Around this time (the 1930s), you’ve got a revolution in how appraisal values of homes were being carried out, with a growing emphasis placed on more “scientific” approaches. Relatedly, government agencies and the private sector were collaborating to better incorporate data analytics into how they made their financial decisions. All these forces come together—the HOLC’s previously established contacts in the cities, people who work in the real estate and lending industries, local understandings of where money can be made and property should be purchased or sold—these forces come together to create these elaborate maps with detailed notes all about, essentially, where they think profitable investments can be made. With these maps and notes, you’ve got this powerful visual representation tied to incredibly detailed quantitative and qualitative information about urban neighborhoods that vividly depicts the governing ideology of the real estate industry of the time, and how they think about the temporal geographies of value.
IS: You’re saying that we can look back on these maps from the 1930’s, and get a glimpse in time—both of how real estate industry representatives and federal agencies saw space, but also how they envisioned it would be in the future.
SM: Yeah. That’s the thing I think is missed a lot. People think of HOLC maps as this sort of static spatial representation, but they’re as much indicators of space in time. The grades themselves are informed by this idea that neighborhoods are inevitably going to deteriorate—that’s sort of the dominant theory of the day—and so these maps also arrange city space by time. The C grade is called “Definitely declining,” so it’s projecting further decline through time, whereas B neighborhoods are called “Still desirable,” which also refers to time. Redlined areas represent many older parts of the city thought to have already done their declining. But there’s also an important racial component to this conception of time; if black folks were moving into a white neighborhood, it would be considered by neighborhood appraisers as “in decline” because black residential presence was thought to speed up the neighborhood aging process, so to speak.
IS: Redlining maps have been catapulted into the public consciousness in recent years, largely through the Mapping Inequality project. Most commonly, they’re used to demonstrate the histories and geographies of racial discrimination in US cities. As you’ve alluded to, there were lots of interlocking factors impacting why a neighborhood was graded a D, or redlined. Your dataset starts to help us visualize the relationships between variables like race, class, housing structure and building age. How does this perspective give us a better understanding of how those decisions were being made by HOLC, and what their implications are today?