Legislative · Federal
The National Housing Act creates the FHA, which institutionalizes redlining
- Direction
- -2 — major harm to Freedmen
- Force
- 1.00 — enacted, vetoed, or final
- Status
- Decided
- Date
- 1934-06-27
Why this rating
The National Housing Act of 1934 created the Federal Housing Administration, whose Underwriting Manual explicitly rated neighborhoods by race and refused to insure loans in Black areas — codifying redlining and restrictive covenants into federal housing policy. Rated -2: a direct, large-scale, federally-designed exclusion of the lineage from the primary post-war engine of household wealth, a documented driver of today's racial wealth gap.
Summary
The National Housing Act of 1934 created the Federal Housing Administration, whose Underwriting Manual explicitly rated neighborhoods by race and refused to insure loans in Black areas — codifying redlining and restrictive covenants into federal housing policy. Rated -2: a direct, large-scale, federally-designed exclusion of the lineage from the primary post-war engine of household wealth, a documented driver of today's racial wealth gap.
Sources
- Redlining — Federal Reserve History — official record · primary · historical
Rated under the published impact rubric. Direction records what a measure would do if fully effective; force records how far it has actually travelled. Neither is inferred — both trace to the sources above. Think something here is wrong? Tell us and we will log the correction.