Property tax systems are how most of us pay for local government. Even if we don’t own our own homes or commercial spaces, landlords typically pass through the cost of property taxes to tenants. Local property tax systems in turn play a huge role in planning, zoning, placemaking, and capital improvement planning. Upon closer inspection, property tax systems everywhere overburden some communities while under-burdening others. The pattern of those communities is one familiar to many — it’s the pattern of redlining. Property tax systems have been helping preserve racial disparities in wealth by contributing greatly to the extraction of wealth from historically redlined areas. Join Next City for a presentation with Joe Minicozzi, urban designer and principal of Urban3, who will share how disparities in land value assessment end up subsidizing wealthier, whiter neighborhoods at the cost of overburdening historically redlined neighborhoods — and how people
Racial justice advocates have been demanding for years that federal banking regulators use their authority under the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), enacted in 1977, to assess whether banks are meeting the credit needs of all racial groups equally. Regulators ultimately did not meet that demand under the new CRA rules and regulations issued on October 24, but there is still a lot to talk about. Under the existing rules, banks get CRA credit for $300-$400 billion a year in loans made to low-to-moderate income households or in low-to-moderate income communities across the country. That’s a higher annual spending than HUD or the Department of Transportation or the Department of Education. Those billions of CRA-qualifying loan dollars include loans for single-family and multi-family residences, small businesses, small farms and community development. After several years and now two White House administrations, the newly updated (but still race-neutral) rules and regulations w
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