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Torey Edmonds has lived in the same house in an African-American neighborhood of the East End of Richmond, Va., for all of her 61 years. When she was a little girl, she says her neighborhood was a place of tidy homes with rose bushes and fruit trees, and residents had ready access to shops like beauty salons, movie theaters and several grocery stores.

But as she grew up, she says, the neighborhood went downhill. By the 1970s, stores had disappeared; those that did return were corner shops selling cheap alcohol but "no real food," Edmonds says. Houses declined too, as homeowners - including her parents - were rejected for loans.

"If the bank's not loaning, she says, "then things deteriorate."

Today, Edmonds' neighborhood remains overwhelmingly African-American, with a poverty rate of nearly 60%. Many of her neighbors suffer chronic medical conditions like kidney disease and diabetes.

"They age differently," says Edmonds, who works for Virginia Commonwealth University promoting community health. "We have a lot of our neighbors that have health challenges."

But it's not just Edmonds' neighborhood. In city after city across the U.S., from Milwaukee to Miami, researchers have found a disturbing pattern: People who live in neighborhoods that were once subjected to a discriminatory lending practice called redlining are today more likely to experience shorter life spans - sometimes, as much as 20 or 30 years shorter than other neighborhoods in the same city.

Researchers from the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, the University of Richmond and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee analyzed historic redlining maps from 142 urban areas across the U.S. - these maps, created in the 1930s, classified Black and immigrant communities as risky places to make home loans.They compared the maps to the current economic status and health outcomes in those neighborhoods today and found higher rates of poverty, shorter life spans and higher rates of chronic diseases including asthma, diabetes, hypertension, obesity and kidney disease.

These once-redlined neighborhoods are also more likely to have greater social vulnerability, meaning they're less able to withstand natural and human disasters because of their more limited resources.

The researchers published interactive versions of these city-by-city maps online for the public to explore their own communities. If your neighborhood was mapped back in the 1930s, these graphics allow you to see how it ranked back then and how it fares today.

What makes these findings especially urgent today, the researchers note, is that these neighborhoods have higher levels of many conditions that raise the risk of severe COVID-19.

"That's a startling revelation, that this global pandemic is going to have a more serious impact on communities that were redlined by official policy in the 1930s," says Jason Richardson, research director for the NCRC and a co-author of the study.
Redlining: Federally sanctioned discrimination
The redlining maps originated in the aftermath of the Great Depression, when the federal government set out to evaluate the riskiness of mortgages in major metropolitan areas of the country. The maps, created by the federal Home Owners' Loan Corporation, color-coded neighborhoods by credit worthiness. Areas with African-Americans and immigrants were almost always considered the highest risk, and they were marked in red on maps... hence, "redlining."

That practice and other discriminatory housing policies of the time helped concentrate poverty in communities of color for generations.

"When banks and other actors are discouraged from lending in the community, you see a very kind of predictable arc of that community," Richardson says. "When I stop and think about it, I'm kind of shocked by the lingering impact of these policies."

Redlining made it difficult, if not impossible, to buy or refinance. A lack of investment meant houses fell into disrepair. That led to health hazards like mold and lead paint. Industrial sites were more likely to be located near redlined neighborhoods, which meant more exposure to pollution.

As areas declined, retailers left, including grocery stores, which meant less access to healthy food. These neighborhoods also had less access to parks and other green spaces, meaning fewer places to exercise. All of those factors combined to create an environment conducive to poorer health outcomes, the researchers say.

"Where we live impacts our exposure to health-promoting resources and opportunities,"says Helen Meier, an epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and co-author of the study. "Redlining has systematically shaped characteristics of the built environment in neighborhoods [in ways] that are impacting our health."

The findings come as no surprise to Edmonds. "Trust me, I know," she says.

The average life expectancy in her neighborhood is just 68 years. That's 21 years less than in a well-off predominantlywhite community a few miles away in the West End of Richmond - a community that got the highest rating on those government redlining maps back in the 1930s. At one point in the pandemic, Edmonds' zip code - 23223 - also had the highest number of COVID-19 cases in Richmond.

Dr. Lisa Cooper, a health disparities researcher at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, was not involved in the research. She says that people often think of health as the result of individual choices. But she says the redlining study's findings show how health is also a result of a lack of choices baked into the very fabric of American cities by racist policies made long ago.

"If you just happened to be born in that neighborhood, who's to say you wouldn't be in the same predicament?" Cooper says.

Cooper notes that there's a large body of research linking residential segregation to negative health effects. It's less about who your neighbors are than about the concentration of disadvantage."
Structural racism, illustrated
Redlining played a major role in shaping the demographics of modern American urban areas, says Robert Nelson, a historian at the University of Richmond who focuses on urban housing policy and race. And the racism underlying those redlining decisions is undeniable, he says. He's a co-author of the study on redlining and modern health outcomes.

As director of the Digital Scholarship Lab at the university, Nelson helped create an interactive project that visualizes the study's findings; it juxtaposes the comments made by federal surveyors who rated neighborhoods on those 1930s maps with their modern-day health indicators. "Infiltration of negroes" is a common reason cited to explain an area's rating as high risk.

"These are not just racist attitudes. This is policy that is being made by the federal government in these documents," Nelson says. He says redlining didn't create residential segregation but helped cement it, because the practice was a federal policy that set a standard which private lenders followed.

"If you want an example of what systemic or structural racism looks like, you really aren't going to find a better example" than these maps, he says.

Along with other federal segregationist housing policies of the time, redlining helped turn white families into homeowners and moved them into the suburbs, while leaving out many families of color, particularly African-American families, many of whom later ended up pushed into urban housing projects, he says.

"This is a way for white families to build intergenerational wealth, and black families are just cut off from those opportunities for generations," says Nelson. Although redlining was outlawed by the 1968 Fair Housing Act, the damage was already done, he says.
Links between redlining and health
The redlining maps were first digitized in 2016. Since then, several studies have examined the links between redlining and health outcomes today in specific cities or regions of the U.S., says Dr. Nancy Krieger, a professor of social epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. For example, Krieger's work has found links between redlining and preterm births in New York City and late-stage cancer diagnoses in Massachusetts.

Other work has found that formerly redlined neighborhoods tend to be hotter than non-redlined areas in the same city, with fewer trees, which also impacts health, as NPR has previously reported.

Krieger, who was not involved in the study from NCRC and its partner universities, says its findings are important because they offer the first nationwide look at the links between redlining and a range of public health outcomes. They also emphasize the ways in which racist policies of the past have ongoing ramifications.

"History never really says goodbye," Krieger says, quoting the Uruguyan writer Eduardo Galeano. "History says, see you later."

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In U.S. Cities, The Health Effects Of Past Housing Discrimination Are Plain To See

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Torey Edmonds has lived in the same house in an African-American neighborhood of the East End of Richmond, Va., for all of her 61 years. When she was a little girl, she says her neighborhood was a place of tidy homes with rose bushes and fruit trees, and residents had ready access to shops like beauty salons, movie theaters and several grocery stores.

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The novel coronavirus pandemic has exacerbated many racial health inequities that existed well before this public health crisis. Americans of color have disproportionately been infected by and died from COVID-19. They are more likely to have underlying health conditions that increase the risk of severe illness from COVID-19. While COVID-19 has pushed racial health inequities into the national spotlight, the underlying differences in social, economic, and environmental conditions that give rise to inequities in COVID-19 infection, transmission, and severe illness are far from new.

The twentieth century's formal and informal practices of racial residential segregation have systematically shaped characteristics of the built environment that may increase susceptibility to not only COVID-19 but other underlying health conditions that increase the susceptibility to and severity of illness from COVID-19. Racial residential segregation may impact health through poor housing conditions, disparities in educational and employment opportunities, inadequate transportation infrastructure, access to healthcare, and economic instability. Where people live impacts their exposure to health-promoting resources and opportunities (i.e., access to quality food, recreation, healthcare, etc.) as well as exposure to health-damaging threats (i.e., environmental pollutants, poor housing quality, etc.).

Among the most impactful practices that created these stark differences in neighborhood resource distribution and concentrated disadvantage was redlining: the practice of denying fair access to credit, particularly mortgages, based on the race of the residents of a neighborhood. For much of the twentieth century, the federal government encouraged redlining. In the 1930s a federal agency, the Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC), graded neighborhoods in nearly 250 American cities scale neighborhoods on a four-grade scale, A to D, "Best" to "Hazardous," that were then visualized on a series of maps. Race was a key-arguably the key-variable in determining these grades. Neighborhoods of color received D or C grades with only white neighborhoods receiving A and B grades.

There is no better archive of redlining than the HOLC maps and the accompanying area descriptions. This site juxtaposes these maps from the 1930s with contemporary health disparities. In most cities, you will see striking similarities between redlining eighty years ago and health disparities today. This is a testament to the long-lasting impact of racial segregation and redlining in shaping the enduring contours of marked inequality in American cities.

One of the reasons that the HOLC materials are such a clear window into the history of structural racism in the United States is how directly and starkly racist ideas were expressed in them. Racism was not subtext; it was text. As a consequence please take note: this means that some of these historical documents contain offensive racist language.

How to Use this Site

Not Even Past presents maps for 200 cities. When you select one you will see two maps side by side.

The one on the left will show the redlining map made by the Home Owners Loan Corporation during the 1930s. They graded the "mortgage security" on a four-grade scale: green "A" neighborhoods were deemed "best," blue "B" neighborhood "still desirable," yellow "C" neighborhoods "definitely declining," and red "D" neighborhoods "hazardous." Lower grades made it harder for applications to secure mortgages to purchase homes in those neighborhoods. The colors might be thought of as akin to traffic lights. Green signaled lenders, when making decisions whether to approve a mortgage, to go, yellow to exercise caution and think twice, and red to stop.

Neighborhoods where the residents were African American, Asian American, Latinx, or immigrants were far more likely to receive D or C grades. The effects of the discriminatory practices of redlining are so pronounced that they last until this day. (For more on redlining and these maps, please visit Mapping Inequality.)

The map on the right shows the Center for Disease Control's Social Vulnerability Index (SVI) scores for census tracts today. The Social Vulnerability Index is widely used to assess a community's capacity to prepare for, respond to, and recover from human and natural disasters. The social and economic resources available to a community and its underlying vulnerabilities are key factors in how hard it may be impacted by a disaster.

The SVI combines a number of these factors: social and economic, housing and transportation, minority status and language, household composition, and disability to provide a metric of comparison between areas. Since their development in the 2000s, indices of social vulnerability have become an important tool for emergency planning and public health assessment.

Between the maps you'll see a diagram.

HOLC grades census tracts ← 1930s grades &current social vulnerability score →

The rectangles on the left are the areas from the 1930s redlining HOLC map by grade, those on the right census tracts plotted by their SVI score. The paths between them connect the same areas across time and show continuities and changes. For example, paths that are more or less horizontal might be interpreted as showing continuity between the past and the present or showing some of the impact of redlining in cementing privilege or vulnerability in an area for generations. Paths that fall from left to right, yesterday to today, might show a decline in the relative privilege of an area. Paths that rise from left to right, yesterday to today, show change in the other direction; neighborhoods that have been gentrified in recent years, for example, will often be represented that way on the graphs.

Click on either the map of the rectangles on the chart to select an area in the past or today to view more details. At the top will appear selections from the HOLC area description for the selected area showing the HOLC's description of the area's population and character-very often clearly showing their racist perspectives. Generally, this is a selection from the area description; a link will be available on the bottom to view the full area description on Mapping Inequality. (A handful of cities do not have area descriptions or they are not available.)

The bottom will show several charts situating the demographic, economic, and health data for the census tract in comparison to other tracts in the city.

7.8%15.9%Asthma (map→)12.4%12.4%

Each dot represents a census tract or, if a HOLC area is shown, an estimation of the overlapping census tract areas. The label for the graph can be selected to map that variable, e.g. asthma rates, and the dots can be clicked to select the tract.

The redlining data for the 1930s all comes from Mapping Inequality. Information about the archival sources for Mapping Inequality is available on its Downloads & Data page.

The data for contemporary age and poverty data comes from the U.S. Census's American Community Survey 2018 Data Release. Minority demographics, defined as "all people who were other than non-Hispanic White," dates from 2011-2015 and comes from the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council's Census Information Sheets. Life expectancy estimates are from the CDC's U.S. Small-area Life Expectancy Estimates Project. Contemporary health data comes from the CDC's 500 Cities: Local Data for Better Health. See their Measure Definitions for complete details about how they define each health outcome.

To enter the project, select a city:

Acknowledgments

Not Even Past is a collaboration between the University of Richmond's Digital Scholarship Lab and the National Community Reinvestment Coalition.

At the DSL, Robert K. Nelson designed and developed the application, Justin Madron organized the spatial and other data, and Nathaniel Ayers designed the landing page and provided input about the application design.

The National Community Reinvestment Coalition and its grassroots member organizations create opportunities for people to build wealth. They work with community leaders, policymakers and financial institutions to champion fairness in banking, housing and business. NCRC was formed in 1990 by national, regional and local organizations to increase the flow of private capital into traditionally underserved communities. NCRC has grown into an association of more than 600 community-based organizations in 42 states that promote access to basic banking services, affordable housing, entrepreneurship, job creation and vibrant communities for America's working families.

Citation and License

If you are citing Not Even Past: Social Vulnerability and the Legacy of Redlining, we recommend the following format using the Chicago Manual of Style.

The Digital Scholarship Lab and the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, "Not Even Past: Social Vulnerability and the Legacy of Redlining," American Panorama, ed. Robert K. Nelson and Edward L. Ayers, https://dsl.richmond.edu/socialvulnerability.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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Not Even Past: Social Vulnerability and the Legacy of Redlining

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Not Even Past maps redlining maps from the 1930s with maps of health dispartities today, showing enduring contours of marked inequality in American cities over the past century.

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Mapping Rothsein. Factor promoting racial segregation

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Mapping Rothsein. Factor promoting racial segregation [THIS IS FROM SOCI-230]

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Mapping Rothsein. Factor promoting racial segregation

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Video Housing segregation still sidelining people of color from dream homes

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Discriminatory practices of the past still cast a shadow on people of color throughout the country. An ABC News investigation of mortgage lending data shows housing segregation still persists.

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Present Effects of Redlining: Brookings Institute Stuy

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Present Effects of Redlining: Brookings Institute Stuy

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"The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house," penned poet and activist Audre Lorde. Pulled from a 1984 essay, the quote summarizes her larger argument that mainstream academic frameworks are incapable of permitting the disruption of their own status quo. "They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change," wrote Lorde.

Over the last few months, several Democratic presidential hopefuls-namely Sen. Kamala Harris (Calif.), Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.), and South Bend, Ind. Mayor Pete Buttigieg-have released housing proposals that utilize a curious vector to implement their respective remedies for historical discrimination: redlining maps.

Redlining was the practice of outlining areas with sizable Black populations in red ink on maps as a warning to mortgage lenders, effectively isolating Black people in areas that would suffer lower levels of investment than their white counterparts. The Democratic candidates hope that the contours of these old maps-once used by the government-sponsored Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC) from 1933 to 1977-offer the blueprint for closing the racial homeownership gap and increasing prosperity among largely Black and Brown Americans who were robbed of wealth for generations under redlining's legal discriminatory policy.

Redlining was the practice of outlining areas with sizable Black populations in red ink on maps as a warning to mortgage lenders, effectively isolating Black people in areas that would suffer lower levels of investment than their white counterparts.

In each plan, redlining maps are used to determine eligibility for beneficiaries, to differing degrees:

Harris's plan would invest $100 billion in assistance for down payments and closing costs, to be made available to those who have lived in government or rental housing for 10 or more preceding years in a formerly redlined area that is low-to-moderate income today. Grantees must also earn less than a maximum annual family income.

Warren's plan would offer down payment assistance to first-time homebuyers in formerly redlined areas or low-income areas that experienced other forms of legal segregation, qualifying them for a grant applicable to a home anywhere in the country. The proposal is billed as a "first step towards closing the racial wealth gap," and would be paid for by an estate tax.

Mayor Buttigieg's plan proposes the Community Homestead Act, which would purchase abandoned properties in select cities and allow residents to acquire them. Eligible grantees include residents who earned less than the area median income over the last five years and either have resided in the area for at least three years, or have resided in any historically redlined or racially segregated area for at least three years.

However, based on our analysis of who lives in these formerly redlined districts today, Lorde's quote should be considered when it comes to these proposed remedies.

The University of Richmond's Mapping Inequality project has digitized scans of the HOLC redlining maps held in the National Archives. Examination of the maps, numbering over 200, reveals that approximately 11 million Americans (10,852,727) live in once-redlined areas, according to the latest population data from the Census Bureau's American Community Survey (2017). This population is majority-minority but not majority-Black, and, contrary to conventional perceptions, Black residents also do not form a plurality in these areas overall. The Black population share is approximately 28%, ranking third among the racial groups who live in formerly redlined areas, behind white and Latino or Hispanic residents.

While still a tremendously large population, the approximately 3 million Black residents in redlined areas account for just 8% of all non-Latino or Hispanic Black Americans. Given the demographic shifts that have occurred since the federal government started using color-coded maps to assess mortgage risk, and the relatively small share of the Black population currently living in these areas, proposals that center on these past tools to redress discrimination probably won't "dismantle the master's house."

The past still haunts us

Together with racially restrictive housing covenants that prohibited Black Americans from buying certain properties, redlining prevented generations of families from gaining equity in homeownership or making improvements to homes already owned. These unjust practices form part of a long history of discrimination, which has contributed to the disparities in homeownership and wealth still observed between the Black and white populations of the country today.

Redlined neighborhoods are generally located near the center of urban areas, where Black people were concentrated when the government generated the maps used today for the Harris, Warren, and Buttigieg proposals. But since then, transformational demographic shifts have spread different populations throughout metropolitan areas and increased the size of those areas overall. To assess the relative residual social patterns across redlined communities today, we compare the aggregate of the census block groups that fall within the redlined areas of each city to the remaining non-redlined areas in the same cities, and measure ways the two areas differ.

These localized comparisons show that in cities with a history of redlining, the redlined areas today generally remain more segregated and more economically disadvantaged, with higher Black and minority shares of population than the remainder of the city. Additionally, they have lower median household income, lower home values, older housing stock, and rents which are lower in absolute terms (but often higher as a percentage of income). Similar studies have confirmed these trends for other social characteristics, as well as a clear correlation showing more positive current-day outcomes for areas that were "greenlined."

The selected characteristics in the group of the ten most populous redlined areas diverge less sharply than in the remaining smaller areas, suggesting that for smaller areas, the residual effects of redlining are perhaps felt more clearly.

Redlined areas vary greatly

The population distribution of once-redlined areas skews heavily toward a handful of large cities. About half (49.8%) of today's redlined population resides in the 10 cities with the most populous redlined areas: New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Boston, San Diego, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Baltimore.

This top-heavy slant of the population distribution poses an issue for policymakers who wish to use HOLC maps to address the legacy of past discrimination, as it is not the case that half of the homeownership and wealth gaps can be attributed to disparities among Black and white residents of those ten cities alone. Furthermore, Black-majority suburbs are on the rise, which are heavily underrepresented in HOLC maps due to their focus on urban centers.

Who now lives in once-redlined areas?

In some places, redlined areas track with conventional perceptions. For example, in Birmingham, Ala., the redlined portion has a much higher concentration of Black residents than the rest of the city, as well as lower incomes and property values. Formerly redlined Birmingham is majority-Black, and a large share of the Black citizens of Birmingham reside in formerly redlined areas.

The racial history of Birmingham is one of sustained aggression against the Black population. The persistence of demographic patterns in formerly redlined Birmingham is a testament to informal and formal enforcement of spatial placement by local, state and private forces. In cities throughout the South with a similar demographic makeup and history of racial violence, policies of targeted assistance in redlined areas could prove useful in closing the local racial homeownership and wealth disparities. However, at the regional and city level across the country, we find wide variations in the demographic makeup of who lives in formerly redlined areas (both in absolute numbers and relative to the cities in which they are found).

Some redlined areas have a lower Black share of population than the rest of the city

Theoretically, if the effects of redlining had faded completely over time, demographics and socio-economic outcomes between redlined areas and the surrounding city would be indistinguishable. Of course, this is not the case, but the degree to which the Black versus non-Black population of a given redlined area matches the area around it varies greatly across cities. Of the 174 principal cities in the comparison, 114 showed a statistically significantly higher concentration of Black population in the redlined areas than the rest of the city. In 26 more, the concentration was higher but not statistically significant.

Six of the 34 cities which inverted this trend (a redlined area with a lower Black share of the population than the rest of the city) are among those 10 large cities which are home to half the redlined population: Detroit, Baltimore, Milwaukee, Boston, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia. Each of the six have sizeable Black populations, and Black people form the largest racial group in Detroit, Baltimore, and Philadelphia. And despite a demographic shift, the redlined portions of these cities still exhibit negative economic outcomes.

Clearly, these areas have suffered from a legacy of divestment, and deserve attention from policymakers. But a strategy to close the racial wealth gap that focuses mainly on these now-diversified locations risks overlooking Black neighborhoods elsewhere.

Some redlined areas, especially in the West, have a small Black population relative to white or Latino or Hispanic residents

Los Angeles is home to the third-most populous formerly redlined area, encircling over 620,000 people. Today, 70% of this group is Latino or Hispanic, 12% is white, and 6% is Black.

In 1930, nine years before the HOLC map was produced, census data showed that the whole city's population was 88% white, 8% Mexican (the closest proxy to the Latino or Hispanic population from the time), and 2% Black. Even so, language from the original HOLC map makes explicit reference to Black neighborhoods. An excerpt from a map encompassing today's central Los Angeles neighborhood of Jefferson Park derisively writes:
This is the "melting pot" area of Los Angeles, and has long been thoroughly blighted. The Negro concentration is largely in the eastern two thirds of the area. Original construction was evidently of fair quality but lack of proper maintenance is notable. Population is uniformly of poor quality and many improvements are in a state of dilapidation. This area is a fit location for a slum clearance project. The area is accorded a "low red" grade.
While redlined areas in Los Angeles largely did and still do encompass far more Latino or Hispanic residents than Black residents, property appraisals and neighborhood assessments were constantly undertaken from a distinctly anti-Black point of view. However, the demographic reality of redlined Los Angeles today means that policies implemented here to close the Black homeownership gap would miss the target population. Of course, the country experiences a Latino or Hispanic homeownership gap as well, which merits intentional consideration from policymakers. But Latino or Hispanic Americans should not be merely an incidental benefactor of policy directed at addressing historic discrimination against Black people.

Other cities which display this pattern include Denver, Salt Lake City, Pittsburgh, and San Jose, Calif.

Some redlined areas are too small to be a useful target for policy

Dallas is a city with a long history of intense discrimination. Today, Dallas remains segregated along lines of race and income, but the HOLC map is surprisingly small. In the 80 years since the map was drawn, the city has grown five-fold. Today, the city of Dallas hosts over 1.3 million residents (including roughly 300,000 Black residents) but has a redlined population of just over 28,000. Policies to address redlining specifically would have little effect on racial homeownership and wealth disparities in Dallas.

Other cities which display this pattern: Sacramento, Calif., El Paso, Texas, Grand Rapids, Mich., and Phoenix, Ariz.

For many cities, there are no available HOLC maps

Washington, D.C. is noticeably absent from discussions of redlining. The reason is simple, and reveals one of the most intractable problems with using these maps to guide policy implementation: We simply do not have any record of a redlining map drawn for 1930s Washington. While it is difficult to imagine the District-long known as "Chocolate City"-being spared from a nationwide effort targeting Black residents, it is not hard to find examples of place-based discrimination that happened in the nation's capital in the 20 th century and continue today. Discriminatory lending at the local level does not require a federally commissioned map, but it helps.

If the 2020 presidential candidates and other federal policymakers wish to close the homeownership and wealth gaps, efforts cannot be considered complete without including the city of Washington. Without a map to guide them, a new system must be devised for implementing policy there. And if that can be accomplished for Washington, then it can be accomplished nationwide.

Other places which display this pattern: all but some 200 cities nationwide, including nearly every suburb and rural area.

Once-redlined areas are no longer a proxy for Black America

Redlining was a federally created-but locally implemented-form of discrimination. As such, redlined areas, and the cities in which they are located, vary widely in size, demographics, and location. Moreover, the racial makeup of the population in redlined areas has grown and evolved dramatically over the last eight decades, and the effects of the practice have spread beyond the confines of the original maps.

The practice of redlining was explicit in its targeting of Black Americans. While Latino or Hispanic residents, low-income white residents, noncitizens, communists, and other populations the federal government deemed "risky" were often included in redlining, they were not targeted in the same manner as Black residents. Today, neighborhoods that fall within once-redlined areas are more likely to have a higher concentration of Black residents, as well as lower incomes, lower home values, and other negative economic characteristics relative to the rest of their cities.

However, proposals that base their remedies primarily on formerly redlined areas paradoxically do not redress the main racial group that was explicitly targeted, exclude important Black neighborhoods and communities, and would skew impact toward a handful of large cities. Place-based discrimination-the practice of divesting in neighborhoods wholesale on the basis of race-has had adverse effects on both people and place. Policymakers should be intentional in ensuring that their proposed solutions can address both.

Consequently, redlining-the master's tool-will prove to be insufficient in dismantling the legacy of racial inequities in homeownership and wealth in the United States.

Methods
We define formerly redlined areas as those geographies marked "Hazardous" or "Fourth Grade" and thus outlined in red via the University of Richmond's Mapping Inequality project. We define cities as census "Places" and choose principal cities as our unit of comparison, rather than metropolitan areas, to better account for the general centrality of redlined areas around urban cores. Principal cities are defined by the U.S. Census Bureau. Population totals and characteristics are tabulated by aggregating all census block groups whose population-weighted centroids fall within any redlined area (including those areas outside of contemporary principal city limits), estimating aggregated medians and margins of error by linear interpolation. Block groups are the smallest geography for which the American Community Survey provides estimates for the latest dissemination period (2017). However, not all socio-economic characteristics which are available in the ACS at the census tract level are available for block groups. Block groups offer a finer approximation of the irregular geographies of redlined areas, at the expense of accessing fewer ACS estimates. As this analysis is based largely on demographic totals, which are available at the block group level, we choose to make the best possible geographic approximation instead of a broader socio-economic snapshot. Because we examine whether the complicated boundaries of these geographies should be followed closely today, we therefore deem it necessary to estimate the most accurate interpretation of those boundaries possible. At time of writing, 2010 population totals for census blocks are available (and would provide a finer resolution of irregular redlining geographies than block groups), but these figures are nine years old and do not include any socio-economic characteristics. After the 2020 census, block level population data will allow for finer demographic analysis of redlined areas using up-to-date figures. All margins of error and significance tests are calculated at a 90% confidence interval.

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America's formerly redlined neighborhoods have changed, and so must solutions to rectify them

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"The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house," penned poet and activist Audre Lorde. Pulled from a 1984 essay, the quote summarizes her larger argument that mainstream academic frameworks are incapable of permitting the disruption of their own status quo.

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We looked at 138 formerly redlined cities and found most were still segregated - just like they were designed to be.

In 1939, officials working with the Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC) went to Cleveland, Ohio, as part of the agency's national effort to grade neighborhoods based on their perceived mortgage-lending risk.

One of the neighborhoods that officials visited - now known mostly as Fairfax - was 55 percent Black, and as such, they gave this area a "D" grade, meaning they thought Fairfax was "hazardous," or at high risk for defaulting on mortgage loans. In their report, HOLC officials concluded that property prices were trending down due to a "strong colored infiltration" and that there was a "detrimental change of ownership occupancy from white to colored." Fairfax, like most metropolitan neighborhoods where Black people lived in the early 1900s, was then marked with red ink in the HOLC's maps - a practice referred to as redlining.

It's been over 80 years since the lines were drawn in Fairfax and over 50 years since the use of redlining was legally banned, but the impact of redlining is still felt in cities like Cleveland, where redlined neighborhoods are some of the most starkly segregated in the country.

But it's not just Cleveland. In its 20 years of existence, the now-defunct HOLC drew hundreds of these maps across the country. In total, we analyzed the demographics of 138 metropolitan areas where HOLC drew maps, using data provided by the University of Richmond's Mapping Inequality project and by the 2020 census. And we found that nearly all formerly redlined zones in the country are still disproportionately Black, Latino or Asian compared with their surrounding metropolitan area, while two-thirds of greenlined zones - neighborhoods that HOLC deemed "best" for mortgage lending - are still overwhelmingly white.

"The redlining maps are like the Rosetta stone of American cities," said LaDale Winling, a professor of history at Virginia Tech and one of the researchers behind the Mapping Inequality project. Winling told us that these maps were used to codify and institutionalize practices that had already been ongoing at a more scattershot level within the real estate industry.

You can see the effects of that institutionalized segregation clearly in this national map of formerly greenlined and redlined zones:

Most formerly redlined zones are people of color; most greenlined zones are white

Estimated 2020 share of non-Hispanic white residents living within greenlined ("best") and redlined ("hazardous") boundaries drawn by the Home Owners' Loan Corporation between 1935-40, by metropolitan area

But despite formerly redlined zones sharing a purpose - to disproportionately deny loans to low-income Americans and, in particular, Black and minority Americans - the legacy of redlining differs from city to city and region to region.

Formerly redlined zones in the Northeast and Midwest are among the most segregated areas in the country. In those regions, a higher proportion of Black Americans live in redlined zones compared with those zones' surrounding areas - and a higher proportion than can be found in other regions of the country. Meanwhile, in the South, formerly redlined zones aren't as segregated. But less residential segregation doesn't mean that the South is a more equitable region for Black and minority Americans, especially given its history of slavery and the Jim Crow era. Additionally, even though redlining was a housing policy that heavily targeted Black Americans, redlining has also affected immigrants and other minorities, in particular Latino Americans - something visible today in places like California. But at the same time, huge demographic shifts, suburbanization, urban renewal and gentrification have also changed the landscape of many of these cities. In some cities, formerly redlined zones are now whiter and more developed than they were in the 1940s. In other cities, there are more Black people than white people living in formerly greenlined areas, or areas that government officials once rated as "best."

There is no one legacy when it comes to redlining. And its legacy is particularly devastating because, as we were told by Stephen Menendian, assistant director of the Othering & Belonging Institute at the University of California, Berkeley, "Housing really is at the core of every expression of racial inequality in America."

The myth of the northern "Promised Land"

The legacy of redlining is particularly pronounced in the Northeast and Midwest, where cities like Cleveland, Pittsburgh and Chicago are home to some of the most segregated formerly redlined zones in the country. This segregation is especially entrenched in redlined cities with large Black populations. Of the 19 such cities in these regions, 16 were still segregated, with over two-thirds as many Black people living in formerly redlined areas as in the surrounding area. White people, meanwhile, made up less than a third of the population of formerly redlined areas and were vastly overrepresented in formerly greenlined areas.

One reason northern cities remain so segregated is because of what historians call the Great Migration and Second Great Migration. From the 1910s through the 1970s, millions of Black Americans fled the oppressive Jim Crow South in search of jobs in industrialized cities and a better life in the Northeast and Midwest. But Black Americans didn't find refuge from systemic racism in these regions, especially when it came to housing policy.

In fact, scholars have found that the increase in Black Americans in these regions led to growing efforts like redlining in northern metro areas to keep Black Americans and other immigrants in specific areas and prevent them from moving into predominantly white neighborhoods. Consequently, Black families had little opportunity to build generational wealth.

Take Pittsburgh. It saw a massive uptick in its population in the early 1900s, but Black Americans moving in were limited to pre-war segregated areas like the Hill District, which in 1937 was officially redlined by HOLC officials because of what they described as an "infiltration" and "concentration of negro and undesirables."

Today, the Hill District, like all neighborhoods encompassing formerly redlined zones in the Steel City, is still overwhelmingly segregated. Pittsburgh's formerly redlined zones have, on average, close to three times as many Black people living in them as compared to their surrounding areas - making Pittsburgh the second most segregated redlined city in the country, just behind Cleveland.

One reason why an area like the Hill District is still so segregated is that redlining created a lack of investment in parts of Pittsburgh that persists today. Last year, a team of researchers released a report that looked at bank lending data and public investment documents in Pittsburgh from 2007 to 2019, finding that just 7 percent of home mortgage loans went to predominantly minority neighborhoods in that time period, despite the residents of these neighborhoods comprising almost 21 percent of the city's population. And out of $11.8 billion in loans to borrowers, less than 4 percent went to Black people.

"[Redlining] biased where investment was made," Bruce Mitchell, a senior analyst at the National Community Reinvestment Coalition told us, with "hazardous" areas like Hill District suffering from years of neglect. Mitchell said it's this lack of investment in formerly redlined areas that is one of redlining's most devastating consequences.

Like Pittsburgh, Chicago saw a huge surge in its Black population as part of the Great Migration. Many Black people moved to Chicago's South Side, north of Washington Park - the area where many of Chicago's redlines were ultimately drawn.

At the time government appraisers drew those lines, housing near parks, lakes and swimming pools was typically inhabited by white people, but in one zone surrounding Washington Park appraisers noted that it had been "almost completely monopolized by the colored race." Appraisers concluded that Black Americans couldn't be "closed in" and Washington Park was already "doomed," so they drew a redline around the area in their map.

Today, there are over 90 percent more Black Chicagoans in redlined zones than in the surrounding area.

How an anti-Black past in the South shapes its present

In the South, most formerly redlined areas are also still starkly segregated - 28 of the 31 cities we analyzed. And while they aren't as segregated as formerly redlined zones in the North, the formerly greenlined zones in the South are more segregated than in the North. On average, the South has almost twice as many white people living in greenlined zones compared with those zones' surrounding areas - a much higher share than is seen in the North.

That's important for understanding the legacy of redlining in the South because slavery and Jim Crow laws have played a much bigger role in the South's unique form of segregation. Winling, who was one of the researchers behind the Mapping Inequality project, told us that Black Americans in the North began to move into greenlined areas after white populations started to flee because city neighborhoods were rapidly diversifying. But in some southern cities, he said, this didn't happen to the same extent.

Take a city like Atlanta. Its neighborhood of Buckhead held the headquarters of the Ku Klux Klan from the early 1920s to the mid-1930s. Currently, Buckhead is the city's whitest and wealthiest neighborhood, and it's also where most of the "best" areas were drawn during in the late 1930s. And as can be seen on the map below, those "best" areas are 80 percent white.

Buckhead also remains very segregated from the rest of Atlanta. In fact, neighborhood residents are now backing an effort in the city's legislature to create their own city and secede from Atlanta, a majority Black city. If this were to happen, it would be financially devastating for Atlanta since the city would lose an estimated 38 percent of its tax revenue.

According to Andre Perry, a senior fellow at Brookings Metro and author of "Know Your Price: Valuing Black Lives and Property in America's Black Cities," it is these white enclaves in the South "where power is often exercised the most."

Part of the way these areas amassed power was through the South's long history of violent racism toward Black Americans, especially those moving to predominantly white neighborhoods. Consider Birmingham, Alabama, a city where bombings against Black residents were so rampant in the mid-1900s - there were more than 50 house bombings and burnings from the late 1940s until the mid-1960s - that Birmingham became known as "Bombingham."

This ongoing violence, in addition to redlining, meant that much of Birmingham's white population was confined to its greenlined zones. This pattern is still visible today, with the share of white people living in the city's formerly greenlined zones being over twice as high as the share living in the surrounding area. In fact, per an ABC News analysis of mortgage-lending data, people of color are still less likely to have their loans approved in majority-white neighborhoods.

But parts of the South's racial makeup are changing, albeit slowly. Since the 1990s, more and more Black Americans have moved to the South - a movement demographers are terming "The New Great Migration." This has changed cities like Atlanta and Birmingham, which have also seen an influx of Asian Americans and other minorities, but according to Taylor, the Princeton professor, the South's fixation on white exclusivity in places like Buckhead is still a big problem.

"People are returning to places that are just as segregated, just as excluded," Taylor said.

"Anti-Black racism hurt everyone"

The harm redlining has caused Black Americans is extensive, but redlining has also affected other minorities in the U.S. - particularly the country's growing Latino population. In some cities, government officials directly targeted Latinos with their redlining maps while in others, the continued lack of investment in formerly redlined areas has caused disproportionate harm to Latino communities.

Of 50 cities across the country with large Latino populations, we found that 72 percent have segregated Latino communities living in formerly redlined areas.

"That's why I always say, anti-Black racism hurt everyone," Perry said. "There's lots of places where ... anti-Black racism and hate against brown people and other groups really limited the amount of housing options for people of color, and the only places that they can generally go are formerly redlined or Black neighborhoods."

Take San Diego. Its formerly redlined zones are the most segregated in the West, with 76 percent more Latinos living in these neighborhoods compared to the surrounding areas. Latinos were targeted by HOLC appraisers, too, as they wrote in their 1935 report that the area southeast of Fairmont Park had "many Mexicans with a definite trend of infiltration."

In other parts of California, appraisers used even harsher, more racist language. In 1939, San Gabriel, a city in Los Angeles County, was 90 percent Mexican American, and appraisers described them as "peon Mexicans" and as a "distinctly subversive racial influence."

Up until 1930, the U.S. census classified Mexicans as white, but in the 1930 census, the government classified them as their own race. According to Jerry González, a historian at the University of Texas at San Antonio, this allowed the U.S. government to more easily target Mexican Americans as a racial threat.

This targeting was especially clear in redlining practices of the time. González told us that officials would specifically identify Mexicans living in places like Los Angeles, and then include language in their reports like, "do not sell this home to persons not fully of the Caucasian race." González said that language gave housing officials the flexibility to more easily discriminate.

It's not just Latinos that HOLC officials targeted either. Appraisers described other areas derisively as a "melting pot ... long been thoroughly blighted," also classifying Asian Americans as "subversive racial elements" in California. Today, San Gabriel's Asian and Latino communities are still segregated from the city's white population.

Beyond the red lines

Of course, segregation in many cities doesn't fit neatly inside formerly redlined zones. This doesn't mean, however, that these cities avoided or overcame a racist housing system. On the contrary, housing segregation manifests in ways that go far beyond HOLC's color lines on these maps.

"The refusal of federal agencies to issue mortgages to those neighborhoods in the 1930s and 40s - that's one of many policies that were followed," Richard Rothstein, author of "The Color of Law," said. "But it doesn't entirely determine today's landscape, and there are many, many other policies that get ignored that are equally important."

For instance, even though it is one of the most segregated cities in the country, Detroit's segregation doesn't match up with its formerly redlined zones. This is in large part because as Black southerners moved into Detroit during the Great Migration, white Detroiters responded by leaving the city in droves, mostly moving out to federally subsidized and racially homogenous suburbs - a migration that historians call "white flight." White Detroiters went through great lengths to keep their wealthy suburbs exclusively white, too, with measures as extreme as building a half-mile-long concrete wall to physically separate themselves from Black families.

According to Joe Darden, a professor of geography, environment and spatial sciences at Michigan State University, the Detroit metro area continues to experience white flight, too. As Black Detroiters move into predominantly white suburbs, many white Detroiters move away - further perpetuating residential segregation.

"The future of Black suburbanization is going to be looking at those places that used to be predominantly white, and turning them more and more to be predominantly Black," Darden said. "As Blacks move in, whites, even to this day, still have a tendency to move further and further out."

Meanwhile, Philadelphia is seeing the opposite happen: More white people are moving into its formerly redlined zones. And as this occurs, property values increase and lower-income people, many of whom are Black, can no longer afford to stay.

This gentrification has fundamentally shifted where Philadelphia's varying demographics reside so that its present-day segregation doesn't really match up against its formerly redlined zones. In 2019, a study by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition found that seven cities account for almost half of all the gentrification in the U.S., and by their metrics, Philadelphia was one of the cities where gentrification was most rampant.

In recent years, it's become popular among some Democrats to tout proposals that will remedy segregation caused by redlining. But Taylor told us that these measures often fail to account for how the maps have changed over time. For instance, in Philadelphia, young white people have been able to move into historically Black neighborhoods and buy homes by using programs associated with the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, which was intended to remedy the damage of redlining. In fact, per an ABC News analysis, it's now easier for white people than people of color to buy homes in historically nonwhite neighborhoods. In 2019, 65 percent of the 347,000 white homebuyers who applied for mortgages in mostly nonwhite neighborhoods in the country's largest metro areas were approved, compared with 56 percent of 715,000 nonwhite homebuyers who received a loan in those same neighborhoods.

What's more, Taylor said, simply encouraging homeownership in neighborhoods like East Germantown, where the housing stock is old and dilapidated, could saddle Black Americans with debt. Without being able to fund repairs or escape long, predatory mortgages, these programs could exacerbate the housing crisis and push more Black people out of their neighborhoods.

"There's no money to be made in affordable housing, and so all the building that is happening now are million-dollar condos, because that's where the money is," Taylor said.

Some 40 years after the first redlining map was drawn, redlining was banned under the Fair Housing Act of 1968. But in many ways, HOLC and the Federal Housing Administration had already written the textbook for racist real estate practices.

"[The Fair Housing Act of 1968] doesn't roll back or undo or make amends for 50 years of housing discrimination that had gone on up to that point," said Winling, the Virginia Tech historian involved in the Mapping Inequality project. "It's going to take probably another 80 or 90 years of vigorous enforcement and vigorous remediation to undo that legacy."

The legacy of redlining extends far beyond housing segregation, too. Its impact can be seen today in minority neighborhoods' access to health care, poorer educational opportunities, and increased risk of climate change, as many of these areas are more prone to flooding and extreme heat. Without a serious confrontation of its lasting generational damage, the racial segregation caused by redlining isn't going anywhere either.

"I look at it as: Redlining happened. It was an important part of American history," Perry said. "And we must reckon with the behaviors and the outcomes in ways that never discount what redlining did. And again, it has different stories for different cities, but redlining is a part of that story. It just is."

About this analysis

Redlining maps used in this project were originally drawn by the now-defunct Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC) from 1935-40 and downloaded from the Mapping Inequality project. Individual HOLC zones that fall within the same metropolitan area were grouped according to census micro- or metropolitan area definitions. A small number of HOLC zones fractionally overlapped in source map shapefiles; these overlaps were carved out of the geographically larger zone.

Population and race/ethnicity data comes from the 2020 U.S. decennial census. Population counts were aggregated from census blocks, which are the smallest geographic census units and offer the most precision when matching census data to other geographic shapes. HOLC zones were matched to census data by first determining which census blocks geographically intersected with each zone. Data from all matching blocks was then weighted by the proportion of the block's total area that intersects with that HOLC zone and summed to estimate the 2020 demographic makeup of each HOLC zone.

The surrounding area for each metropolitan area's HOLC map was computed by adding a 10 percent buffer radius to the combined zones in that metropolitan area. Surrounding area population totals were then computed by summing census-block population data, weighted by the proportion of each block's total area contained within the surrounding area's border.

For each metropolitan area's HOLC map, a location quotient (LQ) - a small-area measure of segregation that specifically compares one racial/ethnic group's proportion in a granular geography to its proportion in a larger surrounding geography - was calculated for combined A-, B-, C- and D-rated zones for each racial/ethnic group. An LQ above 1 for a given racial group indicates overrepresentation in that HOLC zone compared with the broader surrounding area, and values below 1 indicate underrepresentation. A metropolitan area's HOLC zones were defined as segregated for a minority racial/ethnic group if: (1) its LQ in D-rated zones was greater than 1 (suggesting this group was overrepresented in redlined areas); (2) its LQ in D-rated zones was greater than its LQ in A-rated zones (suggesting this group was more represented in redlined areas than in greenlined areas); and (3) its LQ in A-rated zones was smaller than the white population's LQ in A-rated zones (suggesting this group was not more represented in greenlined areas than the white population).

Population density dots were generated for each racial/ethnic group within a census block, with each dot representing one person. Dots were placed randomly within a census block and do not represent exact locations but rather the total population of a given race/ethnicity in that block. White, Black and Asian data excludes those who indicated Hispanic or Latino ethnicity. Hispanic/Latino data includes all who indicated Hispanic or Latino ethnicity, regardless of race. Other race data includes all population counts that did not fall under white, Black, Asian or Latino. The Albers Equal-Area Conic projection, which guarantees areas on one map are equivalent to areas on another map, was used for all maps and spatial calculations.

Art Direction by Emily Scherer. Copy editing by Andrew Mangan and Maya Sweedler. Story editing by Sarah Frostenson. Visual and quantitative editing by Chris Groskopf. Additional research by Jay Boice.

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To better understand present-day housing discrimination, we looked at 138 formerly redlined cities and found most were still segregated -- just like they were designed to be.