Federal “Redlining” Maps: A Critical Reappraisal

Keywords: HOLC, Redlining, Housing, United States, Urban, Real Estate, Data
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

In the past decade, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation’s (HOLC) so-called “redlining” maps have gone from a niche corner of urban historical scholarship to the center of mainstream narratives about racism in the United States. In this presentation, I map this journey and trace the contours of the ongoing debates that have emerged, identifying two competing camps I call “HOLC Culpable” and “HOLC Skeptical.” Finding these perspectives to have run up against their self-imposed limitations, I outline a research agenda that breaks from the debate’s narrow confines by reading the HOLC mapping program through the lenses of racial capitalism and critical cartography. This approach casts the maps and their accompanying field notes not as objects that were functionally used to making lending decisions but as the products of a data gathering program devised to impose order and predictability onto a chaotic home value landscape. Among other things, I argue, this was accomplished by collapsing race and value in space and time. Accordingly, the maps and field notes offer a unique window into the governing racial-spatial ideology of twentieth-century US real estate capital, suggesting that the true power of these maps has almost certainly been underestimated.