Between 1935 and 1940, a US federal agency called the Home Owners' Loan Corporation sent surveyors to every major American city. Their job was to assess the risk of lending money for mortgages in each neighbourhood. They produced colour-coded maps.
The surveyors didn't just colour the map. They wrote notes explaining each grade. Here are two entries from the actual assessors' area description files.
"This is considered the most exclusive, or swank, section in the city. Residents are of the professional and executive class, native white American. This area is a highly restricted district. Property values are very high and stable."
"This area contains a concentration of Negro population. Properties are mainly substandard. Infiltration of: Negroes. The area is not desirable for mortgage lending purposes. Values have declined and continue to decline. No A or B mortgage money available."
Without a mortgage, a family cannot buy a home. Without home ownership, a family cannot build equity. Without equity, a family cannot borrow against their home to pay for education, start a business, or cover emergencies. Without those things, the next generation begins poorer.
The HOLC maps were created in 1939. Redlining — the practice the maps codified — was made illegal by the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Twenty-nine years of legally sanctioned exclusion from the primary wealth-building mechanism of the twentieth century.
A 2023 study found that the racial wealth gap between Black and white American families is still directly traceable, neighbourhood by neighbourhood, to the 1939 HOLC grades.
This map was made by people doing their jobs.
What does that mean?