B-BURG (Boston Banks Urban Renewal Group) is launched.

The program was created in 1961, but only activated in the wake of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.. It provides some $50 million in mortgage funds for minority home buyers in Boston, but only in a largely Jewish area centered in Mattapan. Along with other flaws, the program leads to a wave of blockbusting, violence, and disinvestment that results in some 40,000 former residents leaving and half of the new residents losing their homes through through foreclosure. Hillel Levin and Lawrence Harmon later write, “The Boston Banks Urban Renewal Group program was to housing what court-ordered desegregation was to education: while creating the impression of fairness, in reality it created more problems than it solved.”