parts of JP, Roxbury, Dorchester, the South End, Mission Hill, what's now Northeastern...None of these were black neighborhoods at the time, just poor and/or rundown--the city didn't have a really sizable black population until the 1940s-50s. There was certainly all kinds of racist housing discrimination that came later and years of ethnicity-based territorial squabbling but to use this map as some kind of basis of proof for discriminatory redlining seems bizarre. Different neighborhoods evolved in very different ways. Not to mention they don't begin to explain what zoning variances or current policies are discriminatory today. Oh--and 3200 Washington? On the yellow part of the map, not the red.

They redlined her in that way.

Or is it red-numbered?

Nevermind, unfair anyway.

It amazes me sometimes that people trying to protest to the people in power, don't go where the people in power are.

One of the things I respected about Occupy Boston / Black Lives Matter was that they knew how to create chaos. Block traffic along Amory Street? Big deal. Try to block the Pike? You have everyone's attention.

Former non-white mortgage recipients (Read: They got mortgages and screwed them up, they weren't discriminated against) like the people in the article would have a far better effective message if they blocked Washington Street in Wellesley, Main Street in Hingham, and Beacon Street in Newton Center to get their message across to the people who can help them, not by going up and down through Egleston Square. This protest was like taking umbrage with new polo rules by marching through Fields Corner.

They've created a "public art project" that to virtually everyone who sees it looks like either vandalism or an extensive accident.

They are waving a map from 1934 alleging that it shows the long history of racial redlining in Boston when there were virtually no black people in Boston at that time--the population was something like 3%. Roxbury and Dorchester were definitely not black neighborhoods at that time. There were no doubt racist housing policies and neighborhood housing issues but the map shows more that poor and rundown neighborhoods came in all shades. 3200 Washington was, I'm pretty sure, still a tough, poor Irish/German/immigrant neighborhood in 1934.

Lastly--there's zero attempt to clarify what current day policies they're objecting to or connecting to redlining. Is there some new redlining going on? Zoning policies? Which ones?

As protest art, I'd say this is a fail.

As far as the map used by the activists. Wellington Hill was yellow, not red, just like most of Boston (excepting the areas in red, of course.)

That said, I agree with you 100%.

"Urban Exodus" by Gerald Gamm is another good piece, it's a critique of "Death of Community" in a way - doesn't try to recast the Jewish history of Mattapan, but puts the process in a broader context and compares and tries to reconcile the experience of Jews in Roxbury and Mattapan that left with the experience of Irish Catholics in redlined areas in Dorchester that largely remained in the area and dives deeper into the black and West Indian experience during the period. If you don't want to read the whole book, the NY Times Book Review has a long and interesting write-up that's easy to find on google.

So remember that sign...

Or it's effects. I will note that the map they used does not reflect redlining. Or are they (or you) claiming that the west side of Southie went from all white to all black in the 1950s and 1960s? I can't wait until they paint the red line through the middle of Southie.

Seriously, look at the map they reference.

The protest that used the map made it key.

The map was only concerned with insurance rates. There was no connection with race. I'm sure if they were concerned with redlining, they could have found a better set of boundaries in Boston.

If you look close enough at the map, you'd see that Needham by the Newton line was in red, yet somehow Needham was developed in that area. Somehow people were able to get insurance, even in the west side of Southie.

I fault B-BURG only in that they worked on the idea that there was a certain area where black people would be allowed, the assumption being that blacks would not be able to buy houses outside of that area. Yes, as noted above Gamm makes a good case as to why there would be resistance amongst the Catholics- people talk about Mattapan, but no one notes how slow the process went around St. Angela's.