Redlining Philadelphia
Security map drawn 1937; federal underwriting practice until the Fair Housing Act of 1968North and West Philadelphia, graded D on the 1937 HOLC map, Philadelphia County, PA
Federal appraisers graded North and West Philadelphia "D" and coloured them red, and the city's banks followed. The grades drawn in 1937 still track where the mortgages, the street trees and the life expectancy are.
The Home Owners' Loan Corporation drew a residential security map of Philadelphia in 1937, grading neighbourhoods A to D for mortgage risk. The appraisers' own area descriptions name the hazard: the presence of Black residents, set down in those words alongside the age of the housing stock and the proximity of industry. Large parts of North Philadelphia, much of West Philadelphia and the older river wards were graded D and shaded red.
Philadelphia had a particular reason to matter here. It was a city of rowhouses and small owners, with one of the highest homeownership rates in the country, and the whole promise of federally insured lending was that an ordinary wage earner could buy one. In the red zones the promise did not operate. Families bought on instalment contracts at inflated prices with no equity until the final payment, or rented from landlords who had no reason to maintain anything, or did not buy at all. The Federal Housing Administration's underwriting manual told appraisers that a neighbourhood had to hold the same social and racial classes to keep its value, so the private market and the federal one moved together.
The effects did not need anyone to maintain them. The 1937 grades predict, block for block, where Philadelphia's mortgage denials, vacant lots, lead exposure, tree canopy, summer heat and life expectancy fall today - a gap of roughly twenty years in life expectancy between some neighbourhoods a few miles apart. Everything else on this map that happened in Philadelphia happened inside the lines this map drew: Columbia Avenue, Osage Avenue and the blocks around Girard College are all in the red.
The two shapes are indicative of the D-graded areas of North and West Philadelphia. Mapping Inequality holds the exact digitised HOLC boundaries for Philadelphia and more than 200 other cities.
Sources
- Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal AmericaDigital Scholarship Lab, University of Richmonddsl.richmond.eduThe digitised 1937 Philadelphia security map 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 on the FHA underwriting manual's racial instructions and the federal role in making segregated lending national policy.