Deborah Breen – “Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America” (Journal of American History, 2019)
- This article is a scholarly review of the Mapping Inequality project itself
- It explains how the project uses HOLC data and digital tools to visualize redlining
- It also evaluates the project’s effectiveness as a DH resource
Extract
Mapping Inequality and Renewing Inequality are part of American Panorama: An Atlas of United States History, a multipart project created by the University of Richmond’s Digital Scholarship Lab (Dsl) with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Virginia Tech, the University of Maryland, and Johns Hopkins University. Mapping Inequality was released in December 2015, with Renewing Inequality following two years later—and what a difference that short span of time makes in the ambition and conceptualization of each project.
The subtitle of Mapping Inequality explains the focus of the Web site: redlining in New Deal America. The site is predicated on the collection of maps and surveys from the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (Holc), created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the celebrated “first 100 days” of the New Deal. The surveys, conducted by local realtors and lending officers between 1935 and 1940, document the details of cities throughout the country for the purposes of determining investment risks for home mortgages. City maps were color-coded, with red for the least desirable sections, hence the term redlining—now a shorthand way of describing the limited and limiting living conditions for many African American communities. Scholars debate intention versus consequence with these documents: Did the maps and surveys create inequality, or did they merely document it? Beyond the merits of that discussion, the depth of detail in the Holc materials provides a rich trove of primary sources useful not only for historians but also for current policy makers, urban planners, and community activists. Users may look at environmental conditions, income levels, racial and ethnic makeup of areas, employment categories, and the age and condition of housing stock. In the presentation of this valuable material, statistics suggest stories.