“The purpose of including it is to recognize the history of Lincoln, that it has happened here as well as in other cities,” said David Cary, city planning director. “The result is a more open and honest discussion about the city. “

Not everyone in Lincoln is familiar with this past, he said, that in the mid-1930s, maps divided the city into sections, assessing the level of risk to lenders, which areas considered “dangerous.” Were the parts of town where black families lived. .

These maps – called redlining – codified the patterns of segregation that had developed since before World War I, said Ed Zimmer, the retired town’s historic preservation planner.

In 1916, Sheridan Boulevard became the first neighborhood in Lincoln to introduce racial restrictions with a pact stating that only “those of Caucasian race” could buy homes, the only exception for occupants being if the buyers had maids or servants. black.

In 1924, racial clauses were introduced in Piedmont and the Brownbilt area south of Randolph School had purchase agreements which prohibited the sale of property to “Africans, Chinese or Japanese” from the 1930s to the 1950s. .

Then, in the 1930s, the Federal Housing Authority and Home Owners’ Loan Corp., created as part of the New Deal to help bail out homeowners, helped make loans more readily available to working people and the middle class. , Zimmer said.

These federal loan programs worked with local bankers, developers, and real estate appraisers in cities across the country to define neighborhoods and the risk they posed to lenders. The maps were largely based on poverty and racial makeup, and it was nearly impossible to obtain federally guaranteed loans in the danger areas marked in red (hence the term “redlining”) or the yellow areas considered. as “in decline”.

Here are a few sentences from Lincoln’s 2050 planning document:

“When we look at the red card of the 1930s and recent trends in minority population and poverty, we find, almost 100 years later, that it is the same card. The redlining effects of blacks and other people of color are still visible today. “

Ed Wimes and Marilyn Johnson-Farr, Albert Maxey and Jessie Myles lived through this story or suffered from it years later. It also affected my husband’s family.

Wimes, a native of Lincoln and a retired administrator of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, grew up in a three-bedroom house one block from the Malone Center that he assumed his father was able to purchase thanks to a disposal of the Bill GI as a WWII veteran – even though the benefits of the GI Bill were denied to over a million black veterans. In Lincoln, black families lived in parts of the city, Wimes said. He grew up in a bounded by the 19th to the 23rd and R to Vine.

“I don’t think it’s a mystery to anyone that African Americans can’t buy property outside these borders without real serious hardship one way or another,” he said. .

Johnson-Farr, a teacher from Doane, grew up near Ninth and Park streets in a house owned by her grandparents. Other black families lived there, and she can still name the parents and their children who grew up together in the close-knit neighborhood.

She doesn’t know if her grandparents had trouble getting a loan, but thinks people have likely looked to areas where other black families lived.

“I suspect that it was not easy to find places and that maybe where you landed you created the community.”

Johnson-Farr said something else that resonates: that if his grandparents had struggled to buy a house, they wouldn’t have talked about it.

“There was also another sense of pride at the time. I don’t think my grandparents would ever have told me ‘we had a really hard time trying to get this house’ because they didn’t want me to worry.

My husband’s parents had the same sense of pride. Their parents immigrated from Japan and settled in Hawaii and they both grew up there. In the 1960s, the youngest son – my stepfather – became a professor of social work at the University of Nebraska and moved his young family to Lincoln.

They couldn’t buy a house when they arrived – at least one owner refused to sell to a Japanese-American family.

My in-laws rarely spoke about it. They rented a small house in downtown Lincoln and quietly persisted. They are both gone now, but the house they eventually bought is still part of our family.

Albert Maxey came to college on a basketball scholarship in 1957 and two years later looked for an apartment near campus for himself and his new wife. He has been turned down several times and still remembers the landlord who checked him in, although he said he had to ask the other tenants first if everything was okay. Maxey didn’t need to ask why.

Eventually he bought a house in Belmont and while he had no difficulty buying the house, he and his wife moved out after his daughter came home and rehearsed a nursery rhyme – including a racial insult – which the neighborhood kids sang while she and the other kids played.

“She was starting kindergarten, so I said ‘enough is enough’,” he said.

He was then a police officer and found a brick house near 28th and S streets, a neighborhood close to where many black families lived, such as those where he and his wife grew up.

“We wanted to make sure our children were aware of our people and their current situation,” he said. “It was my reason for finding a … nice place in the neighborhood where the majority of black people lived.”

Years later, in the early 1980s, Myles became a sociology professor at UNL and a landlord told him he had had issues with previous tenants and couldn’t rent to her. When Myles and his wife found out that these previous tenants were black, he filed a discrimination complaint. They later settled the dispute, he said, although in hindsight he wished he had seen it through.

Homeownership is one of the main drivers of generational wealth, and the effects of the red line and racial pacts persist.

Consider this: The median income of households of color in Lancaster County is 15 to 47% lower than that of white households, according to the American Community Survey of the Census Bureau. Almost 64% of white households own their homes. Less than 23% of black families and 38% of Latino households do so.

Wimes recalls that when Paul Adams – an Army Lt. Col. and Tuskegee Airman – moved to Lincoln as Deputy Air Base Commander, he could afford to buy an upper-middle-income house, but officers real estate only showed him houses. in some neighborhoods.

He wanted to buy a house on Cotner Boulevard, Wimes said, and although he could afford it, he couldn’t get a loan approved.

Homes with lower values ​​affected the ability of families to move to larger homes and different neighborhoods, Wimes said.

For example, in the 1970s when city officials wanted to build the Northeast Radial, people who lived on the way to the proposed road had to sell devalued homes that would have made it nearly impossible to purchase a new home from the same size he mentioned. Ultimately, the radial was never built, but homes were sold during the planning process, Zimmer said.

Johnson-Farr, who lived in the house she grew up in until about four years ago, said many of those longtime families have moved and many homes today are rentals and not of the owners.

So what does all of this mean for planners?

It means using that story to inform decisions ahead, Cary said.

It plays a role in affordable housing decisions, including adding affordable units to as many housing projects as possible and finding ways to create more mixed housing options across the city.

While Lincoln doesn’t have zoning ordinances that only allow single-family units, there are certainly neighborhoods where this is most prevalent, Cary said.

Understand that history plays a role in the city’s desire to create “whole neighborhoods” – those with mixed housing options and services such as grocery stores and banks, schools and parks and swimming pools nearby .

“We don’t have all the answers,” Cary said. “What he’s doing – having this experience and understanding of what’s happened in our city – leads to more informed decision making.”