Are we paying too much attention to redlining maps?

Relying on redlining maps of the past to direct where we focus today's efforts to redress segregation may be steering us wrong.

If you seek to educate your community about its history of racial segregation, beware of devoting too much attention to redlining maps and racial deed exclusions (“restrictive covenants”). It’s not that the maps and covenants didn’t play an important role—they did. Yet they were only parts of the story and not always the most important.

I have some responsibility for excessive emphasis on these tools of discrimination. The cover of The Color of Law included a visually compelling reproduction of Newark, New Jersey’s redlining map. The book also described racial covenants, illustrated by a photocopy of the deed that segregated Daly City in the San Francisco Bay Area. Displaying images like these allowed readers to see with their own eyes how the nation’s racial divisions were engineered. Activists find these dramatic public records to be effective educational tools. In our new book, Just Action, we highlight activists in Modesto, California, that began their quest for redressing the segregation of their city by identifying its many subdivisions whose deeds excluded non-whites.

Yet less easily symbolized practices sometimes played bigger roles than redlining maps and restrictive covenants. When we mobilize to remedy segregation, we shouldn’t focus only on easy-to-illustrate actions, while leaving powerful but less visible policies unaddressed.

In this posting, I’ll describe why, if we seek to redress segregation today, we should beware of paying too much attention to the redlining maps of the 1930s. Soon, I will write about why contemporary activists can be misled by the identification of restrictive covenants.

Prior to the Great Depression, long-term mortgages with which we are familiar today were mostly unknown. Homeowners financed property purchases with short term interest-only bank loans, typically with a term of seven years. At the end of that period, the loans came due and borrowers usually refinanced with a new short-term loan. But in the 1930s, banks stopped lending; replacement loans were hard to come by and a cascade of foreclosures followed. To save homeowners from being put on the street, one of the first New Deal agencies, the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC), was authorized in 1933 to refinance homeowners and give them an innovative long-term (“amortized”) mortgage that included both a principal and interest portion of the monthly payment.

The HOLC saved approximately one million households from default. But agency staff were also assigned an additional task—creating maps of urban areas with designations of where it might be high- or low-risk to lend. High-risk areas were colored red; low-risk ones, green. The presence of African Americans resulted in a red color. Most low-income neighborhoods were red, but black households could cause middle-class communities to be red as well, simply because of the residents’ race. It is unclear how rigidly the HOLC followed these designations in determining whether to rescue a homeowner.

In 1934 the New Deal created the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) to insure mortgages. Its role was not to refinance existing homeowners at risk of default but to get renters into owning houses for the first time, with similar amortized mortgages. The FHA insured very few loans in the HOLC redlined neighborhoods.

But population shifts during the last 90 years make map-colors of urban areas a misleading guide to remedies for segregation today.

Consider Ferguson, Missouri, the St. Louis suburb where a police officer killed Michael Brown in 2014, leading to nationwide racial-justice protests. Ferguson today is now 70 percent black, with a poverty rate more than twice the national average. Its African American population began to grow in the 1970s when urban public housing was demolished and some displaced tenants were given vouchers to rent in Ferguson. It then became a refuge from downtown overcrowding which partly resulted from urban renewal programs that demolished private housing in the central city to construct the Gateway Arch, highway interchanges, middle-class housing, university buildings, and commercial structures. Excluded from almost all other communities in St. Louis, African American refugees from these programs concentrated in a few places like Ferguson.

The 1937 HOLC map of St. Louis shows Ferguson as mostly green; it had no black residents other than in one tiny geographically isolated section. Indeed, Ferguson then might be thought of as a “sundown town”—the road to a neighboring black city was blocked off at night because blacks were prohibited from entering Ferguson after dark. The chain across the road was removed in daytime so nannies and domestic servants could walk to their jobs.

As late as 1960, there were almost no African Americans living in Ferguson; the Census counted only 15 in a total population of 22,000.

The HOLC map shows downtown St. Louis as red, but there are few low-income black residents there today. A challenge facing contemporary racial justice advocates in St. Louis is how to pursue remedies for twentieth century policies that impoverished African American families and destroyed their communities. This requires investing heavily in Ferguson so that it has improved transportation access along with high-quality retail, banking, and supermarkets, as well as better-financed public schools. Also necessary is opening other suburban areas, not included in the maps, to African Americans, by providing housing subsidies, enacting zoning reform, and challenging real estate agents’ and landlords’ ongoing discriminatory practices. The redline map has no relevance to these efforts.

The south Minneapolis Powderhorn community where a police officer murdered George Floyd in 2020 was also colored green by the HOLC. But in the 1930s African Americans began to move in, some from northern sections of the city, others from southern states; the Central neighborhood of Powderhorn became mostly black, including a large middle class. It was devastated when construction of an interstate highway in 1959 demolished 50 square blocks. Today Powderhorn has been gentrifying and has a white plurality, with black and Hispanic populations of slightly less than 20 percent each. Needed now are ways to prevent continuing displacement of the African Americans, Hispanics, and Somalis who remain. Minneapolis has an inclusionary zoning policy and a program to preserve affordable housing that support this goal. More needs to be done. The redlining map is also of no help for this purpose.

George Floyd didn’t live in Powderhorn. He stayed with friends in the suburb of St. Louis Park, an historically white city west of Minneapolis. It is now about 80 percent white and 7 percent black. Until 2016, many of its African American residents lived in Meadowbrook, a multi-family apartment complex. Then, new owners gave it what they apparently considered a more upscale name, “Era on Excelsior,” and remodeled it, making it unaffordable to Section 8 households and other lower income tenants who were evicted. The city negotiated with the new owners and won a right for tenants to remain until their children could complete the year in the local schools they had been attending. St. Louis Park officials attempted to help these evicted tenants find other rentals in the city, but rentals in the city were too steep; most displaced households had to relocate to less desirable neighborhoods in other suburbs where costs were lower.

Another multi-family complex in St. Louis Park, Louisiana Court, about half of whose residents are black, was financed by the federal Low-Income Housing Tax Credit program. The project effectively segregates low-income renters in apartments that are not distributed throughout the city. Nearby in the same neighborhood is a public housing project, Hamilton House, that reinforces the isolation of low-income households. It is primarily for elderly and disabled residents.

The city has enacted one law that requires developers of new multi-family market-rate buildings to set aside a share of units affordable to lower-income households, and another that gives tenants three months of protection from immediate eviction when a new owner buys a building and proposes to raise rents.

These are small steps forward, but more should be done. As a first step, a racial justice committee in St. Louis Park should press the city to acknowledge a racial problem that requires fixing. Presently, local government fails to identify which neighborhoods that historically excluded black families remain effectively closed to them—because these once-affordable areas have become too expensive. Instead, officials promote the city’s diversity by claiming that the Census shows it has an evenly distributed “black, indigenous, and people-of-color” (BIPOC) population of twenty percent. The Census, however, has no such category. The city created it by summarizing Census numbers for various non-white residents, of whom African Americans are a small share. Although actual Census data would show where black families now live, the St. Louis Park chief spokesperson states that BIPOC figures, not racial numbers, are “what we use to guide policies and programs.” This ensures that officials will be unsuccessful in remedying the city’s segregation, which in the twentieth century excluded African Americans to a much greater extent than other non-white groups.

The Minneapolis redlining map does not include St. Louis Park and is of no use to advocates who attempt to remedy this history of exclusion.

While redlining maps highlight the usual refusal of government agencies to support housing for African American households in cities that the maps described, policies of the Federal Housing and Veterans administrations also spurred the nation’s suburbanization with insurance for housing in whites-only suburbs. This was perhaps the most powerful program the federal government pursued to segregate the nation, but the redlining maps tell us almost nothing about it. Those suburbs weren’t colored green by the HOLC; few existed when the color-coded guidance was created.

Redlining maps are important historical documents that can be used to educate citizens about how their metropolitan areas were segregated. And it is true: red neighborhoods in these maps are correlated with disinvested neighborhoods today. But they are not perfectly correlated and omit entirely many places to which racial justice activists should pay attention.

In a column coming soon, I’ll describe why restrictive covenants can, along with HOLC  maps, also be misleading indicators of where civil rights activists should direct their attention.

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