What if the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) Redlining Maps Were Not Actually the Root Cause of So Much Modern Health (and Other) Inequality?

In this issue of the newsletter, I want to discuss an important new journal article from the May issue of the American Journal of Public Health by Carolyn Swope, Scott Markley, Shannon Whitaker, and Amy Hillier entitled How and Why Does Redlining Matter for Present Day Health? Critical Perspectives on Causality, Cartography, and Capitalism.[1] I will not attempt to summarize the entire article here; that is not my goal. However, I do want to focus on some key points in the article that I think are particularly important for housing and public health scholars, students, and practitioners.

But first a little background from my perspective. When I began teaching graduate students housing policy about twenty years ago, many of them came into the first day of class not too familiar with the term “redlining.” A few might have read Kenneth Jackson’s famous Crabgrass Frontier and remembered his discussion of the federal Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC), the agency created by FDR in 1933 to refinance distressed homeowners so as to avoid foreclosure. Others had heard the term used to describe banks or insurance companies not providing loans or insurance to lower-income or nonwhite neighborhoods. But a sizable number—maybe most—were not really familiar with the term.

In recent years, this has not been the case. All, or almost all, students coming into my housing policy classes have been familiar with the term redlining. Some came into class understanding it to be a government-initiated policy from the New Deal in which the HOLC used its maps to deny loans to homeowners. Others have a more nuanced understanding, one borne out by the historical literature, in which both private- and public-sector bear substantial culpability in the practice and where some market-based redlining practices predated direct federal involvement in the underwriting of home mortgages.

What changed over this period? Why is there more widespread recognition of the term redlining in recent years? And why have so many people been at least briefly exposed to the now-famous HOLC redlining maps? I think there are two key reasons. First, in 2016, a group of researchers at the University of Richmond, Virginia Tech, and other institutions provided scholars and the general public with digitized versions of the HOLC maps, a project now called Mapping Inequality. The project received a good deal of press, but more importantly, it enabled many researchers to easily access digital versions of the HOLC maps that they could combine with other historical and current neighborhood-level data on demographics, housing and health outcomes, etc.

A second prominent factor in widening the public’s familiarity with redlining was the publication of Richard Rothstein’s book, The Color of Law, in 2017, just a year after the digitized nation-wide HOLC maps debuted. Written in an accessible, nonacademic style, Rothstein’s book soon became a sensation, breaking out far beyond the usual circles of books about housing discrimination and housing policy. Within a few years, many of my incoming graduate students had read the book, and the term redlining was well-ensconced in their vocabulary.

In the world of scholarship though, something else happened, prompted especially by the ready availability of the digitized HOLC maps. Scholars from a wide variety of fields, including public health, economics, urban planning, and sociology, began exploring the data. Some began formulating research questions along the lines of: How did historic HOLC redlining affect today’s (health, housing, economic) outcomes? I began noticing that many of these journal articles employing the digitized HOLC maps essentially used somewhat simplistic linear causal models that look something like this:

This brings me to the AJPH article. The sort of linear, causal historical thinking represented by the diagram above is problematic for several reasons, and the authors identify some of the most important ones. First, they argue that the HOLC maps may represent the symptoms as much as, or more than, the cause of disinvestment in Black neighborhoods. Second, such causal models suggest – as many casual readers of The Color of Law or other more popular literature might – that government was the producer or instigator of redlining, rather than redlining being the product of a collaboration of private and public actors—actors that often moved back and forth between private and public sectors—a collaboration thoroughly “infused” with racial-capitalist principles including a racialized theories of property values that preceded the first interventions of the federal government into the underwriting of mortgages. Finally, and the discussion that I think is the most important contribution of the article, is the fact that redlining interacted with, and was followed and preceded by, many other forms of racialized housing “dispossession” which shape various outcomes, including health outcomes, over the many decades since the HOLC maps were produced.

The authors of this paper argue that because the digitized HOLC maps are readily available, they have become a common subject of public health researchers, especially, as a concrete, measurable form of structural racism. But they question whether such researchers have sufficiently interrogated the “how and by whom they were constructed and deployed, why they were produced, and to whom the benefits accrue(d).” The authors shift the focus away from traditional “structural racism” approaches to one of racial capitalism theory. They write:

It is the last sentence on which I want to focus. The linear causal model diagramed above ignores—or at least severely oversimplifies—the continual, nonlinear, and cumulative forces of racialized dispossession that have so plagued Black households and Black neighborhoods in the U.S. The authors do us the critical service of identifying many of the other historical, racialized processes of urban dispossession that have plagued Black families and neighborhoods. Even within their substantial tabulation of racialized processes shown in their Table 1 (below), I noticed other practices that were not quite captured (e.g., racialized predatory investing or equity theft), which speaks not to any lack of thoroughness (it is only a ten-page paper after all) but to the wide, ever-changing variety of ways in which Black households and neighborhoods have been exploited over the decades since the HOLC. As the authors put it,

From contract-for-deed scams (which still occur), to the predatory subprime lending crises of the 1990s and 2000s, serial eviction practices, extractive extended-stay hotels, and the “risk-based” pricing adjustments that disproportionately penalize lower-wealth Black households, the housing market has continued to be plagued by highly racialized and uneven processes. To reduce decades of cumulative and interacting causation to one process or event is dangerous, in that it focuses too much on one historical governmental action instead of a continuous, evolving, and changing set of private and public sector actors and actions.

As the Trump Administration attempts to eviscerate fair housing and fair lending regulations, weaken key housing supports for lower-income households, and “end DEI,” we need to recognize the persistence and resilience of racial-capitalist exploitation and dispossession, and not view it only as some relic of an earlier era. These forces will remain with us, and so scholarship, practice, and policy will always be required to combat them.

From: Swope et al., 2025.

[1] If you want a copy of this article and are unable to access it via an academic library or similar, you might want to request a copy from the corresponding author, Carolyn Swope, at [email protected].