Getting it right: The history of segregation and redlining in U.S. cities

My July 12 column in The Baltimore Sun is based on the research of Alan Mallach, a senior fellow at the nonprofit Center for Community Progress and author, in 2020, of an Abell Foundation report on racial and economic trends in Baltimore. Mallach produced a research article that corrects the record about the infamous redlining maps developed by a New Deal-era federal agency, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation. Numerous grad students, authors and college professors have pointed to the maps as evidence of government-engineered discrimination in housing. Mallach’s work reveals that the HOLC maps were never used in the granting or denial of loans in the 20th Century while the maps created by another agency, the Federal Housing Administration, were used in that way. In fact, as policy, the FHA refused to insure mortgages of Black families during the explosive growth of the nation’s suburbs during and after World War II.

Here, from an executive summary of Mallach’s research, is why he says this distinction/correction is important.

First, it is important that we understand history correctly. In recent years, much effort has gone into rectifying the gaps in America’s racial history, bringing episodes and events to light that illuminate the workings of systemic racism in our country’s history. This is important work. But it is also important that we not replace old myths and misunderstandings with new ones. The claim that the HOLC maps caused – in whole or part – the distress and disadvantage in today’s low-income Black urban neighborhoods is a myth, not a reality.

Second, blaming the HOLC maps suggests that we’ve found a villain whom we blame for the complex web of social, economic, physical and environmental challenges facing low-income Black communities. On the contrary, today’s racial inequities are systemic, and their origins and the manner in which they are perpetuated are a complex texture of overtly racist elements interwoven with seemingly race-neutral factors, in which no racial intent may be present, but which nonetheless lead to racially-invidious outcomes. By focusing on the maps and the story they purport to tell, a complex reality is distorted.

Moreover, by suggesting that that reality has been pre-determined, it takes away people’s most valuable attribute, their agency. The Black families who moved out of the ghettoes, dealt with blockbusting, predatory contract sellers and other challenges, stabilized neighborhoods and became homeowners should be celebrated, as should those who worked to build community against daunting odds. They were not passive victims of decisions made decades earlier.

Finally, while the areas that were redlined on the maps often remain areas of concentrated Black poverty today, they are no longer the areas where most poor Black people live or where the most urgent challenges necessarily exist. Policies or strategies that target those areas, whether justified as a means of redress or on the basis of the mistaken belief that they are where most poor Black families live, are bad policy. The dead hand of the past, in terms of perceptions of urban or neighborhood conditions of forty or eighty years ago, should not be allowed to distort our understanding of today’s realities, and drive our policy choices today. The story of the last hundred years of American urban history is a complicated story to tell, but only by understanding and telling it fully can we know how to move forward.