Events of the past can have consequences that ring out into the future for far longer than we might expect. History is shaped by the walls that society builds or takes down in the present time, both real and figurative, and by the motivations of those who hold power. Prejudices that were in play decades ago may still have consequences after years of progress, impacting people's fortunes for generations and even influencing the configurations of the cities we live in.
Today we dive into the second iteration of our series on the practice of redlining, a practice conducted by the Home Owner's Loan Corporation in the late 1930s through the early 1940s. The US government commissioned the HOLC to conduct surveys of many cities throughout the United States, evaluating the quality of neighborhoods to determine which areas would be safe investments for banks to grant loans, and forming a recommendation to grant or deny them in various neighborhoods. They mapped the cities using four color-coded categories accompanied by extensive reports explaining the reasoning for the grades in each area based on characteristics including the types and values of homes, the qualities of the land, the degree of vandalism, and the average income, occupations, and significantly ethnicities of the residents.
The exercise went beyond a quantitative and qualitative study of the natural and built environment for economical purposes. In all redlined areas, the HOLC recommended that banks should refuse to grant home loans or grant them only conservatively. Areas with poorer populations of predominantly "undesirable" racial groups, normally Black populations as well as certain other minorities and white populations of specific national backgrounds, were routinely assigned the lowest grades. This created a means of denying home loans to minorities and less affluent people, of perpetuating their economic stagnation, and of systematically reinforcing racial segregation.
Visualizing Discrimination
Today's map draws upon the Mapping Inequality application by Robert K. Nelson, LaDale Winling, Richard Marciano, Nathan Connolly, et al. at the University of Richmond's Digital Scholarship Lab. Mapping Inequality is an excellent resource for visualizing how redlining looked from city to city. A link to the Atlanta map and its accompanying reports can be found here.
We studied how this practice looked in Jacksonville, FL in a recent map. This time we're looking at Atlanta, GA, to understand what redlining looked like there. We'll compare it to the modern day distribution of Black and White populations in the Atlanta area to see whether there is any correlation to the lines drawn by the HOLC over 80 years ago. Click to enlarge.
The HOLC completed its map of Atlanta in 1938, actually extending a bit beyond the city limits at the time. The map shows the grades determined for each area, superimposed with railways and roadways as they exist today. Refer to the legend to understand the color-coding system.
The majority of the city was assigned a red "D" rating or a yellow "C" rating, with most of the preferred blue "B" zones represented on the north and east with a few scattered in the south, and just a handful of green "A" zones in the outer reaches. The lowest-graded areas form a Y-shaped region that appears to center on the downtown area and to somewhat follow the railroad tracks, a correlation supported by the reports that list the noise of the trains as a detrimental factor.
Several major roadways, including the intersection of Interstates near the center of the map, now run over portions of neighborhoods that the HOLC concluded to be bad investments.
We'll need the gradient on the right side of the legend a little later. First let's look a little closer at how the HOLC evaluated Atlanta neighborhoods.
The HOLC Report
Atlanta is now one of the most significant metropolitan areas in the US, and its influence extends beyond where it did 83 years ago when the HOLC completed its map. But a lot has stayed the same over the years, and many neighborhood and street names remain unchanged. The following is an overview of the reports accompanying the map. You can read them in their entirety at Mapping Inequality.
The grade "A" green zones were all reported to be occupied by "executives," "business and professional men," and sometimes clerical individuals too. The largest 'green' area, located due north of downtown, encompassed Tuxedo Park and Peachtree Heights Park. Additionally Westover, Haynes Manor, Garden Hills, and Lenox Park were a few others graded the same way, and all were described as "rolling" and "well-wooded" regions. In these wealthy neighborhoods, the common "detrimental influences" were high water rates, the unavailability of gas in some places, sewage issues, or proximity problems: being too far from a fire station, or too close to a railroad, a cemetery, or a "negro area." In one, the "infiltration" of Jewish families was considered a drawback. Two included the following specific problem: "Street car service only along Peachtree Road to Buckhead presents difficulty of transporting negro servants."
The grade "B" blue zones were a step down, occupied by a similar but less affluent demographic. Many were praised for the proximity of resources like schools and business centers, and for their "restriction," residential zoning, and the availability of street car transit. They got secondary status for the lesser wealth of the occupants, high water rates, and heavy traffic. There is mention of Jewish families moving in to one, and a "negro settlement" near another, as drawbacks. Some blue areas were less conveniently situated than others, and in most HOLC anticipated that the desirability of properties would either decline somewhat or stay static in the coming years, and the HOLC made recommendations about where to hold or sell properties.
The grade "C" yellow zones represent the largest proportion of the city in the HOLC map. A mixed group of lower-income "business and professional men," skilled workers, clerical workers, teachers, and students lived in these neighborhoods. In almost all of them the "trend of desireability [sic]" for the next 10-15 years was expected to decline. Their favorable influences focus on the availability of street car or bus transportation, the proximity to schools and other areas of interest, and for some their restriction and zoning for residential use. There is a wide range of detrimental factors, but the most common are heavy traffic and proximity to noisy railroads and industrial plants, age and disrepair of properties, and interestingly the presence of some resources which might not be considered detrimental today: apartments, boarding houses, and a hospital. There is also mention of adjacent red zones referred to as either "negro areas" or "white D grade property." In the two yellow zones that had very small Black populations, both listed "negro property" among detrimental influences. In the Oakland City area, where there was only a 1% reported Black population, the report reads, "some negro property, Cheap "shot-gun" type [architecture] predominates."
Finally in the grade "D" red zones, residents were mostly "factory workers, laborers, and domestics" and often skilled mechanics or clerical workers. The primary favorable influence reported was close proximity to residents' source of income, and any convenient forms of transit, as well as the presence of schools and churches. The report noted detrimental influences truly typical of poverty: properties and infrastructure in poor repair, proximity to industrial facilities, poor health outcomes, and "difficulty of rental collections" -- which could alternatively be understood as difficulty of rent payment. In some with relatively mixed racial compositions, that mixture was noted as a drawback. The report often drew a distinction between the projected trends of desirability of areas by race, listing many of them as "static for negro, down for white," or vice versa. There were a couple of redlined areas with majority Black populations whose characteristics much resemble those of most 'yellow' graded zones, but which were apparently graded 'red' solely because of the residents' race.
The Takeaway
The determining factors behind the assignment of grades for parts of Atlanta range from the natural environment to the built environment, but the social environment is among the most significant points of consideration.
According to the reports, foreign-born families represented 0% of the population in all parts of the city except for in the "D" graded Capitol Avenue section, where 10% were estimated to be Syrian, Greek, Italian, or Jewish. Black residents represented 0% of the population in all but two "C" graded zones where they represented only 5% and 1% of residents. Nearly all Black residents in Atlanta lived in a "D" graded zone, but about half of the "D" graded zones also had little or no Black population.
The overt racism inherent in the entire exercise is staggering. The language of the reports makes it explicitly clear that it wasn't that Black or Foreign-born people simply tended to live in poorer-quality neighborhoods, but that they themselves were thought to represent a "detrimental" factor in the present and projected future quality of their areas of residence. It is also clear that for the HOLC, the less "infiltration" was observed in a neighborhood, the better it was for the area's long-term value -- the implication being that the mixing of racial and cultural influences would be inherently problematic.
Since this was the official viewpoint of the Corporation commissioned to make recommendations to banks about where to grant home loans, the practice of redlining became an effective way to reinforce segregation and mitigate the economic mobility of lower-class citizens, particularly Black citizens.
That Was Then, What About Now?
Redlining was illegalized through the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Although America has come a long way in breaking down systematic barriers of this kind, there's still a lot of work to be done. Redlining was a contributing factor to long-term disparities in housing that we still see today. Atlanta remains one of America's more segregated cities. Let's use a map to visualize the degree of racial integration in Atlanta. Click to enlarge.
This is a compositional map expressing the percentage of the population represented by either White or Black residents, the two largest racial groups in the area. This is the most recent data from the American Community Survey, shown by census tract. Instead of indicating the exact percentage of either group in each tract, this map focuses on the degree of predominance of either group in each area.
As you can see by referring to the gradient bar on the legend, the deepest purple places have an almost exclusively Black population, the deepest yellow almost exclusively White. The brownish places where purple and yellow mix are relatively integrated, and those regions where the color is thinner have a regionally higher presence of other racial groups. There are also two 'holes' in the data at the East Lake Golf Club and the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, where nobody lives.
The contrast is striking. The population is predominantly White in the northern part of the city, and predominantly Black in the southern part, split dramatically along a line that winds through the middle. There are relatively few areas where the two groups are well integrated, and in most there is a considerable majority of one or the other group.
But let's return to the redlined areas we saw before. Not all of them were Black neighborhoods, although all the Black neighborhoods were redlined. Consider the following map layer illustrating where Black people lived in those regions, in comparison to how the population is distributed today. Click to enlarge.
Use the legend to understand the map layer. You can click back and forth between this map and the previous ones to compare them. There is a visible correlation: many of the areas that had little or no Black population in 1938 remain that way today, and many that had mixed or majority Black populations are either still majority Black or now replaced with mostly White neighborhoods. Consider also the way certain major roadways were directed to cut through redlined areas rather than avoid them.
The redlined areas where the HOLC survey reports a 0% Black population are empty and outlined in red. The intermediate shades of red indicate the approximate percentage of the population represented by Black residents for each area according to that report. In other words, they show which redlined areas were more racially integrated than others. In brightest red are the areas that were totally or almost totally occupied by Black residents.
The one marked with a star was referred to by HOLC only as the "Best negro section in Atlanta," a 100% Black neighborhood where no economic or environmental factor appears to have distinguished it from the higher-graded 'yellow' areas except that the residents were Black. This area consists mostly of what is now known as the Washington Park and Hunter Hills neighborhoods, and it is adjacent to Clark Atlanta University, formerly Atlanta University, which as the first HBCU in the southern US is old enough to have been mentioned in the reports and to have fallen under a redlined area itself.
Conclusion
We've had a look at the form redlining took in one of the south's most culturally important cities, and considered the traces of the past that we can still see. Redlining was by no means an isolated practice in Georgia or even in the southern United States. It took place on a systemic level in almost every single state nationwide, and was virtually always directed at preserving the racial and economic status quo. It labeled entire communities as detrimental and problematic, and greatly reduced opportunities for families to improve their living situations.
And yes, that was the past. We've made so much progress, and how incredible is it that this sort of thing is illegal now. But consider the nonchalance of the language in the reports, and how power was used as an opportunity to reserve necessities for the already privileged and draw boxes around others. This wasn't that long ago, and these were people just like us, living with a discriminatory normal that wasn't normal or good at all, and taking division as a given. This still happens today, and society still suffers because of it. So let's be alert for ways that racism and injustice are built into institutions today and approach our societal normals critically, so we can do our best to keep dismantling systemic oppression in all its forms.
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