If it's not a cash payout, what is it?
I would prefer to see something along the lines of traditional economic development, but on a much larger scale - this could involve sizeable investments in infrastructure, public education, job training, addiction and mental health treatment, medical care, and arts & entertainment. In struggling communities, many of these things have been left to wither, and attempts to address them are often marginal at best.
What are you targeting in your target areas?
Poverty, neglect, and lack of opportunity.
Also, how do you deal with poor black people unlucky enough to live outside your target area?
That's a good question. We can mitigate some of that by targeting a lot of areas. But that still won't help everybody.
Part of our problem is geography - economic growth is centered in urban areas, while many rural areas are dying out and have no foreseeable ways of bouncing back. I've thought for a while that we should do something to better enable people to relocate to where the jobs are, but that won't help the people who remain. I don't know what the solution to this is.
But affirmative action was supposed to do that already. Are you suggesting that it hasn't worked enough?
No, affirmative action wasn't supposed to do that. AA doesn't create jobs or train people for them. It doesn't bring new investment into an area. All it does it take black people who are already qualified for a position and give them a slight advantage intended to counteract the bias that could otherwise be levied against their skin color.
You remember what redlining is....so surely you remember the housing market collapse in 2008 that can be traced back to housing market policies intended to provide more housing opportunities to who?
I've never seen any credible analysis that supports the claim that the CRA was a big factor in the housing crisis. All the ones I've seen that make that claim do little more than make a tenuous association between the CRA and general practices of lowered standards for credit-worthiness. In reality, most subprime loans were not issued under CRA programs and those that were performed nearly as well as regular prime loans. It was other, non-CRA subprime loans that were the problem. But even then, none of that would've been nearly the big deal it was if the loans hadn't been bundled into overvalued securities and then used as collateral by over-leveraged financial institutions. It was the poor valuation and over-leveraging that crashed the financial system.
FRB: FEDS Notes: Assessing the Community Reinvestment Act's Role in the Financial Crisis