In Their Own Words

One Agency’s Maps Are Known For Documenting Redlining

But Many Other Factors Played a Role in Denying Loans, LDI Fellow Says

May 22, 2025

By:

Amy E. Hillier, PhD, MSW

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I spent years of my life obsessed with documenting the federal government’s role in mortgage redlining, a racist system that denied access to home loans in certain neighborhoods and contributed to disinvestment in Black neighborhoods as well as a lack of wealth-building homeownership for people of color. I was fascinated by the chapter in Kenneth Jackson’s book Crabgrass Frontiers entitled “Federal Subsidy of the Suburban Dream,” which links the maps created by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation to race-based neighborhood disinvestment. HOLC’s main purpose was to help homeowners at risk of foreclosure to refinance their homes. Map-making was a secondary activity.

Desperate to see the original residential security maps, I ventured to the National Archives, where I carefully unfolded the paper maps and pored through the accompanying correspondence and reports. Back in Philadelphia, I requested dusty volumes of historical mortgage records be brought up from the bowels of the main branch of the Free Library so I could transcribe and map their locations. I aimed to clarify and complicate the relationship between HOLC and redlining by following the data and making sense of the relationship among public, private, and academic actors in home mortgage patterns for my dissertation.

In 2001, I emerged and declared that, while the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation did support local segregation practices that forbade selling foreclosed properties to Black homeowners in white neighborhoods, the residential security maps HOLC produced in the late 1930s did not cause redlining. Redlining was real, and it contributed to systematic disinvestment in urban areas, especially Black neighborhoods, but the HOLC maps were not the smoking gun. The maps were not widely shared with the private sector, which financed most of the homes. Other agencies and private lenders made similar maps. The HOLC maps were merely a proxy for wide-ranging racist practices within the federal government and private sector.

Over the next two decades, a handful of scholars continued to debate HOLC’s role, and I regularly reviewed new manuscripts. But starting in 2020, the trickle of articles turned into a gusher as dozens of public health, medicine, and environmental science researchers began studying the long-term impact of historical mortgage redlining.

Structural racism came to be understood as redlining, and the HOLC maps–conveniently digitized and publicly available through Mapping Inequality–became the go-to approach to measuring it. No health or environmental outcome was spared; if HOLC redlining could be linked to heart disease and food access, why not the urban tree canopy and older adult walking behavior?

We know that redlining contributed to significant racial wealth gaps for Black Americans who were unable to purchase homes or whose homes did not appreciate at the same rate as white homeowners. We also know that many of the areas considered “hazardous” by HOLC in the 1930s remain places of deep disadvantage in regard to exposure to poverty, violence, outdoor advertising for tobacco, alcohol, and sugary beverages, and environmental hazards. However, understanding the relationship of historical housing discrimination to subsequent federal policies, private industry practices, and contemporary health inequities still eludes us.

In our recent analytic essay, fellow academics Carolyn Swope (urban planning), Scott Markley (geography), Shannon Whittaker (public health), and I (social work) take aim at this line of research for failing to teach us anything about how and why HOLC maps contributed to current inequities.

We propose racial capitalism as an alternative framework, one that underscores the complicated interplay among federal, private sector, and academic players in racializing housing policy in the 1930s and today. We offer conceptual and methodological recommendations for researchers focused on historical redlining.

Clarify HOLC’s role, including the limited direct effects of HOLC’s residential security maps, on disinvestment and health inequity.
Recognize that redlining was only one of many racialized processes that contributed to urban disinvestment. Zoning, foreclosures and evictions, property sales, rental housing, and Urban Renewal all deserve consideration from scholars investigating structural racism, as does blockbusting, where realtors incited fear among white homeowners so they would sell their homes quickly.
Give more attention to capitalism and the role of the market in the exploitation of racialized hierarchies and emphasize how the market imperative for profit shaped HOLC’s maps rather than vice versa.

There was a complex interplay among federal policy and the private market, historical patterns of urban disinvestment, and contemporary processes further producing racial inequalities. The area requires conceptually sound research to produce new understandings that can inform new interventions.

The study, “How and Why Does Redlining Matter for Present-Day Health? Critical Perspectives on Causality, Cartography, and Capitalism,” was published on April 9, 2025, in the American Journal of Public Health. Authors include Carolyn Swope, Scott Markley, Shannon Whittaker, and Amy Hillier.