Underestimating Racism? Decoupling Race and Redlining

Abstract

A rapidly expanding body of research has sought to connect the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation’s (HOLC) so-called redlining maps to a wide array of present-day social injustices. The assertion is that these maps helped entrench emerging cogeographies of racial segregation and devaluation that have continued to reproduce racial-spatial inequities through time. We argue that such arguments likely underestimate the ongoing power of racism by narrowly focusing on the map grades rather than on racial segregation itself. To investigate this possibility, we conduct a set of statistical analyses that decouple race from redlining. These analyses produce two main findings. First, postwar Black population growth did not occur in all HOLC redlined neighborhoods evenly but was most concentrated in those areas that either had an initial Black population or that were adjacent to them. Second, whereas HOLC grade was a stronger predictor of neighborhood home values than Black population share until about 1970, the latter has become the more salient factor since. Thus, rather than obliquely highlighting the persistent geographies of racialized devaluation by way of the HOLC grades, researchers should instead focus on the racially uneven geographies of value directly.

Key Words:

• Home Owners’ Loan Corporation
• housing
• racial capitalism
• racist theory of value
• redlining
• residential segregation

Acknowledgments

This article was greatly shaped by the invaluable feedback we received from Nik Heynen, Anne Bonds, and Jerry Shannon throughout the writing process. In addition, the quality of the figures was significantly improved by the work of Diana Drogaris. We thank them all for their contributions. A previous version of this article appeared as a chapter in Scott Markley’s dissertation, “Planning Spatial Obsolescence: Racial Capitalism, The Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, and the Production of Racialized Devaluation.”

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

Notes

1 Data from both the HOLC neighborhood-level analysis presented here and the tract-level analysis not presented here is available for download (Markley 2024b).

2 Older census tract vintages only provide White, Black, and “other” racial data, so we can only work with these three categories.

3 Because the $\mathit{\text{oth}}$ variable is connected to Black population percentage, we tested a series of models that removed it from the base model and added it to the “Only Percent Black model.” The result was to strengthen slightly the effect of neighborhood racial composition on home values relative to HOLC grades as expected, although the difference was mostly negligible. Black population percentage was clearly the more salient racial variable of the two, so we opted to isolate Black population share in its own model rather than combine them into a composite model.

4 ESRI’s U.S. Federal Data are available at https://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=462b08b0811c4a77aa09afc36c4f4b73.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Scott N. Markley

SCOTT N. MARKLEY is the Geospatial Project Coordinator for the National Zoning Atlas and a Visiting Lecturer in the Department of City & Regional Planning at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14850. E-mail: [email protected]. His research employs geographic information systems (GIS) to better understand the historical (re)production of racially uneven suburban development in the United States.

Steven R. Holloway

STEVEN R. HOLLOWAY is Professor and Director of Urban and Metropolitan Studies in the Department of Geography, University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602. E-mail: [email protected]. His research examines urban neighborhoods related to race, inequality, environmental health, and residential segregation.