Mapping Inequality is a database of more than 150 federal
“risk maps” from between 1930 and 1940 that show which neighborhoods were considered
“best,” “still desirable,” “definitely declining,” and “hazardous.” These
designations would come to dictate the level of investment or lack thereof in
cities across the country for decades. As Grabar notes, “These maps, which came
to shape not just the distribution of mortgages but other types of lending and
investment, were the origin of the term ‘redlining.’” Once a neighborhood was
redlined, as Ta-Nehisi Coates discusses in “The Case for Reparations” in The Atlantic, the homes there were no
longer eligible for Federal Housing Administration (FHA) insured private
mortgages. Redlining, in effect, “. . . exclud[ed] black people from most legitimate means of obtaining a mortgage.”
While the color-coded maps put the fact that racial
discrimination was an integral part of federal housing policy in sharp relief,
the truly fascinating (and infuriating) treasure are the appraisers’ notes
about each neighborhood that accompany the maps.
As Grabar highlights, “In 1937, for example, a summary of
the Eastern Parkway area of Brooklyn noted its favorable influences—‘near
Prospect Park,’ ‘substantial row brick construction,’ ‘close in,’ ‘good
transportation facilities’—and one detrimental influence: ‘slow infiltration of
negroes from the section to the north,’ meaning the Bedford-Stuyvesant
neighborhood. Eastern Parkway was at that point about 2 percent black. It was
colored yellow, for ‘definitely declining.’”
Chicago’s Brownsville,
on the other hand, was redlined due to the fear of the effect the construction
of the Ida B. Wells public housing project might have on the neighborhood: “This
venture has the realtors guessing as to what the ultimate result will be when
so many of this race are drawn into this section from the already
negro-blighted district. … Already Washington Park at the south, a very fine
park, has been almost completely monopolized by the colored race.”
Grabar also observes that “[r]acist though they were, the
appraisers seemed to recognize that cutting the area off from financial
institutions would ultimately be ruinous. ‘One of the most important
necessities is to provide means of financing these colored homes so that they
may be rehabilitated,’ the Bronzeville report states. Instead, contract sellers
and subprime lenders moved into the void.”
If you’ve used the chapter in our book Using Informational Text to Teach A Raisin in the Sun that focuses
on the violence that surrounded the integration of a previously white South
Chicago neighborhood in the 1950s, you may find the 1939 appraisal of South
Deering particularly interesting. (Other units in our volume focus on housing discrimination past and present and socioeconomic mobility.) The database offers students the opportunity
to dig into information about the neighborhoods that the Youngers are moving
from and to in A Raisin in the Sun.
“Here’s How the Federal Government Made the Maps That Crippled Black Neighborhoods” also gives students the opportunity to consider
the history of their own cities and how redlining influences their present-day
reality. The article, and the database underlying it, underscore the wealth of informational
text we can use to make the literary texts we teach year after year come alive
for our students.
