Top Takeaways from this Op-ed
- The iconic Home Owners’ Loan Corporation redlining maps were not actually used to deny home loans to Black families. HOLC had a good racial equity lending record despite the maps, and no other lenders used the maps.
- “Redlined” or “D” areas on the maps were mostly home to white immigrants, though all Black neighborhoods were categorized as D. All D areas had very poor housing conditions that would have earned them a D rating even without racist lenses.
- Other forms of racism—especially FHA discrimination that kept Black families out of suburban starter homes—combined with economic sorting as people moved out of cities to leave “D” areas disinvested from and home today to primarily low-income Black households.
- Assuming that the HOLC maps caused what we see today is not only incorrect, but can result in bad policy decisions.
This piece was co-published with Planetizen, an independent platform that creates, curates, and amplifies stories and resources to inform planning and people passionate about planning.
Few people concerned with racial equality and the effects of racism on American cities are not familiar with the maps created by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) in the late 1930s. In recent years, those maps have been repeatedly singled out as a major, or even the major driving force behind today’s patterns of urban racial inequity, whether measured in terms of housing quality, environmental conditions, or health disparities. Nearly a hundred academic papers, and even more media articles, blogs, commentaries, and lesson guides have pointed to the maps as the roots of conditions as varied as abandoned housing, diabetes incidence, and lack of tree cover. But is this story true? What role, if any, did the maps actually play?
A closer look tells a very different story. But to tell that story, a little background is needed.
The HOLC and Its Maps
The Home Owners’ Loan Corporation was created in 1933 as a New Deal response to the greatest foreclosure crisis the United States had ever seen. The HOLC bought distressed home mortgage loans from banks and borrowed money from the U.S. Treasury to restructure the loans so the homeowners could stay in their homes. From June 1933 to June 1936, when the HOLC’s authority to make loans sunsetted, it refinanced roughly 1 million mortgages, or nearly one of every five existing nonfarm mortgages in the United States. The HOLC did not make mortgages to new homebuyers.
At the end of 1935, the HOLC began to hire local real estate professionals to make what it called “residential security” maps of their cities. Each city was divided into many small areas, which were then evaluated for housing, environmental, social, and economic conditions. Each area was classified as A (best, or green), B (blue), C (yellow), or D (worst, or red).
The D areas are the ones that have come in recent years to be known as redlined. While the surveyors mostly focused on physical and environmental conditions, which they usually documented in detail, they were also notoriously told to consider the presence or “invasion” of “negro, foreign-born or lower grade” residents. The maps they prepared between 1936 and 1940 were shared with the FHA but not with private lenders.
Many people believe that the term redlining originated with those maps, based on the fact that the D areas were colored red. In actuality, the term was coined by community activists in Chicago in the late 1960s. While today “redlining” has come to be used to describe any pattern of denying loans or other resources to areas because of their racial or ethnic characteristics, it was only linked to the HOLC maps many decades after they were made.
How Were the Maps Used?
Nobody knows exactly why the HOLC commissioned the maps. By the time the first maps were made, the HOLC was almost completely out of the lending business. Moreover, during the three years the HOLC bought mortgages and made loans, its racial track record was, for the time, remarkable; it bought and restructured large numbers of mortgages belonging to homeowners in the D areas, and most notably, provided a startling number of mortgages to struggling Black homeowners. The proportion of Black homeowners helped by the HOLC was 95 percent of the proportion of white homeowners helped.
Not only did the maps clearly not influence the mortgage buying and restructuring activities of the HOLC, there is no evidence, even after numerous scholarly investigations, that they affected the lending activities of any other entity either. While the HOLC shared their maps with the FHA, all the available evidence indicates that the FHA did not use them. (FHA made its own maps, which, with one exception, have since disappeared.) Contrary to what writers have regularly asserted, there is no evidence that a single loan to any would-be homebuyer or anyone else was ever made or denied because of these maps.
But why then is there such a strong statistical correlation between the red areas on the HOLC maps and areas of concentrated Black poverty today?
What Areas Were “Redlined”?
To better understand what kinds of areas the HOLC’s surveyors rated D, in a scholarly paper I published earlier this year, I matched the HOLC map categories with 1940 census tract data for seven cities (Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit, St. Louis, Philadelphia, Rochester, and Trenton, New Jersey) to create a picture of the housing and demographic features of what we now call redlined areas at the time the maps were made. This is what I found:
- The great majority—more than four out of five—of the people who lived in the rated D areas in the seven cities were white.
- The residents of areas rated D were mostly immigrants and their children.They were most often “visible” immigrants, largely Italian, Slavic, or Jewish. English, Irish, and German immigrant areas were rarely classified as D areas.
- While most residents of D areas were white, almost all Black neighborhoods were D areas. But Black neighborhoods made up only a small part of total areas classified as D.
- Housing and environmental conditions in D areas were much worse than in the rest of the same cities. In Detroit, one of three families in D areas had no central heating, and more than one in five lived in overcrowded conditions. In St. Louis, two of three families in D areas had no central heating.
- Housing conditions in predominately Black D areas were even worse than those in white D areas. Approximately 26 percent of the homes in majority-Black D areas in Baltimore were in need of major repair, compared to 11 percent in majority-white D areas.
It is important to remember that, for reasons unrelated to the maps—but strongly related to racism—the great majority of urban Black families in the 1930s lived in neighborhoods that were often vibrant but had terrible housing conditions. The data, indeed, led one team of researchers who studied the HOLC maps in depth to conclude that “the assignment of a D rating […] to those neighborhoods where the share of Black families was higher would almost certainly have happened even if the HOLC decision makers had not known the race of the families in the neighborhood.” There were exceptions, but they were rare.
When and How Did Things Change?
The HOLC maps were made in the 1930s during the Great Depression, before the Second Great Migration and before white flight. At that time, the population of cities like Cleveland and Detroit was less than 10 percent Black. The vast majority of Black families lived in areas to which they were confined by both legal barriers and informal pressures. While on average Black family incomes were lower than those of white families, these segregated Black neighborhoods included many working-class and middle-class families with solid incomes, and even some wealthy families, living side by side with low-income and poor families.
Between 1940 and 1980, the demographics of American cities changed dramatically. During those years, 5 million Black people fled Southern oppression and racial violence for Northern cities. During the same years, however, 15 million white people left America’s cities for the suburbs and the Sunbelt. This migration was overwhelmingly white, because racial discrimination by developers, private lenders, and the FHA kept all but a handful of Black families from moving to the new suburban housing being built outside the central cities.
The FHA, which was created in 1934 to insure the mortgages that lenders made to new home buyers, was overtly racist. The FHA’s Underwriting Manual, the first version of which appeared in 1934, initially encouraged use of racial covenants. As late as 1960, Black families made up 6 percent of all American homeowners but held only 2.5 percent of outstanding FHA mortgages. The greatest impact of FHA discrimination, though, was to all but bar Black families from buying homes in the new suburban developments that proliferated in the late 1940s and 1950s.
One should not just blame the FHA. The FHA took its cues from the private lenders it worked with. Government action did not drive the actions of racist private lenders. If anything, it was the other way around. Indeed, to believe that a typical white male lender or developer in the 1940s or 1950s (they were mostly male), unconstrained by either law or social norms, needed the sanction of a government map to discriminate against Black buyers stretches credulity beyond the breaking point.
While they were blocked from the suburbs, Black families found new housing opportunities in the formerly white working-class, middle-class, and upper-class neighborhoods of the cities as white residents left for the suburbs. Black families moved out of the ghettos, while new Black arrivals dispersed across the cities’ neighborhoods according to their economic means. From that point on, urban Black communities, which had previously been economically integrated, split along economic lines.
The most affluent Black families moved to urban areas that were classified A or B on the HOLC maps, often suburban in character although located inside central cities. Most of them became homeowners. These areas became the Black middle-class neighborhoods of subsequent decades. The next group moved to C areas, where about half of them became homeowners. Overall, Black homeownership in the seven cities studied increased dramatically, going from only 10 percent in 1940 to nearly 50 percent by 1980.
The poorest Black residents and new migrants from the South, though, either stayed where they were in the D areas or moved into other parts of the D areas, which were being rapidly vacated as the children of low-income white immigrants moved to the suburbs. Those areas were closest to where Black residents had been concentrated, and their rents were the lowest in the city. Most of those Black families became or remained renters. In 1980 in Baltimore, the median income of Black households in D areas (in 2023 dollars) was $26,000, while in C areas it was $45,000, and in A/B areas it was $67,000.
Along with reinforcing racial segregation while introducing more economic segregation, there was another result of all these migrations—disinvestment. Between 1940 and 1980, over 90 percent of all Black families moved into A, B, and C areas, which had better housing and offered far more opportunity for homeownership. The D areas, white or Black, which had been densely crowded neighborhoods in 1940, were depopulated. Between 1940 and 1980, nine white people left Detroit’s D areas for every one Black person who moved in. The population of Detroit’s D areas fell from 751,000 to 332,000, while the Black share of the population in those areas went from 19 percent to 56 percent. By that point, three out of four Black residents of Detroit lived outside the D areas.
To sum up, between 1940 and 1980:
- Large parts of formerly white D areas in the cities became predominately Black areas, creating new racially segregated areas.
- Those D areas were occupied by the lowest-income Black families, thus becoming areas of concentrated Black poverty.
- Far more white families left the D areas than Black families moved in, leading to a collapse of these areas’ housing markets and widespread housing abandonment that still affects these areas to this day.
It was this process, repeated in city after city, that turned the areas that had been classified D by the HOLC in the 1930s into the areas of concentrated Black poverty and abandoned housing that persist to this day. None of this was caused by the HOLC maps. The only connection—and the reason that a statistical association exists between that and the HOLC maps—is that the D areas were the areas with the poorest quality and lowest cost housing to begin with. These were the areas the poorest Black families moved into after World War II as urban Black populations split along economic lines, and Black families who could afford more moved to the A, B, and C areas.
Since 1980, change has continued but more slowly. The population of the D areas is still shrinking, but now the families moving out are more likely to be Black than white. As suburban housing opportunities have opened up, the Black middle class has become suburbanized, and many Black middle-class neighborhoods in the central cities have declined economically. The difference between the economic level of Black residents of D and of C areas—so great in 1980—has almost disappeared. Today, most poor Black households do not live in the D areas; less than a quarter of poor Black residents of Detroit or Baltimore now live in neighborhoods that were classified D in the 1930s.
Bad History Makes Bad Policy
Why does this matter? It matters for a number of reasons.
First, it is important that we understand history correctly. In recent years, much effort has gone into rectifying the gaps in America’s racial history, bringing episodes and events to light that illuminate the workings of systemic racism in our country’s history. This is important work. But we should not replace old myths and misunderstandings with new ones.
The claim that the HOLC maps caused—in whole or in part—the distress and disadvantage in today’s low-income Black urban neighborhoods is a myth, not a reality. It needs to be put to rest.
The claim that the HOLC maps caused—in whole or in part—the distress and disadvantage in today’s low-income Black urban neighborhoods is a myth, not a reality.”
Second, blaming the HOLC maps suggests that we’ve found the villain to blame for the many social, economic, physical, and environmental challenges facing low-income Black communities, and therefore can stop looking. When researchers from Columbia University write in a study of urban heat islands that “a consequence of [the maps] was the entrenched environmental repercussions, characterized by significant temperature and greenspace disparities that resonate to this day,” (emphasis added) they are not only misreading history but also failing to acknowledge the complex processes that actually led to today’s very real racial and spatial disparities. Those disparities are systemic, and among their roots and the manner in which they have been perpetuated are both overtly racist elements and other apparently race-neutral factors that may have no racial intent but that in context nonetheless have racial effects.
Moreover, suggesting that that reality has been predetermined (by the maps) denies people their most valuable attribute, their agency. The Black families who moved out of the areas to which they had been confined; who dealt with blockbusting, predatory contract sellers, and other challenges; who stabilized neighborhoods; and who became homeowners should be celebrated, as should those who worked to build community against daunting odds. Though they faced and continue to face the effects of past racist actions, we should not cast them as passive victims of decisions made decades earlier. That not only does them a disservice as individuals; it also works against coming up with effective solutions for the challenges they face.
Finally, bad history makes for bad policy. While many (but far from all) of the areas that were redlined on the maps remain areas of concentrated Black poverty today, they are no longer the areas where most poor Black people live or where the most urgent challenges necessarily exist. Policies or strategies that target areas because they fell into a particular category on some 1930s maps, as proposed by a number of candidates in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, whether advocated as a means of redress or based on the mistaken belief that those areas are where most poor Black families live, is bad policy.
We should not allow our misreading of the past to distort our understanding of today’s realities and drive our policy choices today. Strategies that fail to take into account all the relevant factors, including the powerful effects of markets and economic disparities, are unlikely to bring any meaningful improvement to the lives of struggling low-income Black families.
Further Reading
Mallach paper
https://shelterforce.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/HOLC-and-Redlining-paper_Mallach_author-submission.pdf
The link is to the initial version of my article submitted to and published with revisions as:
Mallach, Alan. “Shifting the Redlining Paradigm: The Home Owners’ Loan Corporation Maps and the Construction of Urban Racial Inequality” by Taylor & Francis in Housing Policy Debate on March 11, 2024. The published version (with paywall) is available at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10511482.2024.2321226
Michney, Todd M., and LaDale Winling. “New perspectives on new deal housing policy: explicating and mapping HOLC loans to African Americans.” Journal of Urban History 46.1 (2020): 150-180. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0096144218819429 (paywall)
Michney, Todd M. “How the city survey’s redlining maps were made: a closer look at HOLC’s mortgagee rehabilitation division.” Journal of Planning History 21.4 (2022): 316-344. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/15385132211013361 (paywall)
A short piece by Michney covering much of the material in the above paper (without paywall), entitled “How and Why the HOLC Made its Redlining Maps“ is available at https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/howandwhy
Fishback, Price, et al. “New evidence on redlining by federal housing programs in the 1930s.” Journal of Urban Economics (2022): 103462. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w29244/w29244.pdf
Fishback, Price V., et al. Race, risk, and the emergence of federal redlining. No. w28146. National Bureau of Economic Research, 2020. https://randallwalsh.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Redlining.pdf
Fishback, Price V., et al. “The HOLC maps: How race and poverty influenced real estate professionals’ evaluation of lending risk in the 1930s.” The Journal of Economic History 83.4 (2023): 1019-1056. https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/A1BC46058B2EDCBD796977FF66B33FA3/S0022050723000475a.pdf/holc_maps_how_race_and_poverty_influenced_real_estate_professionals_evaluation_of_lending_risk_in_the_1930s.pdf
Gioielli, Robert. The Tyranny of the Map: Rethinking Redlining. The Metropole, Nov. 2022. https://themetropole.blog/2022/11/03/the-tyranny-of-the-map-rethinking-redlining/
A perspective from a respected urban historian
Hillier, Amy E. “Redlining and the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation.” Journal of Urban History 29.4 (2003): 394-420. https://repository.upenn.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/8c48fb68-5ccf-4e1e-aa6c-0c04ba18da4d/content
Light, Jennifer S. “Nationality and neighborhood risk at the origins of FHA underwriting.” Journal of Urban History 36, no. 5 (2010): 634-671. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0096144210365677 (paywall)
While Light’s paper is about FHA underwriting rather than the HOLC maps, it offers valuable insight into 1930’s thinking about race, nationality and “neighborhood risk.“
*Article is behind paywall
NOTE TO READERS:
While contracts with journal publishers prevent authors from posting their published papers on public web sites for some period (usually 12 to 24 months) after publication, they are usually permitted to send PDF copies to people who make a direct request to the author. If you do so, it’s a good idea to explain who you are and why you’re interested. Emails for academic authors can usually be found on their faculty page on their institution‘s website.
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13 thoughts on “Redlining Maps Didn’t Affect Neighborhoods the Way You Think They Did”
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This was very informative as the details of these “redlining” maps were not entirely clear to me. I think it’s important for folks to remember that American cities were incredibly racist places long before Black migrants arrived from the South. White-on-white ethnic tensions were rampant, and “white flight” and the suburbanization of America was a trend even in cities that didn’t have large numbers of Black migrants. Something that gets very little attention in the story of the Post-WWII suburban boom is land use policy reform combined with financial incentives for investment that made building in the suburbs more attractive than reinvesting in existing cities. American cities saw very little investment during the Great Depression and WWII, so that by the time service members came home from the war, there was a huge housing shortage that demanded immediate action. At the same time, the wartime economy was winding down and the nation had still not moved past the memory of the Depression. The decision was made to allow poorly planned, car-oriented suburban development because it was relatively cheaper and easier to construct than rebuilding existing cities. Financing, tax reform, land use policy and transportation policy were all working in tandem to encourage rapid investment and to keep the economy growing. Federally funded freeways caused land values outside cities to skyrocket as people could now commute to the cities from the countryside. America had so much land, and farming was becoming increasingly dominated by industrial producers in key states. This was a complete reorganization of the economy, and it was NOT primarily driven by racism toward blacks. It was decided to build new instead of maintain the old, for the sake of economic growth. It was all driven by cheap abundant energy and borrowed money. Existing city neighborhoods were a casualty of this economic restructuring and as the disinvestment continued, poverty became increasingly concentrated in the old neighborhoods, reinforcing the desire of everyone, including black families, to flee if they had the chance.
Thanks so much for this thoughtful analysis. The way the HOLC maps have been regarded is another example of confirmation bias–we’re so ready to believe the maps represented a conspiracy to disinvest Black neighborhoods that we just assumed they did. I also love Alan pointing out “At that time, the population of cities like Cleveland and Detroit was less than 10 percent Black.” We tend to forget that the “visible” immigrants, largely Italian, Slavic, or Jewish…” were often viewed as not really “white” and therefore perceived as a negative influence on a neighborhood.
Thanks Alan.
Because I was the scholar who first found the location and effect of the HOLC redlining maps in 1977 and then wrote about them in Crabgrass Frontier (1985) I feel that I am the target of this piece. Mallach is correct in pointing out that residential segregation has and had no one cause. But three quick points. I never said that HOLC discriminated; indeed the reverse. But FHA copied the HOLC maps and FHA discriminated as I demonstrated by looking at Baltimore County and St. Louis County where it was obvious that FHA discriminated even in home improvement loans. And in Newark I showed that banks followed the FHA maps and that they did discriminate. Second, Mallach uses two strange examples. Blacks have never lived in New Hampshire in large numbers and so Manchester is a bad choice. And Atlanta, as anyone who has ever studied cities realizes, has always been an outlier in terms of residential patterns, which is a major reason that the black community there has always been so successful in politically and economically. Third, my major conclusion was that the federal government spent much time and energy in discovering where exactly black people lived. And the HOLC maps remain the best materials available to historians to discover details about such residency.
Kenneth, the author did not choose those two maps which were used for illustration; those locations are never mentioned in the text. Those were editorial choices for image quality and geographic diversity only. Though the fact that Manchester, NH, did not have a large Black population but still has significant red areas, does speak to some of Mallach’s points.
And the fact of FHA’s discrimination is very much a point of agreement all around. I will leave it to Alan to address the question of whether FHA and banks used HOLC’s maps to do so.
I’d like to add a few short notes in response to these comments. First, I’d like to thank Roy for his observation. Confirmation bias is a very good lens through which to look at how the HOLC maps are seen by many of the people who have written about them in the last few years.
I agree with Sam’s description of the post-WWII picture, with one notable exception. I do not believe that it reflected an organized effort, or a deliberate, coordinated federal policy. I think that proposition both overestimates the level of planning and conscious intent on the part of the public sector, and underestimates the power of consumer behavior and the market. As he points out, there was huge pent-up housing demand after sixteen years of the Depression and WWII. Suburban zoning, outside affluent enclaves, was still rudimentary, developers like Levitt saw the opportunity, and farmers in still-agricultural suburban areas like Long Island were eager to cash in. And as it turned out, the FHA machinery created in the 1930s turned out to be a powerful vehicle to move the process forward. And while a strong case can be made that the Interstate system expanded and prolonged white flight and suburbanization, the highways came along well after the suburbanization trend was already well-established.
I can assure Professor Jackson, for whom I have the greatest respect and admiration, that he was not the target of my piece. To the extent the article has a target, it is the people who in recent years have piled on, writing pieces which imply, or assert outright, that the HOLC maps are responsible for the many social, economic, environmental or physical ills of the nation’s distressed Black urban neighborhoods, minimizing or distorting the complex nature of our nation’s history of racism.
To his first point, extensive research in recent years has established that the FHA drew up its own maps independently from the HOLC, most probably preceding the HOLC (It is conceivable, though speculative, that the HOLC got the idea of making maps from the FHA). Light (2010) is informative on this issue. Sadly, those maps (with the exception of the Chicago map) appear to have been destroyed. There is no question that the FHA discriminated egregiously, and that banks followed the FHA’s lead. Moreover, it is likely that the FHA’s maps – since they used similar criteria as well as a four-point ranking scale – resembled those of the HOLC. But the association between the HOLC maps and FHA behavior is not supported by the available evidence.
On the second point, I believe the editor has already clarified that the maps of Atlanta and Manchester that appeared with the article were purely illustrative, and unrelated to the cities on which I based my findings. The seven cities I studied (which I list in the article) were all representative Northeastern or Midwestern industrial cities that drew significant Black populations during the Second Great Migration, if not earlier.
Finally, since the great majority of residents of the D or redlined areas in the HOLC maps were white rather than Black, and largely white immigrants or their children, I do not believe the maps are in fact particularly useful in discovering where Black people lived in the late 1930s. In my opinion, the federal document that is far more useful for any historian seeking to find that information is the 1940 Census, which provides detailed racial, ethnic and housing quality information at the census tract level, and is available on line (albeit with a little digging).
Thx for this historically distorted take in “historic redlining”. In San Antonio, public officials and academics still blame our structural socio-economic inequities to redlining, despite ignoring my assertions that San Antonio was residentially segregated by 1910. On top of that, for the past 50 yrs, our city’s majority policymaking leadership has been in “people of color”, “progressive”, and “liberal” hands, so what have they done to take course correction?
Thus, it begs the question: when will we see public policymaking impacts and outcomes, esp at the local level? We still do not see greater transparency and accountability, nor do we see a “watchdog” press to reveal the effects of such practices. I do believe we need to follow-up with this story.
Of those black families that owned their homes, is there any data that suggests how much homeownership helped the following generations? I am looking for some way to quantify the generational advantages of homeownership versus lifetime renting.
You must know in reality redlining started with insurance companies, no? I’m not sure what your point is around bringing up this obscure organization from one point in time? Are you trying to discredit and say that that there was not systemic racism in the real estate, banking, and government programs back then that reverberates until now? Because that is what the ignorant, the greedy, and the racists are going to with it.
Redlining is a term used to call out all of the overt and covert systemic, racist policies and behaviors of institutions and individuals and to help us all try to end or prevent them. By making such a stink about an esoteric and unimportant detail, you are giving a headline, which is all they need, to those who would say systemic racism and inequality do not exist. You got your name published and promoted but are the consequences worth it?
The point about insurance companies being first or not – is not the important point – don’t take the argument there. In fact, who cares if the color red or blue was used? What matters is that redlining in the broader and all encompassing sense of discrimination existed amongst many institutions then and influences the reality today. Your headline, whether you like it or not, will help those who discredit that reality.
The piece written here may be accurate but it does more harm than good, to the field and society as a whole. I urge anyone on this forum to read the Mortgage Underwriting Manual of 1938 and search for the team “inharmonious populations” and “adverse influences.” It is clear that if a neighborhood had a large concentration of black people, they ranked very poorly for an FHA loan to be approved. Therefore, I was completely shocked when I read this statement:
“The claim that the HOLC maps caused—in whole or in part—the distress and disadvantage in today’s low-income Black urban neighborhoods is a myth, not a reality.”
It is obvious these maps are a byproduct of the underwriting manual. Okay, there is no evidence the maps were used, sure. However, it is true that most blacks were systematically left out from obtaining FHA guaranteed mortgages.
Att: David Valecillos
Whereas HOLC cast a long shadow re: our redlining past, let’s not overlook the fact that “people of color”, “progressives”, “liberals”, and “minorities” have long served in policymaking roles at all levels of govt & in the non-profit sector, and still do, sufficient to have taken many corrective actions in light of our redlining history, but they have not done so.
“Redlining” is code for more than the black-white binary, it is a reflection of economic policy reinforcing class divides: if a city were 100% Black, Brown, Asian, or White, we still would see “redlining” public policy impacts. Policy has its structural aspects.
When I cite my own city’s experience in San Antonio (see above), it is bc despite our redlining history, “minorities” have been at the majority policy table the past 50 yrs, yet, little has been done to correct for our inter-generational socioeconomic disparities. Where are these investigative or academic essays exposing the lack of responsible policymaking occurring by non-whites? I urge Shelterforce to find out how pervasive this problem is.
While it is clear from my article that I disagree with Mr. Linder and Mr. Valecillos, it appears that I need to explain my position further. First, I think I made it very clear that there was systemic racism in throughout the private sector and government. That racism was pervasive at the time, and while perhaps diminished, is still very much part of our society. In fact, it is precisely because of that reality that the preoccupation with the maps is such a problem – and no, Mr. Linder, the maps are not esoteric and unimportant. They have become a central element in the national discourse on race and poverty, appearing hundreds if not thousands of times in newspaper and magazine articles, social media, blogs, speeches and lesson guides. And by fixating on the maps, and failing to understand and acknowledge the pervasive and complex nature of racism – as well as the equally pervasive ways that actions without overt racial intent can compound racial inequality – we distort history and by so doing set back our efforts to address the effects of racism in our lives, our cities and our society.
I was quite explicit in my article that the FHA, from its inception at least until the early 1960s, was, in my words, overtly racist, and that that racism was clearly reflected in their Underwriting Manual. However, contrary to Mr. Valecillos’ assertion, there is no evidence in any source that I have been able to find (and I’ve looked through a lot) that the HOLC maps were “a byproduct of the Underwriting Manual” or anything of the sort. Assertions of that sort merely muddy the waters, and make understanding our history even more difficult.
There is an additional point worth addressing, which Mr. Valecillos does not make in his comment, but made in a separate communication to me. He called upon me to make a public apology, and I quote, “to the communities whose lived experiences you’ve so carelessly diminished.” Leaving aside the gratuitously offensive language, I think the reality is exactly the opposite of what Mr. Valecillos seems to believe. The maps were not part of the lived experience of the millions of Black people who moved to the cities or within the cities from the 1940s to the present. Their lived experience was affected by the reality of racism, as it manifested itself through a myriad of public and private actions, not by a set of maps that were buried in boxes in the government archives. It is that lived experience that I lift up – and the agency that millions of Black families expressed in becoming homeowners and sustaining neighborhoods in the face of racism – and which is diminished by a narrative which presents them as passive victims of a set of maps created by faceless bureaucrats decades earlier.
One final comment. As advocates for social justice, I believe we have an obligation to face reality in all its complexity, and avoid settling for myths that simplify, but distort that reality. As we speak, our political and social environment is being torn apart by myths, lies and misrepresentations. I do not want to suggest for one second that the maps rise to that level, but to suggest that in today’s world, if we do not make the effort to stand up for clear thinking and care for the facts, who will?