Decades after civil rights laws overruled racist policies that starved non-white neighborhoods of investment, new analysis shows that deep disparities linger.
About a third of the homes on West Oakdale Street between 15th and 16th in North Philadelphia are empty. Six vacant lots interrupt the narrow rowhouse block. On a recent November afternoon, brown tendrils of dead ivy cling tightly to the roof of one abandoned home and blanket the brick below. A thriving colony of feral cats boldly holds court among the piles of litter at the east end of the street, within sight of Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority’s North Philadelphia station.
Nearby there are blocks in worse shape, so blasted that they appear touched by the hand of God or by some implacable force of nature. Closer to Broad Street and along major thoroughfares like Lehigh Avenue stand the faded remnants of North Philadelphia’s 19th-century past.
When Alex Peay moved to Philadelphia from New York City 10 years ago, the scale of the disinvestment astounded him. He now lives about a 15-minute walk from West Oakdale Street.
“I’ve seen it in New York, but not to this scale,” says Peay, who runs a nonprofit called Ones Up, which helps disadvantaged youth learn professional skills. “There are just blocks and blocks of abandoned houses. And you go down Broad Street and notice that at one time that was a busy, high-end area. Now there’s nothing. You’re like, ‘what the hell happened?’”
There are many reasons for North Philadelphia’s desperate state. But one of the most profound can be traced back to an 80-year-old social engineering effort, when the federal government exacerbated racial wealth disparities and housing segregation across the United States.
Beginning in the 1930s, the federal government involved itself in the national economy as never before. But as it struggled to revive the housing market after the Great Depression, it spurned the opportunity to maintain or foster integrated neighborhoods. Instead the federal government encouraged mortgage lenders to withhold credit from older urban neighborhoods, immigrant communities and, especially, areas where African-Americans or other people of color lived.
The process came to be known as “redlining,” because of the way that banks and federal agencies marked maps of the neighborhoods where mortgages should be withheld, chalking them off from the rest of the city with red ink. North Philadelphia and its cousins across the U.S. were choked off from credit, the lifeblood of any healthy community.
“The federal government may not have had their hand in every transaction, but they are the ones who shaped the commercial lending culture across the country,” says N. D. B. Connolly, professor of history at Johns Hopkins University. “It was a feedback loop between the federal government and the local level.”
In many parts of Philadelphia, the cycle remains largely unbroken today.
HOW THE NEW DEAL SEGREGATED PHILADELPHIA, AND AMERICA
The New Deal gave birth to an array of federal agencies intended to stabilize the capsizing housing market, and create jobs in a moribund construction sector and shelter for those in need. The Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) staved off foreclosures by refinancing hundreds of thousands of existing mortgages, while the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) jump-started housing construction by insuring millions of mortgage loans issued by skittish private lenders. During the same period, the federal government began to finance the construction of public housing units to provide homes for working-class families.
All of these efforts were integral parts of the New Deal and helped save millions of Americans from foreclosure, unemployment and homelessness. But they were also each, to varying extents, segregationist.
Until civil rights activists brought the Federal Housing Administration to heel during Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, the government agency refused to insure in black neighborhoods and worked relentlessly to enforce segregation in America’s rapidly growing suburbs. The FHA operated with such blatant racism that, in 1955, one of the nation’s leading housing experts wrote that its policies “could have been culled from the Nuremberg laws.”
But while the FHA’s influence endures in today’s hypersegregated metropolitan regions, the most infamous maps created during the New Deal’s dabble into residential real estate came from HOLC. These “Residential Security Maps” graded neighborhoods on their perceived investment risk and creditworthiness. Areas deemed to carry the least risk of mortgage default got graded “A” and colored green, while those neighborhoods considered “hazardous” and high-risk got a D grade and red shading.
The HOLC maps are where the term “redlining” originated. They represent some of the starkest visual images of 20th-century housing discrimination.
Operating on the principle that older neighborhoods could not be restored and were inevitably trending downward, many historic urban neighborhoods were rated D by HOLC. But it wasn’t only the age and condition of an area’s buildings and infrastructure that determined its rating.
The agency hired armies of local real estate agents to appraise the properties and neighborhoods, many of whom had already done racist mapping projects for the private sector and brought the same biases into their new government gig. The appraisers hired to conduct the mapping often employed discriminatory judgments against African-American neighborhoods. (One HOLC map in Richmond, Virginia, contained a scribbled appraiser’s note that a neighborhood’s weathered building stock was “Bad for whites; Fair for darkies.”) These resulting maps largely reflected earlier documents used by the real estate industry.
Areas populated by African-Americans were inevitably considered high-risk and rated D. Recently immigrated European groups, like Jews and Italians, warranted lower grades too.
In Philadelphia, many D-rated areas remain wanting for investment. Segregation remains endemic, if unofficial. In 2015, 41.6 percent of people in Peay’s North Philadelphia neighborhood were living below the poverty line, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Two-thirds of the population identified as black.
Yet some of today’s trendiest neighborhoods like Fishtown, Manayunk and all of South Philadelphia were redlined as well, despite having small brown and black populations (if any) in the 1930s. Instead these areas were rated D because of their dense rowhouse nature, their mix of recently arrived European ethnics, and the factories that were interlaced with residential building stock. Appraisers colored tony Rittenhouse Square yellow, rating it as declining, while more suburban areas of the city, sections like West Oak Lane, earned the highest ratings and have since weathered white flight and economic destabilization. Society Hill is today one of the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods but on the HOLC map it is red. The urban renewal movement that would come after World War II hadn’t yet transformed the area into a stronghold custom made for well-to-do urban dwellers.
Recent scholarship by the University of Pennsylvania’s Amy Hillier calls into question how responsible HOLC itself was for the devastation that followed. It’s unknown how many other public or private sector entities used the agency’s maps. And HOLC itself still made plenty of loans in D-rated areas, despite the harsh judgments of their appraisers. In Philadelphia, Hillier found, the agency made 60 percent of its loans in the areas shaded red.
“To call them redlining maps implies that they caused the redlining, when in some ways they reflected practices already underway,” says Hillier, who’s a professor of social policy. “Those areas colored red and considered hazardous had already experienced disinvestment, and it was hard to get mortgages there.
But, Hillier adds, her argument isn’t intended to dispute the overall narrative about redlining. “The arc of the story is definitely still true: Systemic disinvestment between the federal government, private sector and individual citizens caused long-term damage, in particular to urban neighborhoods of color,” says Hillier. “I think my version of the narrative — that private sector, academics and multiple federal agencies were all working together and buying into the same racist view of neighborhood change and ‘good’ investment — is even more insidious.”
Even if the HOLC maps are not the smoking gun they were once assumed to be, they do reflect the patterns of real estate discrimination that existed as the FHA began its stint as one of the most influential federal agencies of the 20th century.
And because the maps highlight areas that real estate industry players and the FHA strived to avoid, they still today show how undesirable development tends to crop up in neighborhoods inhabited by people of color. Take pollution-generating industrial and waste sites. A contemporary map of toxic brownfield sites overlays with the HOLC to show that a majority sit within D-rated areas.
Or consider public housing, which began as a segregated service with different complexes designated for white and black workers. But by the 1950s, public housing became mostly populated by black Philadelphians, and so the location of the sites almost perfectly correlates with the areas of the city that HOLC rated D and colored red. Of the over 60 public housing sites in Philadelphia mostly built by the government in the years between the issuance of HOLC maps and 1967, only six rose outside the D-rated sections of the city. In the entire 51 square miles of Northeast Philadelphia, largely developed after World War II and overwhelmingly white until the 1990s, there is only one small neighborhood that was given a D rating. It is this exact tiny area where the Northeast’s only public housing complex lies.
But if there is only correlation, and not causation, between the HOLC maps and Philadelphia’s hypersegregation, there is no such ambiguity about the role of the era’s other major housing agency. The Federal Housing Administration was profoundly biased against neighborhoods like the sections of the city graded D in the HOLC maps, areas like Peay’s North Philadelphia.
About a third of the homes on West Oakdale Street between 15th and 16th in North Philadelphia are empty. Six vacant lots interrupt the narrow rowhouse block. On a recent November afternoon, brown tendrils of dead ivy cling tightly to the roof of one abandoned home and blanket the brick below. A thriving colony of feral cats boldly holds court among the piles of litter at the east end of the street, within sight of Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority’s North Philadelphia station.
Nearby there are blocks in worse shape, so blasted that they appear touched by the hand of God or by some implacable force of nature. Closer to Broad Street and along major thoroughfares like Lehigh Avenue stand the faded remnants of North Philadelphia’s 19th-century past.
When Alex Peay moved to Philadelphia from New York City 10 years ago, the scale of the disinvestment astounded him. He now lives about a 15-minute walk from West Oakdale Street.
“I’ve seen it in New York, but not to this scale,” says Peay, who runs a nonprofit called Ones Up, which helps disadvantaged youth learn professional skills. “There are just blocks and blocks of abandoned houses. And you go down Broad Street and notice that at one time that was a busy, high-end area. Now there’s nothing. You’re like, ‘what the hell happened?’”
There are many reasons for North Philadelphia’s desperate state. But one of the most profound can be traced back to an 80-year-old social engineering effort, when the federal government exacerbated racial wealth disparities and housing segregation across the United States.
Beginning in the 1930s, the federal government involved itself in the national economy as never before. But as it struggled to revive the housing market after the Great Depression, it spurned the opportunity to maintain or foster integrated neighborhoods. Instead the federal government encouraged mortgage lenders to withhold credit from older urban neighborhoods, immigrant communities and, especially, areas where African-Americans or other people of color lived.
The process came to be known as “redlining,” because of the way that banks and federal agencies marked maps of the neighborhoods where mortgages should be withheld, chalking them off from the rest of the city with red ink. North Philadelphia and its cousins across the U.S. were choked off from credit, the lifeblood of any healthy community.
“The federal government may not have had their hand in every transaction, but they are the ones who shaped the commercial lending culture across the country,” says N. D. B. Connolly, professor of history at Johns Hopkins University. “It was a feedback loop between the federal government and the local level.”
In many parts of Philadelphia, the cycle remains largely unbroken today.
HOW THE NEW DEAL SEGREGATED PHILADELPHIA, AND AMERICA
The New Deal gave birth to an array of federal agencies intended to stabilize the capsizing housing market, and create jobs in a moribund construction sector and shelter for those in need. The Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) staved off foreclosures by refinancing hundreds of thousands of existing mortgages, while the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) jump-started housing construction by insuring millions of mortgage loans issued by skittish private lenders. During the same period, the federal government began to finance the construction of public housing units to provide homes for working-class families.
All of these efforts were integral parts of the New Deal and helped save millions of Americans from foreclosure, unemployment and homelessness. But they were also each, to varying extents, segregationist.
Until civil rights activists brought the Federal Housing Administration to heel during Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, the government agency refused to insure in black neighborhoods and worked relentlessly to enforce segregation in America’s rapidly growing suburbs. The FHA operated with such blatant racism that, in 1955, one of the nation’s leading housing experts wrote that its policies “could have been culled from the Nuremberg laws.”
But while the FHA’s influence endures in today’s hypersegregated metropolitan regions, the most infamous maps created during the New Deal’s dabble into residential real estate came from HOLC. These “Residential Security Maps” graded neighborhoods on their perceived investment risk and creditworthiness. Areas deemed to carry the least risk of mortgage default got graded “A” and colored green, while those neighborhoods considered “hazardous” and high-risk got a D grade and red shading.
The HOLC maps are where the term “redlining” originated. They represent some of the starkest visual images of 20th-century housing discrimination.
Operating on the principle that older neighborhoods could not be restored and were inevitably trending downward, many historic urban neighborhoods were rated D by HOLC. But it wasn’t only the age and condition of an area’s buildings and infrastructure that determined its rating.
The agency hired armies of local real estate agents to appraise the properties and neighborhoods, many of whom had already done racist mapping projects for the private sector and brought the same biases into their new government gig. The appraisers hired to conduct the mapping often employed discriminatory judgments against African-American neighborhoods. (One HOLC map in Richmond, Virginia, contained a scribbled appraiser’s note that a neighborhood’s weathered building stock was “Bad for whites; Fair for darkies.”) These resulting maps largely reflected earlier documents used by the real estate industry.
Areas populated by African-Americans were inevitably considered high-risk and rated D. Recently immigrated European groups, like Jews and Italians, warranted lower grades too.
In Philadelphia, many D-rated areas remain wanting for investment. Segregation remains endemic, if unofficial. In 2015, 41.6 percent of people in Peay’s North Philadelphia neighborhood were living below the poverty line, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Two-thirds of the population identified as black.
Yet some of today’s trendiest neighborhoods like Fishtown, Manayunk and all of South Philadelphia were redlined as well, despite having small brown and black populations (if any) in the 1930s. Instead these areas were rated D because of their dense rowhouse nature, their mix of recently arrived European ethnics, and the factories that were interlaced with residential building stock. Appraisers colored tony Rittenhouse Square yellow, rating it as declining, while more suburban areas of the city, sections like West Oak Lane, earned the highest ratings and have since weathered white flight and economic destabilization. Society Hill is today one of the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods but on the HOLC map it is red. The urban renewal movement that would come after World War II hadn’t yet transformed the area into a stronghold custom made for well-to-do urban dwellers.
Recent scholarship by the University of Pennsylvania’s Amy Hillier calls into question how responsible HOLC itself was for the devastation that followed. It’s unknown how many other public or private sector entities used the agency’s maps. And HOLC itself still made plenty of loans in D-rated areas, despite the harsh judgments of their appraisers. In Philadelphia, Hillier found, the agency made 60 percent of its loans in the areas shaded red.
“To call them redlining maps implies that they caused the redlining, when in some ways they reflected practices already underway,” says Hillier, who’s a professor of social policy. “Those areas colored red and considered hazardous had already experienced disinvestment, and it was hard to get mortgages there.
But, Hillier adds, her argument isn’t intended to dispute the overall narrative about redlining. “The arc of the story is definitely still true: Systemic disinvestment between the federal government, private sector and individual citizens caused long-term damage, in particular to urban neighborhoods of color,” says Hillier. “I think my version of the narrative — that private sector, academics and multiple federal agencies were all working together and buying into the same racist view of neighborhood change and ‘good’ investment — is even more insidious.”
Even if the HOLC maps are not the smoking gun they were once assumed to be, they do reflect the patterns of real estate discrimination that existed as the FHA began its stint as one of the most influential federal agencies of the 20th century.
And because the maps highlight areas that real estate industry players and the FHA strived to avoid, they still today show how undesirable development tends to crop up in neighborhoods inhabited by people of color. Take pollution-generating industrial and waste sites. A contemporary map of toxic brownfield sites overlays with the HOLC to show that a majority sit within D-rated areas.
Or consider public housing, which began as a segregated service with different complexes designated for white and black workers. But by the 1950s, public housing became mostly populated by black Philadelphians, and so the location of the sites almost perfectly correlates with the areas of the city that HOLC rated D and colored red. Of the over 60 public housing sites in Philadelphia mostly built by the government in the years between the issuance of HOLC maps and 1967, only six rose outside the D-rated sections of the city. In the entire 51 square miles of Northeast Philadelphia, largely developed after World War II and overwhelmingly white until the 1990s, there is only one small neighborhood that was given a D rating. It is this exact tiny area where the Northeast’s only public housing complex lies.
But if there is only correlation, and not causation, between the HOLC maps and Philadelphia’s hypersegregation, there is no such ambiguity about the role of the era’s other major housing agency. The Federal Housing Administration was profoundly biased against neighborhoods like the sections of the city graded D in the HOLC maps, areas like Peay’s North Philadelphia.
