Smithsonian Magazine, September 9, 2020: How Redlining Made City Neighborhoods Hotter
Governments at the local and federal level in the United States have long played a role in segregating city blocks. For instance, in 1933 in the wake of the Great Depression, the federal government created the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation. The organization set out to map the perceived “riskiness” of lending in neighborhoods in 239 cities, marking them green for “best” or red for “hazardous” — a process known today as redlining. In doing so, these officials fortified structures that denied loans to lower-income, minority populations, which were typically deemed “hazardous,” and divert resources toward white neighborhoods, as Tracy Jan reported previously for the Washington Post.
