ABSTRACT

Urban historians love redlining maps, the real estate appraisal documents created during the 1930s and early 1940s by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, or HOLC (pronounced ‘holk’). Used to visually represent home-loan risk in American cities, these ‘security maps’ offer a powerful and almost self-evident look at one of the central contradictions of New Deal America, namely the effort to bring about national economic recovery on a racially segregated basis. With redlining maps, HOLC, and later the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), assessed mortgage risk as part of broader deliberations about who deserved rescuing from mortgage default during the Great Depression and which neighborhoods seemed most creditworthy and safe for debt financing. HOLC and their maps were supposed to help all of America return to economic stability, but, according to federal and local housing officials, that recovery could only be secured if lenders, realtors, developers, and home-sellers controlled, on a racial basis, who could live where. 1 The term ‘redlining’ comes from the red colors used on HOLC maps some 80 years ago to mark communities that were considered high investment risk. Today, we know ‘redlining’ as a general term for any form of institutional housing discrimination. In spite of having updated our language, though, security maps themselves have largely been frozen in time, used mostly as mere illustration for what many consider a largely unchanged, if important, argument about past segregation.