Redlining Richmond
Security map drawn 1937; federal underwriting practice until the Fair Housing Act of 1968The districts graded D on Richmond's 1937 HOLC security map, Richmond City, VA
Federal appraisers graded Richmond neighbourhood by neighbourhood in 1937 and outlined the Black ones in red. The grades followed the colour line, and the areas marked D are where the city's concentrated poverty and subsidised housing sit today.
In 1937 the Home Owners' Loan Corporation, a New Deal agency, produced a residential security map of Richmond grading every neighbourhood from "A First Grade", coloured green and safe for investment, down to "D Fourth Grade", coloured red. A green grade meant residents could get a mortgage. A red grade meant it was nearly impossible. The areas outlined in red were the inner-city neighbourhoods where Black Richmonders lived; the C areas were working class and whiter; the A and B areas were almost entirely white.
Richmond had been trying to fix that line in law for a quarter of a century before the appraisers arrived. The city passed a residential segregation ordinance in 1911 and the state passed enabling legislation in 1912; when the Supreme Court struck such ordinances down in 1917 the work passed to private deed covenants - Windsor Farms required that its houses be occupied "by white persons only" - and when the Court made covenants unenforceable in 1948 it passed to appraisal practice. The Federal Housing Administration's underwriting manual instructed appraisers that a neighbourhood had to be held by "the same social and racial classes" to keep its value, which made the HOLC's reasoning into national mortgage policy.
The grading then set where the city put public housing. Through the 1940s and 1950s the federal projects went into the same inner-city neighbourhoods the HOLC had marked D, so that the places where lending had been refused became the places where poverty was concentrated by design. The Library of Virginia states the outcome plainly: neighbourhoods that received a D grade now hold a high concentration of federal housing subsidies and high levels of poverty.
The map itself is not a historical curiosity in this city - it is held and published here. The University of Richmond's Digital Scholarship Lab put the 1937 Richmond map and its area descriptions online in 2008 as Redlining Richmond, and later built Mapping Inequality, which holds the scanned HOLC maps and the appraisers' own words for more than 200 American cities.
The shape here is indicative of the central D-graded districts. Mapping Inequality holds the digitised boundaries and the appraisers' own area descriptions for Richmond.
Sources
- Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal AmericaDigital Scholarship Lab, University of Richmonddsl.richmond.eduThe digitised 1937 Richmond security map and the appraisers' own area descriptions, scanned from the National Archives; the lab's earlier Redlining Richmond project published the city's map in 2008.
- Timeline of Housing Events, Mapping Inequality online exhibitionLibrary of Virginialva.virginia.govRichmond's 1911 segregation ordinance, the Windsor Farms covenant requiring white occupancy, the grading of neighbourhoods with Black residents as D, the siting of public housing in D areas, and the concentration of subsidies and poverty there today.
- Redlined Map of RichmondEncyclopedia Virginia, Virginia Humanitiesencyclopediavirginia.orgThe grading scale from A to D, and that residents of the red districts - usually poor and predominantly Black - found it nearly impossible to get a loan.
- Underwriting Manual: Underwriting and Valuation Procedure under Title II of the National Housing ActFederal Housing Administration (1938)The federal instruction that appraisers keep neighbourhoods in the hands of the same social and racial classes.