Federal redlining maps formally institutionalized racial segregation in the 1930s

Evidence

“Racial redlining” acquired formal governmental backing in the 1930s when the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC), a federal agency, was charged with establishing “residential security maps” for 239 US cities. As Richard Marciano has made evident, these secret maps, composed with input from “competent local real estate brokers and mortgage lenders,” ranked zones within cities in terms of their desirability for residential investment. The central criterion underpinning the ranking concerned their ethnoracial character. The residential security maps coded affluent and desirable lending zones blue, less affluent and less desirable areas yellow, and zones inhabited by blacks – and so deemed undesirable – with the alarmist, high alert red. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 369

Categorization

• XREF: Directly connects to the ongoing HOLC-redlining literature (e.g. Melamed’s ‘redlining’ genealogy and contemporary racial-wealth-gap scholarship). — connects to: The 1930 Land Apportionment Act legally institutionalized racial land segregation — Tavengwa Gwekwerere, Davie E. Mutasa, and Kudakwashe Chitofiri, Settlers, Rhodesians, and Supremacists:…, 20; Federal loan agencies institutionalized racial segregation as real-estate orthodoxy — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of…, 144; A federal housing project was deliberately built as a segregation buffer — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of…, 171
• SEED: Angle: ‘The bureaucratics of racial sorting’ — how a federal agency’s secret maps, made with local broker input, turned racial prejudice into a mortgage-decision infrastructure that outlived the agency.