Housing
A Digital Window Into the Roots of Redlining
A University of Richmond project collects 150 Depression-era maps that reveal the inner workings of the era’s racist real-estate practices.
Racial gaps in economic well-being, education, health, and generational mobility are all intimately tied to segregation and concentrated poverty. But these spatial phenomena weren’t accidents. They were the result of decades of intentional government-sanctioned housing and loan discrimination, which manifested through an explicitly racist real-estate practice known as “redlining.”
A new, interactive platform called “Mapping Inequality,” released by the University of Richmond, serves as a vital repository of redlining’s foundation documents: Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) maps prepared during the Great Depression.