Many American cities have developed on a foundation of racial segregation. There is growing interest to understand how neighborhoods have changed in the wake of policies of racial exclusion, such as redlining, a federal practice by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) that systematically denied mortgages to people of color for decades in the United States. This paper examines neighborhood change in Baltimore since redlining began in the 1930s using two sources for comparison. First, using US Census data we track neighborhood trends based upon components of the HOLC’s mapping – owner occupancy, vacancy, and racial composition – over time from 1930 to 2010. Second, we compare 1930s neighborhood appraisals by the HOLC with Baltimore City’s present-day Housing Market Typology, to examine the extent to which historical grades correspond to current real estate market stability today.
Results/Conclusions
Our main findings suggest that, contrary to other studies, formerly redlined areas exhibit a wide range of variability in owner occupancy, vacancy, and market stability, largely due to postindustrial revitalization efforts in the downtown core, while yellowlined areas have experienced more uniform socioeconomic decline as a result of abandonment and capital disinvestment. As we might expect, neighborhoods in areas that once received the highest HOLC grades have remained among Baltimore’s most economically prosperous and stable in the housing market over the past 80 years. We thus conclude that redlining’s long-term effects on the socioeconomic characteristics of neighborhoods are not necessarily linear and should be understood in a historical-geographical context of social, political, and economic change.