Redlining Baltimore
Security map drawn 1937; federal underwriting practice until the Fair Housing Act of 1968West Baltimore, graded D on the 1937 HOLC map, Baltimore City, MD
Federal appraisers graded Black Baltimore neighbourhoods “D” and coloured them red on the city's 1937 security map, cutting them off from mortgage lending for a generation.
In 1937 the Home Owners' Loan Corporation, a New Deal agency, produced a "residential security map" of Baltimore grading every neighbourhood from A to D for mortgage risk. The grading was not a prediction; it was a policy. Appraisers' notes for the red D zones routinely named the presence of Black residents as the hazard, in exactly those words, alongside the age of the housing stock.
Baltimore had been building toward this for decades. In 1910 it passed one of the first racial zoning ordinances in the country, and when the Supreme Court struck such ordinances down in 1917, the work passed to private racial covenants and then to appraisal practice. The Federal Housing Administration adopted the same logic in its underwriting manual, which instructed appraisers that a neighbourhood must be occupied by "the same social and racial classes" to hold its value, and that natural or artificial barriers between races helped.
The consequence was that federally backed mortgages - the instrument that built the white middle class - were effectively unavailable in Black neighbourhoods. Families there bought on contract at inflated prices, or did not buy at all. The boundaries drawn in 1937 still predict the distribution of home values, tree cover, asthma rates and life expectancy across Baltimore today.
The shape here is indicative. Mapping Inequality holds the exact digitised HOLC boundaries for Baltimore and more than 200 other cities.
Sources
- Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal AmericaDigital Scholarship Lab, University of Richmonddsl.richmond.eduDigitised HOLC security maps and the appraisers' own area descriptions, scanned from the National Archives.
- The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated AmericaLiveright (2017)Richard Rothstein's account of federal housing policy as the engine of residential segregation.
- Underwriting Manual: Underwriting and Valuation Procedure under Title II of the National Housing ActFederal Housing Administration (1938)The federal instruction that appraisers protect neighbourhoods from “inharmonious racial groups”.