Community Development, Research, and Reinvestment: The Struggle against Redlining in Washington, DC, 1970–1995

Using archival data and oral histories, this paper describes the community reinvestment movement in Washington, DC from 1970 until 1995. Though the movement began as isolated private advocacy in the early 1970s, it helped pass key pieces of federal legislation, such as the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) and the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA). The DC government responded to both redlining and gentrification with a suite of community development legislation designed to extend credit based on social needs, to increase homeownership via a homestead housing program, and to mitigate displacement due to gentrification with tenant right-to-purchase legislation. Additionally, DC's reinvestment movement is unusual in that the city government used an interstate banking law to force reinvestment in the 1980s and early 1990s. Furthermore, the paper describes class-based barriers to reinvestment within the African American community including petty corruption amongst mortgage bankers and real estate brokers, corruption that foreshadowed exploitation during the sub-prime era. The paper concludes with a discussion of how the DC reinvestment movement took advantage of political opportunity structure, using advocacy and research to effect reinvestment because of successful venue-shopping. This work fills specific gaps in the literature, to include DC's role in the writing of CRA and HMDA, qualitative evidence of the effects of redlining, the use of interstate banking laws for reinvestment, and class issues within the African American community in the context of reinvestment.