Upgrade To Current Hvac System At The County: Fill & Download for Free

Redlining maps were discriminatory in effect but it wasn't really the intention. The intention was to prevent more losses in the event of another stock market crash. Not saying it wasn’t dumb and poorly thought out. It was. There just wasn’t a real intention to oppress Poles and Italians through the manipulation of mortgage insurance services. Regardless, it officially ended in 1968 with the passage of the Fair Housing Act.But wait, it’s a little more complicated than that. Let's back up for a minute.Most people can agree that most of the South was a collection of apartheid states - to varying degrees - but apartheid nonetheless. It wasn't so much that housing was segregated but rather public and private facilities were. Both Institutions and establishments. There was residential segregation as well, but it wasn’t as stark as in the northern cities.The industrial cities of the Northeast and Midwest were not like the South. It's not to say there was no separation, just that there was no legal authority or right to do so. To the extent that it existed, it was culturally enforced. I'm not talking about African-Americans here. In 1890, when the streetcar suburbs of the northern cities began to explode, black Americans were a tiny demographic. They were barely on the radar. They made up about 3.5% of the population of Philadelphia and about 1.5% of NYC.People had a lot more prejudices back then than we do today. Not that we’re perfect now - it was just a lot worse then. They associated certain ethnic groups with certain moral qualities. Then as now the scientific method escaped a lot of people. Then as now people confused cause and effect. If housing was bad it's because Italians lived there. It couldn't possibly be that Italians moved there because it was cheap and close to work. It couldn’t possibly be that Italians were poor, not because they were lazy or stupid, but because they left Italy as peasants with little to no education and came to the US with nothing.Let's use Philly as our example. People of recent European immigration mostly lived with their own kind in the 1st and 2nd generation. The native born, middle class WASPs were already beginning their exodus to the 'burbs. It wasn’t our current conception of the suburbs. Remember, before about 1840 you needed a horse or your own two feet to get where you wanted to go. Railroads changed that for the wealthy but the middle class couldn’t afford that commute. The streetcar opened up the suburbs to the upper middle class first then shortly after, the middle class. They flocked to the new streetcar suburbs in West Philadelphia. These new townhomes for sale at 60th & Carpenter ca. 1900 were large even by today’s standards.The Irish lived along the river and worked the docks (and still do) The Italians lived further in from the river in South Philly and worked in restaurants and the building trades and made up a big part of the merchant class (and still do). The Jews lived between the Irish and Italians in a narrow corridor that led up to the old financial district and garment district - today we know these places as Old City, Fabric Row, and Jeweler’s Row. The Poles settled further north along the river, closer to some of the bigger factories. Southern blacks settled just south of downtown and were mostly employed in the nearby service industries. Germans settled in North Philly east of Broad St. but by 1890, no longer recent immigrants, were also starting their exodus to the 'burbs.Important point of fact here — homeownership was tiny back then. In 1890 just under 23% of households owned their home (it peaked near 60% in 2000). The vast majority of households rented. Most of those units were owned by landlords who might’ve owned a few properties and who today we might call, “slumlords.” Protections for renters back then were slim. Minimum standards for occupancy were also slim. There was no real pressure for landlords to maintain or repair their properties.The problem for all of those groups isn't that they lived apart. No legal system was forcing them. It was just the culture back then. Not saying it was right or wrong, it just was. You hung out with people who spoke your language, went to your church, and ate the same food. It's probably who you worked with. It's probably who you married. If you were Italian you might get harassed for spending too much time in the Irish neighborhood. And vice versa. No joke, in Italian, South Philly, more than once and as recently as 17 years ago, I heard someone say some version of, “yeah, but then you’d be hanging out with them mayonnaise eaters,” referring to South Philadelphians of Irish descent in the Pennsport neighborhood. Both times it was meant as a joke but it has deep roots that weren’t always friendly.I digress, the problem was that they were moving into housing that had been vacated by the people moving to the suburbs. It was old. A lot of it was falling apart. All of it was obsolete. The big shift towards homeownership in the immigrant communities began in the 1920s. This is 30 years after the big housing boom of the 1890s. There was another huge boom in the 1920s - but that was a suburban boom in a way that we would recognize as suburban today - detached homes, often with driveways.If you have time you can read up on filtering. The short version is that most housing is built with the upper-middle class and middle class in mind. It becomes obsolete without massive infusions of cash for major renovations. It’s not necessarily unusable, it’s just obsolete. If you've ever lived in an old house, think about the technological changes in that house. My old house had pipes running all throughout it to get gas to the lanterns in all the bedrooms. Then knob and tube wiring was added. And then Romex. And then modern, NM wiring. The old fuse box was still in the basement right next to the new 200 amp panel. That's to say nothing of plumbing. My old house was built before indoor plumbing and the kitchen and bathrooms were very clearly afterthoughts. The stairs to the basement had been moved at some point. It was clear that the old stairs used to lead straight to the old coal furnace. The point is, when the middle class was leaving these homes in the 1890s, they were leaving old, antiquated homes and moving to new, modern (for the time) homes.By the time the first redlining maps were seen after the Stock Market crash of 1929 we were already on the 3rd iteration of the middle class suburbs. The Model T had been introduced 21 years earlier. Modern homes had detached garages and an electrical system robust enough to support a refrigerator.Oh, yes, housing construction. It just stopped. If you wanted a new home in the 1930s you ordered it from the Sears Catalog and put it together yourself. Imagine that.No one had any money to fix up old houses, either. By 1941, large swathes of redlined Philly looked like this -This wasn’t hyperbole. Even by 1960 there were whole neighborhoods where half the housing units were sharing bathrooms with other units. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the building itself was in bad shape but it wasn’t a place that could charge enough rent to keep up with needed repairs. The neighborhood along Vine St. that made way for the Vine St. Expressway is one such neighborhood.To be clear, redlining maps were first produced commercially as a guide for lenders in an attempt to avoid a repeat of the losses of 1929. They included ethnic descriptions of neighborhoods. Crappy science but not that surprising given the (nativist/anti-immigrant) time period and with the social sciences still in their infancy. So during the Great Depression, when the FHA was created in 1934, similar maps were solicited by the Feds - without the ethnic descriptions. The effect was the same, though. The oldest housing stock was redlined. This map is from 1936.If you know Philly, the older parts of town are red. The other former boroughs in Philadelphia County that were incorporated into the city during the Act of Consolidation also stand out - Manayunk, Germantown, Frankford, and Eastwick. Another standout is the only patch of yellow in South Philly, known as Southwest Center City or Graduate Hospital. This was old housing stock, to be sure, but this was also a solidly middle class, black neighborhood and home to much of Philly's black, upper middle class at the time.The maps weren't a ban on anyone getting a mortgage as it is popularly understood. It just prevented anyone from getting a federally insured, FHA loan. This typically meant that larger deposits were required when signing for a mortgage.For example, if we zoom into South Philly in the area now generally referred to as Graduate Hospital and Point Breeze - here:You see this in 1940 - a cluster of moderate, black homeownership generally between 5% and 15%Go to this in 1960 - generally 45–55%A 10–15x increase in black, homeownership. These are showing black homeownership as a percentage of the tenure of all black households but taken in the context of a huge boom in the actual number of black households, the shift from renting to owning is huge.Home ownership in the adjacent, majority Italian neighborhoods during the same period went from generally 45–55% in 1940 to 70–85% by 1960. Remember, the entirety of South Philly is redlined and supposedly, no one could get a mortgage.Obviously, this wasn’t true.Salacious headlines like Racist property deeds kept thousands of Philly homes off-limits to all but white buyers, study finds are ostensibly true. Developers specifically targeted Jews and Blacks for exclusion. But it obscures the fact that restrictive covenants were in place on fewer than 1% of the housing stock and most of it limited to the pricey new subdivisions of the nouveau riche. Not a lot of immigrant Jews were showing up to the open house. Especially not during the Depression. Homeownership was 1/3 of what it is today. Housing discrimination was a lot more “casual” and more often perpetrated by jagoff landlords. It also, clearly, didn’t stop Jews from moving into the middle class. In the 1920s they started moving to West Philly and Strawberry Mansion and by the 1950s were moving on to the Main Line and Cherry Hill. It was by then that they were were almost completely gone from the Jewish corridor along 5th & 6th Streets in South Philly.It’s not apparent to me that there was ever a point that a prospective home buyer couldn’t get a mortgage. I think the bigger problem was with appraisals and the value of housing in general. Look at this guySold in 1997 for $6800 then again in 1998 for $16,000. And this is Philadelphia and other big cities writ large. Maybe it was Boston in the late 70s and NYC in the late 80s but generally, every older industrial city went through this. In 1997, installing new HVAC or updating the electrical easily could’ve exceeded the value of the house. A new kitchen could’ve easily cost twice as much as the house. Let’s say I go to a bank for a home equity loan for $30,000 because I want to do top to bottom renovations on this house. No bank is going to approve that loan on a house that only appraised for $10,000. OK, so I spend my own money. But now I have a house that cost me $40k. Maybe that’s worth it if you’re in it for the long haul. You’d certainly save a lot on a mortgage. But what happens if you have to move?People in the 80s and 90s were very aware of the problems. So when kids, who had their own families in the suburbs, inherited a house in South Philly or North Philly they found it easier to just abandon them than to try to upgrade them for sale. If they did sell them the buyers were usually real estate interests only interested in land banking because the property didn’t have any other real value. At best they would tear the house down as soon as the closed on it.The fact that this place survived the 1980s and 1990s intactand became this placeis a testament to the resilience of those communities. Actual communities. Not a neighborhood. A place you’re a part of.It’s not at all clear that FHA loans would’ve made much of a difference. Maybe it would’ve induced more demand from first time buyers but that’s an assumption based on nothing. The demand for suburban housing was like wildfire from the 1890s onward. Living in the city didn’t become cool again to anyone outside of the twee set until Friends said it was cool.