WebMD, February 16, 2023, Advocates Decry ‘Environmental Apartheid’ in Port Cities
In the 1930s, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) sketched Los Angeles. Under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, the HOLC was responsible for helping Americans, crippled by the Great Depression, refinance their mortgages. To guide its investments, the HOLC took markers to maps, shading certain areas of town green, others yellow, and still others red.
Today, the legacy of those maps – and the “redlining” they started by withholding money from communities with worse “residential security” scores – lives on. According to the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, nonwhite communities, like Long Beach, were often deemed “hazardous,” receiving the worst scores and the least money. Property values suffered over the long term.
