Policy That Ended 50 Years Ago Blamed for Current Urban Violence

A soft science journal article is claiming that a racist policy about guaranteed home loans that ended more than 50 years ago is still a cause of the high rates of minority-committed violence in the areas once targeted.

The more likely cause is, of course, the Leftist policies still active today that reward the end of personal responsibility, and caused a massive spike in welfare reliance and fatherless children. Maybe someday these social theorists will get around to looking at that data, but for now we get this pap:

But a paper published in the May edition of the journal Social Science & Medicine, titled “The enduring impact of historical and structural racism on urban violence in Philadelphia,” adds an intriguing piece of evidence to a growing body of research that links the history of racial discrimination in cities to current problems with gun violence. This research suggests that fighting systematic racism is a better solution to urban crime than the heavy-handed policing tactics prescribed by Trump and his supporters.

The researchers, who all work with the Penn Injury Science Center at the University of Pennsylvania, took a look at modern maps of gun-violence hotspots in Philadelphia and compared them to an infamous redlining map of the city produced in 1937 by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation. What they found was that areas of Philadelphia deemed “red zones” 80 years ago strongly correlate to areas that now have a high concentration of gun violence.

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The FHA literally defined red zones, which were considered too toxic for guaranteed mortgage lending, as places that had “inharmonious racial or nationality groups,” which in practice often meant red-zoning neighborhoods for having a large number of black residents. While there is some dispute over how much impact these maps had on actual mortgage distribution in Philadelphia, Jacoby argued that the maps represent “a marker or a reflection of the racism of the 1930s and ’40s” and, as such, offer a good indicator of the ways historical patterns of discrimination can contribute to current problems.

“We can’t just look at a block in the city and understand the problem of violence from the firearm rate of the last 5 or 10 years,” Jacoby argued. “These sort of dangerous spaces perhaps are purposeful and maybe a century in the making, and maybe they need more concentrated intervention.

“The hotspot itself is not about ‘hot’ people,” she added. “It’s about places that have developed over time.”

There’s no defense possible for redlining — which is why the policy ended almost 50 years ago.

The people shooting up their neighborhoods now weren’t alive when the policy was in place. Neither were many of their parents.

At some point, the onus falls on those who live in these neighborhoods to take responsibility for their own lives. To finish high school — which admittedly means little now, when the Left rejects school choice — and get a job and get married before having children. Because people of any race who do those three things do just fine in America, and so do their kids.

The Left loves coming up with clever answers that allow them to continue believing that Big Government cures everything, and looks sillier and sillier in the process.