CURRENT COMMUNITY SEGREGATION MIRRORS RACIST SAN DIEGO PAST

Amid so much disturbing news, let’s not forget that there’s a critical upcoming election to choose the next mayor of the city of San Diego.

One overriding theme that continues to emerge is the notion that single-family neighborhoods should be protected from, well, “fill in the blank.”

In effort to add context to this emerging narrative, we would do well to remember why we have single-family communities in the first place.

In the 1930s, the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Administration created maps of every major U.S. city, showing where people of color and the poor lived. Known as redlining maps, they were used as a tool to discourage, even prohibit, federal funding and public resources away from poor ethnic neighborhoods.

Now, those maps reveal the disgraceful history of exactly how local zoning was and still is used to segregate communities, with the implicit, immoral goal of keeping people of color locked in downtrodden neighborhoods that were little more than self-perpetuating pockets of poverty.

Simply put, if they couldn’t get loans, they couldn’t buy homes.

Today, large cities such as San Diego, indeed, countless cities and towns of all sizes and locales around the nation, remain nearly as racially segregated as they were in the Depression-era 1930s — revealing a shameful time capsule.

Pull away the preening veil of “America’s Finest City” and our current patterns of neighborhood segregation all too sadly mirror an undeniable racist past.

Nearly 90 years later, San Diego’s sociodemographics have shifted so that more than half — 57 percent — of the city’s residents are people