Shifting the Redlining Paradigm: The Home Owners’ Loan Corporation Maps and the Construction of Urban Racial Inequality

Abstract

While it is important to recognize the racist roots of contemporary urban conditions and Black disadvantage, the focus on the HOLC redlining maps of the late 1930s, which have become a staple of both research and popular literature, is misplaced. Despite statistical associations between the maps and contemporary measures of racialized disadvantage, extensive research has found no evidence to support a connection between them. Instead, the Second Great Migration and white flight, both acting in the context of the exclusion of Black buyers from the growing suburbs, led to the spatial and economic bifurcation of urban Black populations within cities and the reconfiguration of the formerly predominately white-ethnic redlined areas as segregated areas of concentrated Black poverty. It is that migratory process, rather than any public or private actions based on the maps, which, while racist, principally reflected underlying housing and economic conditions, that account for the associations found in the literature. Today, while redlined areas still tend often to be concentrated poverty areas, the great majority of poor Black households live outside those areas. A focus on the HOLC maps as a driver of contemporary inequities and disadvantage is both poor history and a poor starting point for policies to address today’s persistent racialized inequities.