The Physical Legacy of Racism: How Redlining Cemented the Modern Built Environment

Keywords: redlining, housing, historical gis, census, geographies of race
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Tuesday
Session Start / End Time: 3/1/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 3/1/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 23

Abstract

Land use choices, which date back over a century ago, still powerfully shape current development patterns. With advances in digitization, scholars have started studying the long-term effects of historic federal placed-based policies. One such area that has drawn attention from the housing and real estate community is “redlining,” designated by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation in the 1930s. However, the literature is not clear about the mechanisms through which the placed-based policy in the past affects the current neighborhood performance. In this paper, we unravel one of these mechanisms. We argue that redlining has shaped the geography of housing segregation, not just that of racial segregation, by delineating the predominant location of single-family and multi-family stock. We then hypothesize that these built environment effects persist even while redlining-related racial segregation diminished over time. Specifically, we explore how and why poorly-graded multi-family neighborhoods became locked in a continued cycle of impoverishment, with continued under-resourced and under-invested housing stock. We test this idea for ten U.S. cities for which digitized maps and 1930-2010 census data are available. By instrumenting the geography of housing segregation through the redlining policy, we demonstrate the long-term connection between the built environment and contemporary neighborhood outcomes in local housing markets.