Testbed for the Redlining Archives of California's Exclusionary Spaces
By David Theo Goldberg & Richard Marciano
Programming by Chien-Yi Hou
The residential security maps coded affluent and desirable lending zones green and blue, less affluent and less desirable areas yellow, and zones inhabited by blacks--and so deemed undesirable--with the alarmist, high alert red.
The security maps, a central technology of residential planning and management across US cities from the late 1930s on, became the basis across many years to follow for denying mortgage loans by government and private banks especially to black home seekers and in black neighborhoods. They thus fueled racial residential segregation, urban abandonment, and ultimately capital flight, thus hyper-concentrating racial poverty, slum conditions, and urban blight. Today's gated communities are essentially privatized modalities of redlining, segregating communities informally extended.
Color-coded maps were produced in the 1930s and 1940s for almost every city in America to delineate—both to describe and determine—what urban areas were to be developed for appealing, secure, and wealth-producing housing for eligible, racially coded population groups, and what areas were to be avoided, ultimately left undeveloped or underdeveloped. These maps were accompanied by municipal regulations, mortgage company directives, and insurance company missives from the 1930s onwards directing investments and restricting what urban areas would be available for development, gentrification, and support. As the maps and accompanying materials make explicit, public and private mandates combined to code urban housing development and the basis of ensuing suburban formation in straightforwardly racially segregationist terms.
The archive reveals, perhaps unsurprisingly for anyone with knowledge of the field but still disturbingly, even chillingly, that those urban areas that remain racially segregated today tend largely to be those that were historically redlined from the mid-1930s onwards. The color-coding of the maps, we note in passing, form the basis also of the contemporary Homeland Security alert system, thus linking histories of urban segregation abstractly to more recent patterns of national restriction.