Redlining is the discriminatory housing practice of banks, insurance companies, real estate agencies, and landlords, when refusing or limiting loans, mortgages, insurance, and/or apartment rentals within specific geographic areas to keep out minorities, most often Black people.

This wasn’t necessarily obvious to anyone beyond those employing it, and those living in a redlined neighborhood most likely had no idea it was happening.

When I was three years old my parents moved from Boston to a newly established suburban neighborhood to which houses were continually being added. Most of the heads of households were World War II veterans who could afford to move out of the congested city because the GI Bill made it possible to get a mortgage. As had been the history of the city where one ethnic/racial group moved into a new district and was replaced by another in the old, as these families moved into the ‘burbs’, other groups moved into the city neighborhoods they left. No one was fleeing minorities who couldn’t move in until they moved out to the suburbs. They were interested in bettering their own family situation and didn’t pay much attention to who filled the empty space their move created.

In my neighborhood, beyond the majority being Boston/Irish and Italian, there were some Jewish families, a Japanese family, and, as we were not familiar with Hispanic variations, what we thought was a Mexican family because of their surname.

If redlining was taking place it wasn’t noticed as the assumption was that where we lived was because we could afford to and Black people were moving up the ladder and would eventually move there too after having spent time in the old neighborhoods that moving to the “burbs” made possible.

If redlining was happening no one knew it.  No one would have been aware of such a thing.

But banks, insurance companies, real estate agencies, and landlords may have been employing it in the shadows.

One such real estate person who practiced this in the past and seems to want to make it permissible now is Donald J Trump whose New York real estate company was once sued by the federal government for discriminating against potential Black renters.

Trump’s father, Fred Trump, had made his fortune by building thousands of units of middle-class housing in Brooklyn and Queens, but when The Donald became president of his father’s company, the Justice Department sued the company for violating the Fair Housing Act by refusing to rent or negotiate rentals because of race and/or color. It was found that the company had required different rental terms and conditions because of race and that it had told potential renters of color that apartments were not available.

Unlike his father who attempted to deal with similar charges quietly, Trump went on the offensive and hired Roy Cohn, the former aide to Joseph McCarthy, to counter sue the government for making baseless charges, demanding $100 million in damages and accusing the Justice Department of trying to force him to rent to “welfare recipients”.

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He claimed that if people of color moved into his properties, there would be a “massive fleeing from the city of not only our tenants, but communities as a whole”, an action known as “White Flight”.

Although he claimed in an application for a broker’s license filed at the same time that he was in charge of all rentals, he told the court that he had nothing to do with renting apartments.

In 1975, while not admitting guilt, Trump agreed not to discriminate, to take steps to open his housing to more nonwhites, and to have his company submit a weekly list of vacancies to the Urban League.

In 1978 the government charged that the Trump company had not complied with the 1975 agreement, but continued to discriminate against blacks, telling blacks that apartments were not available for inspection and rental, the same charges in the earlier case.

To curb the practice of redlining, President Obama instituted rules to withhold federal funding from cities and municipalities that failed to confront segregation, requiring local governments to collect data to better track patterns of neighborhood development and segregation in order to obtain federal housing funds.

The rule also eliminated the unintentional discrimination that resulted from lenders’ use of algorithms that rejected applicants of color

Trump, who really has a thing about undoing what Obama did, may be taking action to undo that rule for that reason, but may also be doing it because he is a real estate man still feeling the sting from being called on past offenses.

He does hold grudges.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development is scaling back the rule that combats redlining, and in the process undoing decades of progress in curbing housing discrimination.

HUD Secretary, Ben Carson, claims the rule was suffocating investment in some of our most distressed neighborhoods that need our investment the most, wrongly expanding affordable housing options, and that desegregating neighborhoods is a failed socialist experiment.

The Trump administration also seeks an overhaul of a 1977 rule requiring banks to invest in low-income neighborhoods and help transform them into areas of economic opportunity.

Trump’s family and that of his son-in-law are in the real estate business.

They stand to gain once, like in the past, they can discriminate again.