Philadelphia’s homicide rate has been on the rise, reaching a more than decades long high in 2018. The Office of the City Controller decided to study homicides as a result, releasing a report on the economic impact of homicides in October 2019. The report analyzed historical data from 2006 through 2018 to quantify the effect of a single homicide on residential sale prices in Philadelphia and used the potential economic benefit of reducing homicides as a leverage point for the City to consider alternative or more concerted investment in proven violence reduction strategies. The report carefully noted the complex intersection of gun violence and intergenerational structural racism, including residential segregation, and its role in shaping Philadelphia’s neighborhoods today. Since the report’s release, 2019’s homicide rates have been finalized, surpassing 2018’s total. In an effort to provide additional historical context and support a better understanding of the collective responsibility for these challenges, the Controller’s Office mapped 2019’s homicides and present-day disadvantage alongside 1930s redlining maps. This interactive data release is part of an on-going analysis by the Controller’s Office of gun violence in Philadelphia.
A History of Redlining
During the first half of the 20th century, local and federal governments prevented African Americans and other minority populations from homeownership through the creation of discriminatory federal mortgage programs and redlined appraisal maps, as well as the use of racially restrictive stipulations written into deeds that prohibited certain races from the ownership of specific properties. These policies, which exclusively provided white populations with the access to capital and privilege necessary for homeownership, had a significant role in the racial segregation of American cities.
Discriminatory lending practices became ingrained at the federal level during the 1930s with the creation of the Homeowners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) and the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), New Deal programs that provided financial support to homeowners and aimed to increase homeownership in the wake of the Great Depression. HOLC refinanced home mortgages in default or at risk of foreclosure [1] and created now-infamous appraisal maps of cities across the country that included an explicit racial component. The FHA, which provided federal insurance for mortgages, relied on these neighborhood appraisals, as well other risk assessments, to tailor its underwriting policies to limit or prohibit mortgage insurance for individuals from neighborhoods deemed “risky.” [2]
These discriminatory federal policies directed lending practices in the private sector, creating significant barriers to mortgage lending for African Americans and incentivizing white populations to move out of redlined neighborhoods and into approved, racially homogenous neighborhoods. [3] By the end of World War II, the definition of “white” had expanded to include Eastern European, Irish, and Jewish populations, [4] creating majority African American neighborhoods across America’s cities with depreciating property values and compounding disinvestment. Ultimately, the homeownership enabled by these programs allowed select populations to accumulate wealth through the 1960s, while redlining and other racially restrictive policies explicitly prevented African Americans from participating in this wealth building. [5]