Important Resources on Redlining’s Role in Cementing the American Wealth Gap
A decades-long housing policy that segregated U.S. cities still plagues Black communities today.
Homeownership was the central pillar of the American dream in the 20th century, contributing to retirement security and generational wealth. Beginning roughly in 1945, returning veterans taking advantage of the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944—better known as the G.I. Bill—spurred a postwar building boom of midcentury homes that were meant to be more accessible for an expanding middle class. These ladder rungs to financial stability, however, remained out of reach in Black neighborhoods as property values declined due to a discriminatory practice known as redlining.
This six-minute clip from the acclaimed 2003 documentary series Race—The Power of an Illusion is a quick introduction to the policy; below, we’ve rounded up other informative resources that track the lasting impact of redlining.
From 1935 until 1977, banks used "residential security" maps drawn by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation to assess property values and guide their decisions on whether to lend money to clients for building, buying, and renovating homes. The maps graded neighborhoods from "Type A," marked in green, to "Type D," marked in red, and dictated where the government, bankers, and investors invested capital—and where they withdrew it. The biggest determining factor was the presence or absence of Black residents. For decades, low- and moderate-income and minority communities were intentionally cut off from lending and investment.
A 1930s "residential security" map of Atlanta by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation shows color-coded gradation of neighborhoods by risk level.
Courtesy of Mapping Inequality
Originally created during the New Deal to rescue the collapsing housing market after the 1929 Wall Street crash, the maps offer a lesson in how government policy can have disastrously disparate impacts. In 1977 (almost a decade after Congress passed the Fair Housing Act in 1968, making housing discrimination illegal), the Community Reinvestment Act required banks to invest in communities in which they did business. The law was passed to combat the lasting effects of redlining. But the availability of loans and credit—and the exploitative terms of that credit, which led to the mortgaged-backed securities crisis of 2008—remains a huge obstacle in housing affordability to this day.
Mapping Inequality’s searchable archive of redlining in U.S. cities includes digitized, transcribed, and geolocated data from historic maps.
Courtesy of Mapping Inequality
Drawing from research at the National Archives by teams of University of Richmond, Virginia Tech, and University of Maryland, Mapping Inequality is a searchable archive of redlining in cities across the U.S. Researchers obtained, digitized, transcribed, and geolocated data from historic maps, and the tool has nurtured ongoing scholarship at other universities and institutions. Its availability has led to significant local reforms of zoning laws—and bans on restrictive covenants upholding these racially discriminatory legacies.
Racial covenants are clauses that were inserted into property deeds to prevent people who were not white from buying or occupying land.
Courtesy of Mapping Prejudice
For example, the University of Minnesota’s Mapping Prejudice project uses the data to indicate how demographic patterns set by redlining remain in place today, leading to disparities in employment, education, and health care. At the University of Washington, the Seattle Civil Rights & Labor History Project created Segregated Seattle, tracking the use of racial covenants on deeds. Language like "No person or persons of Asiatic, African or Negro blood, lineage, or extraction shall be permitted to occupy a portion of said property," for example, limited who could live in many Queen Annes.
A redlining map of Detroit drawn by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation.
Courtesy of Detroitography
The group Detroitography has images and analysis of the 1939 Detroit redlining map and other cartographic studies related to social justice issues. In Washington D.C., the Mapping Segregation project examines restrictive covenants and includes geolocated maps of FHA Insured Housing to trace redlining in the capital, as well as the crucial distribution of resources to schools.
The 2009 exhibit Red Lines Housing Crisis Learning Center at the Queens Museum by Damon Rich, partner at HECTOR and cofounder of Center for Urban Pedagogy, documented redlining on the New York City Panorama and screened The Road the Better Living, a 1959 film glorifying the benefits of homeownership for the emerging middle class and inadvertently revealing its discriminatory codes. Filmmaker and educator Walis Johnson’s The Red Line Archive used this history in a mobile public art project enacted along the boundaries of Brooklyn neighborhoods affected by gentrification and displacement.
Other studies have recently traced these legacies in Chicago—as analyzed by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago—as well as in Boston, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia. Understanding of these facts underlies Ta-Nehisi Coates’s forceful 2014 Atlantic story, "The Case for Reparations," which argued that the dispossession of Black wealth was not just a historical legacy of slavery but part of an ongoing process that justifies reparations.
For longer reads, look to Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, which unveils the systemic characteristics of redlining. Sam Stein’s Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State looks at the legacy of redlining as it traces its way to the present day in New York, while Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s Race for Profit uncovers how exploitative real estate practices continued well after housing discrimination was banned. Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me deals with a variety of forms of institutional racism through the device of a letter to his son, and Sarah Bloom’s The Yellow House tells a personal story about her family home in New Orleans that was destroyed during Hurricane Katrina, inflected by narratives of ownership, dispossession, and place. Meanwhile, Moving Toward Integration: The Past and Future of Fair Housing by Richard Sander, Yana Kucheva, and Jonathan Zasloff offers a comprehensive chronology and analysis of American housing segregation—and efforts to address it over the past century and a half.
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The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
Widely heralded as a “masterful” (Washington Post) and “essential” (Slate) history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law offers “the most forceful argument ever published on how federal, state, and local governments gave rise to and reinforced neighborhood segregation” (William Julius Wilson). Exploding the myth of de facto segregation arising from private prejudice or the unintended consequences of economic forces, Rothstein describes how the American government systematically imposed residential segregation: with undisguised racial zoning; public housing that purposefully segregated previously mixed communities; subsidies for builders to create whites-only suburbs; tax exemptions for institutions that enforced segregation; and support for violent resistance to African Americans in white neighborhoods. A groundbreaking, “virtually indispensable” study that has already transformed our understanding of twentieth-century urban history (Chicago Daily Observer), The Color of Law forces us to face the obligation to remedy our unconstitutional past.
ShopRace for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership
By the late 1960s and early 1970s, reeling from a wave of urban uprisings, politicians finally worked to end the practice of redlining. Reasoning that the turbulence could be calmed by turning Black city-dwellers into homeowners, they passed the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968, and set about establishing policies to induce mortgage lenders and the real estate industry to treat Black homebuyers equally. The disaster that ensued revealed that racist exclusion had not been eradicated, but rather transmuted into a new phenomenon of predatory inclusion. Race for Profit uncovers how exploitative real estate practices continued well after housing discrimination was banned. The same racist structures and individuals remained intact after redlining's end, and close relationships between regulators and the industry created incentives to ignore improprieties. Meanwhile, new policies meant to encourage low-income homeownership created new methods to exploit Black homeowners. The federal government guaranteed urban mortgages in an attempt to overcome resistance to lending to Black buyers – as if unprofitability, rather than racism, was the cause of housing segregation. Bankers, investors, and real estate agents took advantage of the perverse incentives, targeting the Black women most likely to fail to keep up their home payments and slip into foreclosure, multiplying their profits. As a result, by the end of the 1970s, the nation's first programs to encourage Black homeownership ended with tens of thousands of foreclosures in Black communities across the country. The push to uplift Black homeownership had descended into a goldmine for realtors and mortgage lenders, and a ready-made cudgel for the champions of deregulation to wield against government intervention of any kind. Narrating the story of a sea-change in housing policy and its dire impact on African Americans, Race for Profit reveals how the urban core was transformed into a new frontier of cynical extraction.
ShopThe Black Butterfly: The Harmful Politics of Race and Space in America
The best-selling look at how American cities can promote racial equity, end redlining, and reverse the damaging health- and wealth-related effects of segregation. The world gasped in April 2015 as Baltimore erupted and Black Lives Matter activists, incensed by Freddie Gray's brutal death in police custody, shut down highways and marched on city streets. In The Black Butterfly—a reference to the fact that Baltimore's majority-Black population spreads out like a butterfly's wings on both sides of the coveted strip of real estate running down the center of the city—Lawrence T. Brown reveals that ongoing historical trauma caused by a combination of policies, practices, systems, and budgets is at the root of uprisings and crises in hypersegregated cities around the country. Putting Baltimore under a microscope, Brown looks closely at the causes of segregation, many of which exist in current legislation and regulatory policy despite the common belief that overtly racist policies are a thing of the past. Drawing on social science research, policy analysis, and archival materials, Brown reveals the long history of racial segregation's impact on health, from toxic pollution to police brutality. Beginning with an analysis of the current political moment, Brown delves into how Baltimore's history influenced actions in sister cities such as St. Louis and Cleveland, as well as Baltimore's adoption of increasingly oppressive techniques from cities such as Chicago. But there is reason to hope. Throughout the book, Brown offers a clear five-step plan for activists, nonprofits, and public officials to achieve racial equity. Not content to simply describe and decry urban problems, Brown offers up a wide range of innovative solutions to help heal and restore redlined Black neighborhoods, including municipal reparations. Persuasively arguing that, since urban apartheid was intentionally erected, it can be intentionally dismantled, The Black Butterfly demonstrates that America cannot reflect that Black lives matter until we see how Black neighborhoods matter. Winner of the IPPY Book Award Current Events II by the Independent Publisher About the AuthorLawrence T. Brown (BALTIMORE, MD) is an equity scientist, urban Afrofuturist, and the director of the Black Butterfly Academy, a racial equity education and consulting firm. In June 2018, he was honored by Open Society Institute–Baltimore with the Bold Thinker award for sparking critical discourse regarding Baltimore's racial segregation. He is currently a research scientist in the new Center for Urban Health Equity at Morgan State University, where he is leading the Black Butterfly Rising Initiative. Published by Johns Hopkins University Press (January 26, 2021) Photo courtesy Johns Hopkins University Press
ShopTop image courtesy Mapping Inequality
This article was originally published on June 4, 2020. It was updated on February 7, 2025, to include current information.
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