AS: How red lines on paper divided people by color
We hear the term “redlining” a lot to describe discriminatory housing practices. But it also has a very specific, historical meaning. Just like the expression “you hit the nail on the head” both means to be exactly right and comes from an actual act of using a hammer to hit a small, metal, flat-headed peg, “redlining” refers both to the general pattern of intentional discrimination and to a literal, physical process.
In this case, redlining has to do with how government-backed housing insurance maps were marked. The Andscape video to the right explains what happened.
Enterprising scholars and community members have digitized and analyzed those insurance maps—and you can explore them.
The University of Richmond’s Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America showcases an interactive resource that allows you to zoom in and out and search for individual cities.
There are other projects that have mapped individual cities or regions, such as Redlining in Michigan, developed at Michigan State University.
But how durable is the inequality resulting from redlining, as Andscape argues?
You can find out through a project developed by data-driven journalism website FiveThirtyEight called The Lasting Legacy of Redlining. In addition to a fascinating article with analyses of various cities, you can see a then-and-now comparison of any city that was redlined. It includes a map of every redlined city, along with a visualization of a variety of long-term social vulnerability indices for redlined areas.
Various projects have conducted research to understand redlining's long legacy. Savi's Jeramy Townsley, Unai Miguel Andres and Matt Nowlin's The Lasting Impacts of segregation and Redlining explores how Indianapolis remains divided.
Some cities have made a point to study such negative effects, including Philadelphia, which published an interactive report, Mapping the Legacy of Structural Racism in Philadelphia.
Many of these ills may be related to environmental hazards, such as heat islands and lack of tree coverage, particularly endemic to areas that were redlined. The Lines That Shape Our Cities offers an interactive visual for every redlined city.
