1937: The Eugenics Color Map — The Baltimore Story

Redlining, the color code of HOLC rating system, was influenced by eugenics and biased race research. Rothstein (2017) noted that “[a] neighborhood earned a red color if African Americans lived in it, even if it was a solid middle-class neighborhood of single-family homes” (p. 64). In short, neighborhoods populated by decedents of English, Germans, Scots, Irish, and Scandinavians were far more likely to be greenlined (FHA loan eligible) than African American neighborhoods, which were usually redlined or yellowlined (non-FHA loan eligible). The ghettos created by early neighborhood segregation in response to the First Great Migration were solidified through redlining by federal programs meant to assist people in need. The blatant racism of HOLC mapping becomes even clearer in the appraisal notes written for different neighborhoods. One appraiser in St. Louis, justified redlining a middle-class neighborhood for “it had little or no value today … due to the colored element now controlling the district” (p. 64).

The systemic racism underpinning these HOLC maps devastated African American home ownership and generational wealth (wealth and security passed from parents to children) produced by home equity. Feagin (2014) argued that “A great many white families secured their significant family assets as a result of an array of white “affirmative action” programs, including large-scale federal and state homestead acts from the 1860s to the 1930s” (pp. 20-21). He further argued that “Many whites accumulated enough home equity to use later on for start-up capital for businesses or funding education for children and grandchildren” (p. 212). These economic options were not open to people of color who had been legally relegated to sub-par neighborhoods and then told that those areas were now even less desirable because of the federal government’s redlining policy (Rothstein, 2015).

In Baltimore, the HOLC maps benefited economically successful white neighborhoods like Homeland and Roland Park, which were designated green and blue respectively. Likewise, HOLC maps hindered underprivileged African American neighborhoods like Sandtown and Winchester, which were designated yellow and red respectively. The FHA and private financial institutions refused to underwrite mortgages in places like Sandtown and Winchester, or did so at exorbitant rates, which contributed to their ongoing cycle of poverty. The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights noted in 1973 that the “housing industry, aided and abetted by Government, must bear the primary responsibility for the legacy of segregated housing… Government and private industry came together to create a system of residential segregation” (Rothstein, 2017, p. 75).

Today, if one superimposes the HOLC housing maps with maps of poverty in Baltimore City, the result will be an almost identical match—yellowlined and redlined neighborhoods still struggle, while many blue and green neighborhoods thrive. The Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America (Nelson et al., 2018) project and the article “After nearly a century, redlining still divides Baltimore City” on the Citylab website illustrate this reality (Bliss, 2015).