The Debate Over tax Breaks for Nonprofit Cleveland-area Hospitals is Also About Racism and Redlining

Posted June 29, 2022

External Article: The Debate Over tax Breaks for Nonprofit Cleveland-area Hospitals is Also About Racism and Redlining

Assistant Professor Todd Michney in the School of History and Sociology was quoted in "The Debate Over tax Breaks for Nonprofit Cleveland-area Hospitals is Also About Racism and Redlining" published in The Land.

An excerpt:

Redlining helped create health problems that disproportionately plague Black Clevelanders, said Dr. Todd Michney, a history and sociology professor at Georgia Tech University and an expert on 20th-century Black upward mobility in Cleveland.

Redlining was part of a federal program started in the 1930s that rated neighborhoods across the country to help mortgage lenders predict whether an area was a good financial risk. Black neighborhoods were deemed ‘hazardous” risks, which led to decades of disinvestment, according to the University of Richmond.

“Sociologists have taken the [redlining] data … and found that really, across the board, these real estate predictions correlate with bad health outcomes (today),” Michney said. “The correlation is striking.”