ancient cities

in both the amount and terms of mortgage loans
have confirmed the persistence of racial bias in the
data reported under the terms of the Home Mortgage
Disclosure Act (1975). Many communities have
used aspects of the Community Reinvestment Act
of 1977 to develop pools of investment funds that
can be combined with neighborhood renewal and
thereby promote the “greenlining” of previously
disinvested communities.
In recent years, the concept of redlining has
been broadened. Some have argued that the
growth of predatory lending represents a case of
reverse redlining, as some credit-starved neighborhoods
have become the target of lenders using
illegal practices in providing high-cost, high-return
products. Redlining has also been used to
describe real estate-related practices in homeowners’
insurance and in marketing practices and to
describe the absence of insurance availability in
areas that overlap investment-redlined areas. The
term has also emerged in the context of retail
services, which have been charged with limiting
their services on the basis of the race or income
levels of communities.
David W. Bartelt
See also Divided Cities; Disinvestment; Housing Policy;
Jackson, Kenneth T.; Neighborhood Revitalization;
Real Estate; Social Exclusion
Further Readings
Holmes, Andrew and Paul Horvitz. 1994. “Mortgage
Redlining: Race, Risk, and Demand.” The Journal of
Finance 49(1):81–99.
Lang, William W. and Leonard I. Nakamura. 1993. “A
Model of Redlining.” Journal of Urban Economics
33(2):223–34.
Massey, Douglas and Nancy Denton. 1993. American
Apartheid. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Squires, Gregory, ed. 2004. Why the Poor Pay More: How
to Stop Predatory Lending. Westport, CT: Praeger.
Squires, Gregory D. and William Vélez. 1987.
“Neighborhood Racial Composition and Mortgage
Lending: City and Suburban Differences.” Journal of
Urban Affairs 9(3):217–32.
Tootell, Geoffrey M. B. 1996. “Redlining in Boston: Do
Mortgage Lenders Discriminate Against
Neighborhoods?” The Quarterly Journal of
Economics 111(4):1049–79.
Regime Theory
643
Urban-Suburban Investment Study Group. 1977. Redlining
and Disinvestment as a Discriminatory Practice in
Residential Mortgage Loans. Washington, DC: U.S.
Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Re g i m e th e o R y
Regime theory provides an explanation of how
public- and private-sector interests come together
in ways that allow for the governance of a city. As
such, it represents a significant contribution to the
urban politics literature. First, it presents a richly
nuanced perspective on power, governance, and
policy at the local level. In so doing, it also provides
a necessary corrective to the earlier power
elite, pluralist, and city limits theories of urban
politics. Finally, the nuances of regime theory,
stemming largely from its careful integration of
agency and structure, paved the way for further
refinements, thereby increasing its applicability.
These refinements can be found in the typology of
regimes developed to demonstrate the relationship
between a specific policy orientation of a regime
and the coordination tasks needed to successfully
carry out that orientation.
Power, Governance, and Policy
Regime theory responds to the thorny question:
How does anything get done (i.e., how do you
govern) in a system where power, authority, and
critical resources are fragmented across the public
and private sectors? According to regime theorists
Stephen Elkin and Clarence Stone, a key distinguishing
feature of the American political economy
is the fundamental division of labor between state
(political authority) and market (economic power).
Government wields significant official authority by
virtue of constitutions, laws, and the like, most of
which are subject to popular control, but the market
is where most economic wealth and jobs are
generated. There, the majority of control rests in
private hands. Each party needs the other to
achieve its desired ends (private interests want economic
growth; public officials seek governing
capacity), but there are no formal mechanisms for
coordination. This division becomes even more
problematic at the local or municipal level, where