Redlining: The Legacy of Wealth and Systemic Racial Discrimination in our Land

This article was published in our Autumn 2020 Naturalist Quarterly special edition, “Healing Our Land – The Election Issue.” Please visit www.anshome.org/naturalist-quarterly to see the rest of the stories in the issue.

Map showing areas in the Washington, DC region graded by loan risk categories, Federal Housing Authority, 1937.

Map showing areas in the Washington, DC region graded by loan risk categories, Federal Housing Authority, 1937.

In the first half of the 20th century, huge federal investments and analyses shaped the post-war housing boom as America’s white middle class built wealth through land and home ownership. Access to federally subsidized loans, homeowners’ insurance products, and public housing were in many ways explicitly shaped by race. Redlining was a practice of the Federal Home Owners Loan Corporation that “graded” areas of cities according to factors including “infiltration of Negroes.”

People living in lower-graded areas were denied both mortgages by banks and subsidized Federal Housing Administration insurance products. Victims of redlining were forced to live with racially restrictive housing deeds and covenants and segregated schools and playgrounds. Black and other families of color in the Washington, DC region were effectively forced to remain as renters in substandard housing.

The map above shows Residential Sub-Areas graded according to the Federal Housing Administration in the Washington region in 1937 (In this illustration, the darker the shaded area, the higher the rating). Click here to read the full descriptions for each grade, many of which are racially explicit. For example, Type A areas contain houses “appealing to the highest type of occupants,” and Type H areas “represent the negro developments and the lowest grade of residential area…the only possible future… is that the present scattered structures may be razed and new planned subdivisions instituted in their place.”

By the end of 1960, Fairfax, Montgomery, and Prince George’s County received seven times the amount of federal mortgage insurance than Washington, DC. Today, according to an Urban Institute study, white households in Washington, DC have a net worth 81 times greater than Black households – an enormous wealth gap that can be traced to discriminatory housing and land use policies.

There is no simple fix to this problem—it will require a mix of strong affordable housing policies, zoning changes, green infrastructure projects, consumer finance rule changes, and more. Conceived broadly, many of these policies go by the name “reparations.” Reparations for American slavery have been discussed for decades, but a 2014 Atlantic article by Ta-Nehisi Coates catapulted the issue into mainstream policy discussions.

Richard Rothstein, author of “The Color of Law,” had a recent piece in the New York Times arguing that modern banks, successors to the corporate beneficiaries and enforcers of residential segregation, should reinvest in those same families who were previously excluded from neighborhoods because of discriminatory mortgage financing.

“The [companies and banks] could not have segregated Hillsdale without the support of government agencies. In fact, in some cases, federal agencies required builders…to insert the racial clause in deeds.”    – Richard Rothstein, New York Times

ANS’s new Conservation Priorities outline the role we will play in helping to heal the effects of discrimination in things like the access to land, healthy environments and natural places in the Washington DC area. We are thinking deeply, and learning from our partners, about how best to advocate for Human Health and Access to Nature, Climate Resilience and Sustainable Land Use in communities still affected by the negative legacy of redlining today, decades after the practice was legally abolished.

We will urge our elected officials to think deeply, too, as new opportunities to heal the effects of systemic racism on peoples’ ability to benefit from land ownership, live in neighborhoods with clean air and clean water, and safely access natural places in our region. We will continue to share ideas and support conversations and actions rooted in justice. A great first place to start is with our September, October, and November Conservation Cafés, where we will discuss equity and sustainability in cities and the legacy of discrimination in the environmental movement. Join us!

Map and information thanks to the project “Mapping segregation in Washington DC” and the D.C. Policy Center.

About Eliza Cava

Eliza Cava is the Nature Forward Director of Conservation, where she supervises our policy, advocacy, watershed community science, and conservation outreach work, and supports Woodend restoration as a demonstration landscape for the region.
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