A National Neighborhood Appraisal System

The racial undertones of Detroit have been extremely problematic to Detroit’s real estate market for well over 50 years. These social disruptions continue to have an effect on the current residents of Detroit. During the middle of the nineteenth century, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) introduced real estate tactics such as redlining, which is the practice of flagging minority dense neighborhoods for the purposes of denying approval of mortgages or inflating the price of the homes. Redlining had a profound social and economic effect on all residents of Detroit. The white majority began abandoning and selling their homes in fear that the value of the home would plummet, leading to a great financial loss when minorities moved in the area. This idea is known as white flight, and is the primary reason that Detroit has one of the highest African American populations in the country. However, through revitalization and gentrification of the Midtown/Downtown area, Detroit is slowly becoming more diverse. Throughout history, racial politics of the mid-to-late twentieth century affected Detroit 's real estate market by excluding minorities from the real estate market. Although adding stadiums, high end retail, small shops, and restaurants is economically valuable to the city of Detroit, this is conflicting and potentially problematic for the original residents of the area because the prices of these new establishments are often much higher than the residents can afford.

Similarly, low-density-only zoning has been common, despite its tendency to reduce the rental housing available and thus effectively excluding African Americans and Latinos from living in certain neighborhoods or even entire communities.” By them using zoning power to keep blacks out of their communities, it brings on another form of discrimination such as steering. Steering is "practice by which real estate brokers and agents preserve and encourage patterns of racial segregation in available housing by steering members of racial and ethnic groups to buildings occupied primarily by members of such racial and ethnic groups and away from buildings and neighborhoods inhabited primarily by members of other races or groups”

Dictionary.com defines the process of redlining as, “A discriminatory practice by which banks, insurance companies, etc., refuse or limit loans, mortgages, insurance, etc., within specific geographic areas, especially inner-city neighborhoods.” This practice became far more prevalent in the 1930’s, subsequently becoming a staple of the housing market up and until the passing of the Fair Housing Act which was passed in 1968, theoretically preventing landowners from participating in the practice. However, while the actual term wasn’t coined until the early twentieth century, the ideologies that held up redlining had been seen since the 1860’s. With the founding of Oregon as a state, the later practices of redlining in suburban communities

Redlining is the practice of denying services, either directly or through selectively raising prices, to residents of certain areas based on the racial or ethnic makeups of those areas (Wikipedia). Redlining refers to the actual act of drawing red lines on maps to denote where banks were not going to invest in because they are a liability to the bank. This leads into the term being used to describe the discrimination against other people normally due to race or sex. Redlining is a disgusting idea that reminds us of the old days of inequality and it is saddening that people discriminate against others because they have a different skin tone.

It was 1947, eight years before Mississippi lynched Emmett Till. The Great Migration was a mass exodus of six million African Americans out of the South that spanned most of the 20th century. Blacks did not journey north seeking better wages and work. Rather, they were fleeing the acquisitive warlords of the South. They were seeking the protection of the law. From the 1930-60s Blacks across the country had no access to legitimate home mortgages. This happened through means both legal and extralegal. In 1935, the Federal Home Loan Bank Board (FHLBB) asked Home Owners ' Loan Corporation (HOLC) to look at 239 cities and create "residential security maps." The purpose was to show the level of security for real-estate investments in each city. The resulting redlining caused a large increase in residential racial segregation and urban decay. Redlining denies services to residents of certain areas based on racial or ethnic criteria. John McKnight, a sociologist and community activist, coined the term in the late 1960s. The term comes from the practice of marking a red line on a map to delineate the area where banks would not invest. In addition to redlining, many Chicago Whites employed other measures to keep their neighborhoods segregated and to discourage non-white home buyers, including restrictive covenants and even bombings. Further, such local measures received broader support, including from a prominent national real estate

A determined effort to end the effective redlining of Native homelands began in the second half of the 1990s, with many promises made and some actual progress. However, much of that progress seems to have evaporated in the implosion of the mortgage market. Most redlining was targeted towards African Americans.

Much of the 20th century was plagued by a social barrier known as redlining. Redlining involves the denial of services by selectively altering prices in a certain area due to the racial or the ethnical make-up of the area. The most common form of redlining that is witnessed is the denial of financial services in the form of mortgages and loans. Other forms of redlining include health care firms and supermarkets. These two industries have tended to avoid areas where banks do not invest and this is in itself a form of redlining. The term ‘redlining’ was coined by a sociologist named John McKnight in the late 1960s who first described the term as the areas where banks would not invest. The definition has now shifted to discrimination to a certain

The redlining practices of the Federal Government established economic segregation in San Antonio. Denying minorities access to federally backed home loans put them at an economic disadvantage when it comes to accumulating wealth. This also creates a cycle of poverty and crime in those neighborhoods.

The social construction of reality is the procedure in historical and societal perspective that entails human beings giving meaning to the world through cultural interaction. The world exists beyond processes and language of interpretation. Nevertheless, social construction of reality is an aspect that can be understood and linked to, by human beings through language-based procedures of historical creation of knowledge, sense-making and cultural interpretation. Apparently, social construction of reality is a sociological-anthropological idea that addresses basic questions of what are human and the link between humanness and the communities in which people are created.

The goal of my research is investigate differences in the value homeowners place on neighborhood local public goods. I define local public goods as either non-excludable or non-rivalrous neighborhood amenities such as open space, school quality, and public transportation, and disamenities such as crime. Previous research has focused on estimating the average value or willingness to pay for these types of goods. However, just as most preferences can vary by income level, so can the preferences for local public goods. From a public policy persepctive it is important to understand this heterogeneity so that local governments can better serve their residents. For example, if low income households value public transportation more than the

Social structure is the organization of society into predictable relationships. Two of the building blocks that help make up social structure are social group and social institutions.

In the mid-40s there was a rampant problem of house shortage. Loans and mortgages were denied to the blacks despite their financial standing through the redlining practice and covenants that restricted the blacks from buying land were made (Desmond and Emirbayer, 173).

In his book The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration, Anthony Giddens develops his structuration theory. The basis for Giddens theory is an attempt to explain human agency and social structure, and how the two together, explain social life and interactions within our social system. Giddens emphasizes that rather than social structure and human agency being two separate constructs, they are instead just two ways of considering and explaining social action. He also introduces the duality of structure, which expands into the idea that the social system is in one way composed of actors who undertake social interactions, and their knowledge in such activities and circumstances. While this is the case, Giddens also

There was a time in the 1970’s when redlining was common. This means that financial institutions refused to give mortgages to low-income neighborhoods. This caused these neighborhoods to go down hill, making the poor people poorer, and the rich people richer. This issue was not fixed until the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act stopped banks from redlining.

Throughout this essay I will rely heavily on Parsons’ ideas and methodologies. By portraying Parsons’ main concepts of a social system through analysing the tools that are required to formulate a system and I will then proceed to outline what Parsons perceived as the functions of a social system, in the hope of accurately outlining the main features of his concept.