As Craig Wilder has explained, for African Americans everywhere, the redlining of their communities had a number of pernicious consequences: it decreased neighborhood property values, made it virtually impossible for blacks to obtain affordable home finance, and effectively restricted their scope for residential mobility to other redlined neighborhoods. Furthermore, zoning spurred disinvestment from redlined areas as businesses, jobs, capital—and even municipal services—abandoned the inner cities, turning the nation’s ghettos into virtual economic wastelands.
