Redlining is the discriminatory and, now, illegal practice of refusing someone credit, a loan or insurance based on the applicant's race or ethnicity -- even if they were qualified. For those applicants who were approved, it was common for lenders to add unfair terms in the contracts. The term redlining comes from the red lines that real estate lenders would draw on their maps to mark predominantly Black or mixed-race neighborhoods. It is an example of structural racism, or a system in which public policies, practices and other norms reinforce racial inequity.
Discrimination in housing in the United States occurred prior to the 1930s, but the establishment of the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) and the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) during the New Deal Era made housing discrimination much more systematic. This was a form of federal aid aimed at stabilizing the housing market and making homes more affordable during the Great Depression. Government officials created internal (nonpublic) residential security maps to help decision-makers in the government and financial institutions decide which communities could receive government-insured mortgages -- a loan for property where the lender can obtain ownership of the property should payments not be made -- for homeownership.
They marked places as follows:
Green or A (“Best”): An “ethnically homogeneous” (meaning white), U.S. born, upper- or middle-class neighborhood where “professional men” lived. These areas still had room for growth and had no Black residents, so were therefore the most “desirable.”
Blue or B (“Still Desirable”): An established neighborhood with not as much new housing and with most or nearly all white and U.S.-born residents. These were areas thought to have a low chance of an immigrant or person of color moving in, making it more appealing to white homeowners .
Yellow or C (“Definitely Declining”): Neighborhoods bordering Black neighborhoods where European immigrants and working-class people lived. These places were viewed as concerning, as “undesirable populations” could join the community.
Red or D (“Hazardous”): Neighborhoods that had predominantly Black residents, making them undesirable to white homeowners. These locations were often also in industrial areas with older buildings and infrastructure.
These maps helped make homeownership more affordable for white homebuyers by making it easier for them to identify and apply for mortgages in predominantly white areas. In general, lenders refused mortgages to people who wanted to buy in red-lined areas. Lenders also would not give Black people mortgages to buy in white areas, so Black applicants were effectively barred from homeownership. Redlining also created and reinforced segregation in most of the United States.
Classifying places in this manner is no longer legal thanks to the passage of the Fair Housing Act, which prohibits discrimination based on race, color, national origin, religion, sex, familial status and disability. The Fair Housing Act was passed in 1968 due to activism efforts by the NAACP, the National Committee Against Discrimination in Housing, and the GI Forum, which leveraged the fact that Black and Hispanic soldiers coming home after serving in the Vietnam War could not get a home mortgage. Community organizations, such as the Marshall Heights Community Development Organization in Washington D.C., also emerged in redlined areas to help Black people buy homes and to improve living conditions in redlined neighborhoods.
The Fair Housing Act of 1968 made it illegal to use race to discriminate against prospective homeowners, but race continues to impact mortgage approval rates as of the 2020s. Research in 2020 found that Black and Hispanic applicants were denied home loans at higher rates than white and Asian applicants. Further, the effects of redlining can still be seen. Areas classified as red or yellow in the 1930s, ‘40s, and ‘50s, continue to be underserved by government agencies and private entities. For example, hospitals in areas that were once redlined and that still have predominantly Black or Hispanic populations have closed at higher rates than those in white neighborhoods. Research has shown that diabetes is more prevalent in formerly redlined areas, a problem that has been linked in part to inadequate access to fresh or healthy food.
This map layer was created by Esri and the University of Richmond’s Digital Scholarship Lab. It features approximately 143 cities and 7,148 neighborhoods in the United States of America, a subset of the more than 200 cities that were redlined by HOLC in the 1930s. Due to licensing rules, National Geographic is unable to host the full dataset at this time.
