Redlining had an underlying reason. It made little sense to invest in an area where, likely as not, the asset would be damaged or destroyed, confiscated as part of a criminal enterprise, or just plain lose value due to deterioration of the surroundings.
Funny thing, though. People who came here from other places (India, Viet Nam, Dominican Republic, Haiti, various African countries, eastern Europe) had saved and could pay cash for those dirt-cheap properties. They opened stores and other businesses, and in most cases the neighborhoods improved.
What prevented the American-born residents from doing the same? Nothing but their own behavior and attitudes.
Al Sharpton illustrated how this works...
In 1995, a black Pentecostal Church, the United House of Prayer, which owned a retail property on 125th Street, asked Fred Harari, a Jewish tenant who operated Freddie's Fashion Mart, to evict his longtime subtenant, a black-owned record store called The Record Shack....Sharpton told the protesters, "We will not stand by and allow them to move this brother so that some white interloper can expand his business."
On 1995-12-08, Roland J. Smith Jr., one of the protesters, entered Harari's store with a gun and flammable liquid, shot several customers and set the store on fire. The gunman fatally shot himself, and seven store employees died of smoke inhalation.
Amen,brother.
I was always impressed by the way immigrants from the Dominican Republic arrived and built up little businesses in some of the crummiest parts of New York. In the Inwood area, they also took back the park because they simply wouldn't be driven out by the black thugs who had taken up residence there (and the Dominicans were usually armed with a knife, which they did not hesitate to use!). Success or failure has nothing to do with color, because many Dominicans are as black as any "African American." It's all a matter of attitude.