In 1977, Congress passed a law to combat a practice known as redlining, where for decades the government had discouraged lenders from extending mortgage loans to borrowers in Black neighborhoods. The law requires banks to lend to creditworthy lower-income people in the same neighborhoods where they have branches that take deposits. But the growth of the internet and mobile banking have made those rules increasingly obsolete. Banks, in effect, had a major presence in many neighborhoods where they had no branches.