Mapping Inequality, an online archive of maps and documents by the Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC), is a collaboration of four universities housed at the University of Richmond. The HOLC is the federal agency created out of the Great Depression that helped stabilize the economy, but also brought the racism of the times into housing policy through the creation of security maps. These maps graded neighborhoods from A to D based on the perceived security of mortgages. Here is an example from Decatur, Illinois from their site.
Green areas have an A grade ("best"), blue is B ("still desirable"), yellow C ("declining") and red D ("hazardous"). Yellow and red areas became difficult places to get mortgage financing and thus made home ownership extremely difficult, creating or exacerbating wealth disparities that remain in place today. Areas with high immigration or minority populations were often given low grades for that reason alone. A brief look at the introduction will show some of the prejudicial language used in describing neighborhoods throughout the country.
In addition to a vast archive of these maps for most major cities in the country they also have a map view where you can go to an area and see the maps. My favorite part is the zoomed out view where you can see the cities with graduated circles colored to show percentage of each city that was graded by color.
There were very few green areas but the cities with more diversified economies had a higher proportion of blue, while major manufacturing centers such as Detroit have much larger yellow and red areas. In the Midwest, Omaha, Minneapolis and St Louis had many areas considered desirable while Sioux City and Kansas City were mostly "hazadous" places.
Zoom further in and the scanned, georeferenced maps appear.
When you zoom all the way to the neighborhood level, you can see the individual (often xenophobic) descriptions of neighborhoods.
Green areas have an A grade ("best"), blue is B ("still desirable"), yellow C ("declining") and red D ("hazardous"). Yellow and red areas became difficult places to get mortgage financing and thus made home ownership extremely difficult, creating or exacerbating wealth disparities that remain in place today. Areas with high immigration or minority populations were often given low grades for that reason alone. A brief look at the introduction will show some of the prejudicial language used in describing neighborhoods throughout the country.
In addition to a vast archive of these maps for most major cities in the country they also have a map view where you can go to an area and see the maps. My favorite part is the zoomed out view where you can see the cities with graduated circles colored to show percentage of each city that was graded by color.
When you zoom all the way to the neighborhood level, you can see the individual (often xenophobic) descriptions of neighborhoods.
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