Redlining is still alive and well, continuing to haunt communities that decades ago were denied access to home loan financing. A March report from the Neighborhood Community Reinvestment Coalition found that areas denied credit in the postwar period remain heavily disinvested in today.
The Gartz family lived in the neighborhood in the midst of these chaotic changes, similarly confused about what was happening. But unlike most white families, who sold their homes and fled the neighborhood, Linda’s parents remained, rooted by the reluctance of her father, Fred, to leave the place where he grew up and Fred’s parents’ decision to give the family their house—a six-flat—after they fled, compelling them to become landlords for more than 40 years. The decision to remain would create an incredible strain on their marriage as Fred traveled for work while his wife, Lillian, became a full-time property manager in a community that grew increasingly unstable and violent each year. Redlined offers insight into the ways white families failed to grasp their own role in how government officials reshaped the city, and how those failures further solidified the racial divisions that continue to plague Chicago today.
As Gartz and her parents became familiar with their new neighbors, their racist assumptions were quickly challenged. While Lillian initially describes feeling “squeamish” at the arrival of the first black family on her street, she soon declares to the rest of the family, “You know, I’m not the least bit unhappy in this changing neighborhood.” Though a sense of neighborhood stability quickly fell apart after the sudden change in demographics, there’s still a sense in the book that Lillian and Fred are transformed by their deepened relationships with black families, which quietly reshape the reflexively racist attitudes they’d once held. Gartz shares a moment at their dinner table, when her mother recounts the experiences that their local butcher, Eddie, experienced growing up in the Jim Crow south. Telling her family how he was used as a shooting target by his white boss, she breaks down crying, while Fred comments, “Man’s inhumanity to man.”
“Redlined is a personal story, into which is interwoven the history of redlining and its impact on one family in one Chicago neighborhood,” Gartz says, adding that she believes a memoir might be less intimidating to casual readers than an academic book on the subject. “[I hope] it may provide a path for the nation to move forward and remedy these unconstitutional injustices of the past that are still having an impact on race relations today.” v
