Date/Time
Date(s) - August 18, 2021
12:00 pm - 2:00 pm
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Location
University of Maryland BioPark
Please join Lambda Alpha International’s Baltimore Chapter for our August Presentation on Wednesday, August 18th at noon. The presentation will feature LAI member Dan Pontious speaking on the topic of “Wrestling with the Roots of LAI.” The presentation will be a live luncheon as well as on Zoom. Zoom details will be sent prior to the event.
Click here to register.
As the killings of Freddie Gray, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and many others have pushed more of America to reckon with the roots of racial bias in our society, Lambda Alpha International, too, has begun to wrestle with the full legacy of long-celebrated early LAI leaders like founder Richard T. Ely and first international LAI president Homer Hoyt.
New research is revealing how central these early LAI leaders were to establishing the discriminatory land valuation policies in the New Deal and beyond that still shape our Baltimore area and our country today. As a prominent economics professor and essentially the founder of real estate as an academic field, Richard Ely gave academic legitimacy to the view that the presence of African Americans reduces the value of land and trained new academics and professionals in that view. Contemporary Homer Hoyt, in his famous 1933 PhD thesis, included a list of races and ethnicities from most favorable to least favorable impact on land value. The following year Hoyt brought those views to the new Federal Housing Administration (FHA) as its chief economist. His views infused the “redlining” maps the federal Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) drew in the 1930s for more than 200 cities, and Hoyt, himself, developed the pro-segregation risk criteria that the FHA used to underwrite white suburban homeownership for decades.
What does this information about the roots of land economics and LAI mean for us as 21st century LAI members? LAI member Dan Pontious, whose work at the Baltimore Metropolitan Council (BMC) involves counteracting the continuing influence of the HOLC’s 1937 “residential security map” of Baltimore and the FHA underwriting criteria that accompanied it, will discuss how the ideas Richard Ely and Homer Hoyt espoused still affect Baltimore today.
Dan has been the housing policy coordinator at BMC since 2012. Before that he spent two years coordinating green and healthy homes policy at the Baltimore City Department of Housing and Community Development. Prior to that, Dan spent ten years leading policy and advocacy at the nonprofit Citizens Planning and Housing Association and Baltimore Regional Partnership. He has a history degree from Princeton University.