Redlined

by Max Page

The other day, I was reading the New York Times and saw an ad saying that cheap rates were available for delivery in Philadelphia. I called and ordered a subscription for my in-laws who live in the East Oak Lane neighborhood. The operator took the details and we hung up. Three minutes later, she called back to inform me that in fact the New York Times does not deliver to the East Oak Lane neighborhood. "But the ad says that there is delivery service in Philadelphia; East Oak Lane is in Philadelphia." The bland response: "Well, I guess they haven’t quite gotten around to getting delivery to that area."

But it’s not like it’s a new neighborhood. That the Times is delivered five blocks away, just over the Cheltenham line in the suburbs, only confused this operator. I knew the real answer. After all, my in-laws having been trying to get delivery of the New York Times to their home in East Oak Lane for the last decade. They get the Philadelphia Inquirer but, truth be told, they still have a love for Brooklyn, the city of their birth, and like to keep in touch with the news in the Big Apple and elsewhere. And so, every now and then, my mother-in-law calls for service, or sends in those little cards requesting home delivery and gets the same response: not yet; maybe someday.

The failure to deliver has nothing to do with the lack of demand (of which there is enough among my in-laws’ friends alone), or lack of delivery people — although these are the common excuses offered over the years by the New York Times). Rather, it has everything to do with who lives in East Oak Lake, and more particularly the color of their skin. My in-laws have lived in this urban neighborhood, on North 12th Street, for more than a third of a century, staying in the city while so many of their (white) neighbors fled to the suburbs. They like their house, the neighborhood, the elementary school where all four children went. They also feel that people should not run away when people different from them come to live next door. Their attitude — just like their 35 years of marriage — makes them part of a small minority in this country. When the neighborhood was dominated by people like them — white and Jewish and middle class — there was New York Times service; once the neighborhood "tipped" and became largely black and lower-income, there was none. As crazy as it sounds, although the paper has many potential readers there, for the New York Times the residents of East Oak Lane are bad for business. The paper is less concerned about expanding its circulation and more concerned about luring costly advertisers. By delivering to high-income, and white, neighborhoods across the country, the New York Times can brag about a "high-profile" readership to its advertisers. Saks Fifth Avenue is not especially interested in reaching black people in North Philadelphia.

I’m not suggesting that the inability of an individual to get home delivery of the New York Times is a state of injustice about which we should march in the streets — although New Yorkers will roundly disagree with this statement. But it’s a small part of a much larger injustice that we should loudly protest. The practice of drawing lines on a map and excluding from service a neighborhood because it is largely black, or is in the process of becoming home to more racial minorities, has a long and horrible history in this country. The practice is called redlining and it has been used most notoriously by the government, but also by real estate developers and banks and insurance companies.

Redlining of the sort that the government engaged in for half a century is illegal now, but for banks and other industries, it still hasn’t been eliminated. Moreover, the effects of historically discriminatory policies will live on for many more years in the struggling areas of our inner cities. The absence of the New York Times in North Philadelphia is a small but eloquent reminder of the ongoing redlining of the mind that made redlining of our cities so pervasive. Neither should be acceptable in this new millennium.

Max Page is a Yale professor. If you would like to respond to this Slant or have one of your own (650 words), contact Howard Altman, City Paper news editor, 123 Chestnut St., Phila., PA 19106 or e-mail altman@citypaper.net.