By Emily Meriam, Ross Donihue, and Craig McCabe, ArcUser, June 2021
Redlining is the practice of discriminating against residents of an area based on race or ethnicity through systematic policies that deny financial services—especially mortgages—that are applied based on location. The Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) was created in 1933 to increase homeownership as part of the New Deal. HOLC mapped neighborhoods and assigned grades to areas based on perceived lending risk factors that included racial and ethnic composition. Redlining has had adverse effects on these neighborhoods that can still be seen today.
Researchers in this collaborative project found that environmental factors, such as heat islands, had a striking relationship to HOLC grades. They joined forces to elevate this undertold story and explore this relationship further by performing geospatial analysis on environmental data layers in relation to HOLC grades. These collaborations allow researchers and museum staff to raise awareness of the legacy of redlining.
An ArcGIS StoryMaps story, The lines that shape our cities,
that profiles the research done by this team. It explores how redlining policies from the 1930s have left an environmental legacy that is visible in cities today. The story identifies four cities—St. Louis, Missouri; Montgomery, Alabama; Fort Wayne, Indiana; and Oakland, California—that haven’t received major redlining coverage and performs GIS methods on data from these cities to see how environmental characteristics like tree coverage, impervious surfaces, topography, and heat islands relate to HOLC grades.
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