Racial Geography Paper & Presentation

Question 1

Abstract

Answer 1

• The contemporary practice of homeownership in the United States was born out of government programs adopted during the New Deal. ​
  
  • NEW DEAL –
• The Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) – and later the Federal Housing Administration and GI Bill – expanded home buying opportunities, although in a segregationist fashion.
• Through mechanisms such as REDLINING, these policies fueled white suburbanization and black ghettoization.
  
  • REDLINING – A discriminatory practice in which services were withheld from potential customers from racial and ethnic minorities neighborhoods which were classified “hazardous” to investment.
  • Laying the foundation for the racial wealth gap.
• This is the first article to investigate the long-term consequences of these policies on the segregation of cities.
• Show that cities HOLC appraised became more segregated than those it ignored.
• Black-white dissimilarity, black isolation, and white-black information theory indices are 12, 16, and 8 points higher in appraised cities.
• ​These results contribute to current theoretical discussions about the persistence of segregation.
  
  • The long-term impact of these policies is a reminder of the intentionality that shaped racial geography in the United States, and the scale of intervention that will be required to disrupt the persistence of segregation.
• ​America’s stark racial geography remains a strong predictor of opportunity.
• Residential segregation shapes inequality in educational opportunity, labor market success, political efficacy, and access to credit.
• Persistence of racialized spatial inequality in the post-Civil Rights Era necessitates a look back to what precipitated the emergence of the black ghetto surrounded by a “WHITE NOOSE” of suburban affluence.
• Blame on the federal government for creating this sociospatial dichotomy through segregationist housing policies initially developed during the New Deal and expanded in subsequent decades.
• The Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC), Federal Housing Administration (FHA), and GI Bill created the contemporary U.S. homeownership society but largely excluded people and communities of color from affordable mortgage credit through explicit and implicit means, thereby reifying racialized neighborhood boundaries.
  
  • By giving federal backing to the idea that proximity to people of color necessarily leads to property value decline, these policies created a powerful financial incentive for white communities to segregate themselves.
  • Discouraging white home-buying inside black neighborhoods and constraining black home-buying outside of black neighborhoods strengthened stereotypes about quality of life and structural strength of black neighborhoods, creating a “vicious housing cycle” (Kendi 2016:170) of self-reinforcing narratives that deepened racial stereotypes, the wealth divide, and racial isolation.
• Although the racist nature of these policies is clear (Roediger 2006), there is little empirical evidence connecting their implementation to contemporary patterns of spatial inequality—or changes over time in those patterns.
• Tom Note – REDLINING – A discriminatory practice in which services were withheld from potential customers from racial and ethnic minorities neighborhoods which were classified “hazardous” to investment.
  
  • Federallymandated redlining carried consequences for racial isolation and housing values at the neighborhood level.
• First article to estimate the effects of early-twentieth-century housing policies on subsequent segregation patterns.
• What is he trying to show? – I leverage a full century of census data to show that the cities and towns appraised by HOLC became far more segregated than cities and towns ignored by HOLC.
• Methodology – ​Although HOLC appraisals were not randomly assigned (i.e., guidelines requested appraisals of all cities with populations above 40,000), I exploit imperfect implementation of this rule, as well as geographic spillover of countywide and metropolitan-wide appraisals, to provide further evidence of the impact of HOLC.
  
  • Appraised and unappraised places were similarly segregated in 1930 (i.e., before HOLC), and both groups experienced increases in segregation between 1940 and 1960, but the rise was significantly steeper for cities and towns HOLC evaluated.
  • HOLC-graded places continued to be more segregated than their ungraded counterparts through the “decline” of the American Ghetto.
• What does this show? – In 2010, the black-white dissimilarity, black isolation, and white-black information theory indices were 12, 16, and 8 points higher, respectively, in places touched by HOLC than in other cities.
  
  • These results illustrate the long-term impact government intervention can have on the hierarchy of places. HOLC placed cities on dramatically different trajectories in the 1930s, which is still evident today—a manifestation of a broader pattern of the “historically consistent, sequentially reinforcing practice of repression.
  • The stability of HOLC’s impact over most of a century also has crucial implications for ongoing theoretical discussions about how and why segregation is maintained over time.
    
    • Specifically, the inheritance of HOLC’s segregationist logic by a wide range of federal programs and institutional actors suggests the “momentum” Krysan and Crowder ascribe to individual-level dynamics may also apply to social policy and institutional decisionmaking.
    • With growing evidence showing the centrality of segregation in the U.S. stratification system these findings perhaps offer some hope that sociospatial inequality can be disrupted.
  • What is the hope? – If America’s stark racial geography was intentionally constructed, work can be done to intentionally deconstruct it—although only through redirecting the momentum carried by public policy.

Question 2

Background

Answer 2

• Policy-driven investments already in place have helped shape the dramatically unequal distribution of opportunity across the United States, where select cities—and neighborhoods within cities—experience robust job growth, housing value appreciation, and upward mobility, while others are marred by crime and multigenerational poverty.
• Research has documented the consequential and enduring effects of policies at all levels of government on the segregation of people, institutions, and infrastructure: from municipal-level zoning and land use decisions, to the drawing of school district boundaries (Bischoff 2008; Owens 2016), to the federal expansion of the interstate highway system.
  
  • Because of overlapping and reciprocal systems of racial inequality, these patterns can result in an uneven distribution of people of different racial groups across U.S. neighborhoods.
  • Although considered among the most substantial interventions into U.S. social geography, little empirical work has evaluated the long consequences of federal housing policy during the New Deal.
• NEW DEAL INVESTMENTS IN SEGREGATION:
  
  • ​The Great Depression was not only an employment crisis, but a housing crisis.
  • To stem the tide of foreclosures and spur economic activity, the Roosevelt administration created the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC), a new federal agency, as part of the New Deal.
  • HOLC granted loans to homeowners to help them avoid foreclosure and reacquire homes already lost to foreclosure.
    
    • HOLC also institutionalized the long-term, fixed payment mortgage, which largely replaced the ad hoc, patchwork system for purchasing homes.
      
      • In doing so, HOLC created the primary tool for wealth generation in the United States.
  • As the federal government took an increasingly involved role in the provision of mortgage credit, its interest in assessing the default risk of potential borrowers also grew, leading HOLC to map the distribution of perceived risk within cities across the country.
  • HOLC appraisers, gave neighborhoods one of four grades: “A” being the most desirable (displayed in HOLC’s “Residential Security Maps” in green), “B” being slightly less desirable (blue), “C” being declining neighborhoods (yellow), and “D” being undesirable (red) – Also the origin of the term “redlining.”
  • Adopting the practices of the real estate industry, appraisers based these grades on housing characteristics, proximity to industry, and the sociodemographic characteristics of a neighborhood’s residents.
  • Grades were geographically distributed in starkly segregationist fashion. The presence of low-income immigrants, or—most importantly—black families, effectively guaranteed a D grade.
    
    • For example, in 1930, not a single black person in St. Louis—home to some 94,030 African Americans at that timeresided outside of D areas
    • By conflating race with mortgage default risk and home equity growth, these policies not only justified racial discrimination, but they also created a marketplace whose metrics of risk made discrimination necessary.
  • HOLC’s practices of racial exclusion were adopted by subsequent federal programs, which were larger and more durable. Most notable among these were the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and the GI Bill.
    
    • Tom Notes – HOLC created through the New Deal was the beginning of institutionalized racial geographic segregation.
    • Tom Note – It was from HOLC that other large and enduring institutions adopted the discriminatory policies that dominated and drove geographic segregation that still endures to this day.
  • ​The FHA and GI Bill embraced HOLC’s neighborhood appraisal practices.
  • FHA drew maps like HOLC’s neighborhood security maps.
  • Following HOLC, FHA maps excluded communities of color, effectively restricting billions of dollars of housing assistance to white Americans on the condition that they not buy homes in communities of color.
    
    • Tom Note – Control of resources through structural racism.–CONFLICT THEORY.
  • ​​The FHA also expanded segregationist efforts through the widespread promotion of racial covenants, which restricted home-buying opportunities for black families in white neighborhoods, further strengthening the color line institutionalized by redlining.
    
    • These massive programs, funneled billions of dollars of housing investment away from poor, urban communities of color, and toward more affluent and suburban white communities.
  • New Deal housing programs certainly did not invent segregationist mortgage provision, but they institutionalized the practice, and implemented it at an unprecedented scale, leading many scholars to directly implicate HOLC, FHA, and the GI Bill in suburbanization, the exodus of white families from central cities, the creation of the black Ghetto.
  • HOLC, in particular, “marks a notable transition between two distinct eras of housing economics in the United States,” whereby ad hoc discriminatory efforts of individual homeowners and municipalities were replaced by widespread, federally supported and federally funded—tools for segregation.
    
    • Tom Note – HOLC helped transform individual racism in AMerica to widespread structural racismthat would come to affect all aspects of life for racial and ethnic minorities for generations.
    • Even well after HOLC was phased out private appraisers continued the practice of systematically excluding communities of color from mortgage credit established by the federal government.
    • New Deal redlining had a causal effect on neighborhood-level racial isolation (Aaronson et al. 2018), but no work thus far has explored the relationship between the legacy of these mortgage lending policies and subsequent trends in segregation at higher levels of aggregation—for example, between neighborhoods within cities.

ROLE OF REDLINING IN RISE AND SLOW DECLINE OF THE AMERICAN GHETTO:

• Segregation peaked between 1960 and 1970.
• As racial attitudes moderated (Bobo et al. 2012) and federal legislation made explicit housing discrimination illegal (Massey 2005), black-white segregation declined in the postCivil Rights Era.
  
  • However, blackwhite segregation remains stubbornly high especially in historically hypersegregated areas populations.
• Place** **Stratification Model – Institutional practices create and reify racialized spatial boundaries. The segregation of black and white households is perpetuated over time through a relatively stable social hierarchy of neighborhoods and cities, within which residential mobility decisions are mad.
  
  • Following from this perspective, we should observe spatial inequality deepen as the result of institutional intervention in the housing market, such as federally mandated redlining.
  • Because these policies drove investment away from already disenfranchised black communities and toward already advantaged white communities, they exacerbated the hierarchy of places.
    
    • Tom Note – Driving housing quality UP in white neighborhoods and driving housing quality DOWN in minority neighborhoods.
• Spatial Assimilation Theory – Points to disparities in socioeconomic factors between black and white households as drivers of differential neighborhood location.
  
  • As black families become similar to white families in income, wealth, education, and other measures of socioeconomic status, they will increasingly inhabit similar neighborhoods and cities.
  • Because HOLC restricted homeownership to white households and linked proximity to black households to neighborhood decline, HOLC policies may have slowed black families’ class mobility and “assimilation.”
  • Spatial manifestation of racial inequality ran parallel to a key component of economic inequality—unequal access to home equity, the key tool for asset accumulation.
    
    • Put another way, redlining may have made it more difficult for black families to accumulate socioeconomic resources with which to “assimilate.”
    • These racist policies created a “vicious housing cycle” by depressing housing values in black neighborhoods, decreasing demand for housing within those neighborhoods, and further depressing housing values.
      
      • Tom Note – Because growing home value is one of the primary ways families accumulate wealth in the US.
      • Racial geography served as a foundation for a growing wealth gap between whites and blacks by depressing housing values in black neighborhoods.
  • Over time, the wealth gap has become a dramatic site of racial stratification.
  • Relatively fewer financial resources for black families can, in turn, lead to fewer residential mobility options.
    
    • This lack of mobility, which reinforces housing stratification and the corresponding wealth gap, is again directly linked to the legacy of explicitly racist policies.
• Racial Preferences – Perpetuate segregation over time, as bias toward neighborhood homogeneity can, in aggregate, result in racial isolation.
  
  • By institutionalizing and legitimizing the practice of redlining, New Deal housing policies may have exacerbated, exaggerated, or locked in home seekers’ racial preferences and created powerful financial incentives for real estate agents and mortgage lenders to make spatial segregation manifest.
  • Incorporation of widespread racist attitudes into federal policy may have provided institutional justification for those attitudes, thereby slowing or delaying the eventual moderation of racial attitudes in the latter decades of the twentieth century.
    
    • Tom Note – The institutional policies that grew from HOLC and The New Deal likely condemned minorities to discrimination for longer than would have endured if these policies had not been put in place.
  • ​Discriminatory policies fed racist ideas about black places:
    
    • For example, negative stigma of poor communities of color.
  • Tom Note – These are the three theoretical perspectives he refers to:
    
    • ​These overlapping theoretical perspectives illustrate the many intersecting ways federal redlining.
    • place stratification, spatial assimilation, and racial preferences.
• Structural Sorting Perspective – Offers a holistic viewpoint from which to understand segregation and—importantly—what sustains segregation over time.
  
  • Argue that many self-perpetuating mechanisms, such as the reduced economic mobility of black families or segregated sources of information, maintain segregation over time, through residential moves structured along racial lines.
  • The structural sorting perspective is particularly useful in assessing whether HOLC was a “weak” or “strong” institutional intervention.
    
    • Again, HOLC did not invent racist mortgage provision, but it invested heavily in a segregationist logic, which was implicitly and explicitly inherited by subsequent federal policies, including FHA and the GI Bill, highway development, urban renewal, and Civil Rights Era efforts to ostensibly expand black homeownership.
    • On the local level, urban planning and zoning efforts often segmented municipalities to isolate white households from communities of color
  • Private mortgage lenders and real estate speculators throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century internalized the conflation of race, place, and mortgage risk to the detriment of African Americans.
    
    • Tom Note – So, the influence of HOLC is still powerful to this day.
  • The structural sorting perspective primarily focuses on individual- and community-level dynamics, but these and countless other examples illustrate that the ideas codified by HOLC may also carry tremendous “momentum” on policy and institutional levels.
  • The self-reinforcing dynamics of overt and even unintentional actions sustain HOLC’s racist logic in the policy sphere, proving it to have been quite a “strong” intervention.

Question 3

Data and Methods

Answer 3

DATA AND METHODS:

• Explore differences in segregation over time between cities and towns (i.e., census places1 ) that were appraised versus not appraised by HOLC.
• Provides a large sample of both appraised and unappraised observations.
• My primary concern is the extent to which black individuals were segregated from white individuals.
• I limit my analyses to these two groups for several reasons, the first of which is the fact that HOLC appraisals were quite sensitive to the presence of black residents—even a single black person within a neighborhood could lead to a D grade.
• Focus on African Americans is also evidenced by the fact that “Negro” population share was the only racial category in the neighborhood descriptions included with HOLC Residential Security Maps.
  
  • The second (and related) reason for this analytic focus is that the black-white color line is stronger than other racial boundaries.
    
    • third reason is data consistency. Over the course of the twentieth century, the way the U.S. Census categorized Hispanic/ Latino and Asian groups changed far more dramatically than did definitions of white and black groups.
• I rely on imperfect measures of changing racial geography gathered from multiple census data sources.
• I discuss potential bias introduced from this technique in detail below.

Measuring Redlining:

• Two sources to identify cities and towns that were appraised by HOLC.
• List of surveyed cities generated via archival research for all cities with a population of at least 40,000, there was uneven and incomplete compliance.
• Supplement the Hillier (2005) list with georeferenced HOLC data provided by Mapping Inequality.
• I overlay Mapping Inequality shapefiles of neighborhood appraisal patterns with shapefiles describing contemporary census place boundaries.
• Any places that overlap with HOLC appraisal maps or places listed by Hillier (2005) are coded as “HOLC Appraised.”
  
  • This result suggests the institutional process of just being appraised is all that matters.

Tracking Cha_nge Over Time In Racial Geography:_

• I combine data from several census sources to assess changes in place-level racial geography.
• I began with 1920, because that is the first year for which data on intra-city geography are available.

Question 4

Findings

Answer 4

• Before HOLC, to-be-appraised cities had, on average, slightly higher black-white dissimilarity indices than unappraised cities (.559 compared to .501 among unappraised cities) and information theory indices (.227 compared to .205).
• Tom Note – (**This is Particulary Important):
  
  • **​Conversely, by 1930, black isolation was lower in to-be-appraised cities (.180) than in unappraised ones (.201).
  • **By 1950, black families in appraised cities were more isolated than black families in unappraised cities.
• Gaps between HOLC-appraised cities and cities HOLC ignored widened dramatically in the post-World War II period.
• Both groups of cities experienced increases in segregation, although the rise was sharper among the appraised cities –
  
  • Especially along the dimension of black isolation.
• By 2010, ungraded cities had a similar average black isolation index as they did in 1930 (.202), whereas black households in graded areas are far more isolated today (.366) than in 1930.
• Tom NOTE – GRADED AREAS = APPRAISED AREAS In _​_the paper and presentation refer to the areas as graded A, B, C, D for MAX IMPACT.
• ​​​​In contrast to the stability of black isolation, both dissimilarity and information theory measures declined beginning around 1960 (for graded and ungraded areas).
• By 2010, dissimilarity fell to .356 and .239 for appraised and unappraised cities, respectively—both below their 1920 starting points.
• Tom Note – In the paper and presentation refer to these specific measures simply as “The Indices he used to calculate segregation” with particular focus on “black isolation.”
• ​The gaps between appraised and ignored cities that emerged in the 1940s have not closed in the intervening six decades.
• In 2010, appraised cities had .117 higher dissimilarity, .084 higher information theory, and .164 higher isolation—all of which are statistically significant (p < .001) and substantively important.
• Along the measure of information theory, appraised cities were approximately as segregated in 2010 as unappraised cities were two decades.

Estimating Redlining ‘s Impact:

• The intuition behind these models is that they identify differences in pre-to-post-HOLC changes in segregation between graded and ungraded cities.
• the average difference in segregation between the pre- and postHOLC periods among ungraded cities (net of covariates in some models), and coefficients on the graded by HOLC variable measure the average difference in segregation between appraised and unappraised cities before HOLC.
• On average, this measure of segregation was approximately .076 lower in the years following HOLC implementation within ungraded cities (i.e., the coefficient on post-1930). Graded cities, however, experienced a .106 increase in dissimilarity relative to ungraded cities.

Exploiting Imperfect Implementation of HOLC Appraisal Assignment And Geographic Spillover:

• This stage of analysis is premised on the assumption that cities right above 40,000 would have otherwise experienced similar segregation trajectories as cities right below 40,000 were it not for redlining.
• Effect of HOLC on dissimilarity (the first row), isolation (second row), and information theory (third row) are all positive.
• Estimates of HOLC’s effect on all three segregation indices are significant in the second-smallest population band (i.e., .2 standard deviations above and below 40,000) and remain significant through all subsamples, with relatively stable magnitudes.
• Largest ungraded city (i.e., Elizabeth, NJ, 1930 population: 114,607).
  
  • Tom Note – There was no explanation why HOLC ignored some cities other than saying it was “inconsistent.”
• **Tom Note – SUMMARY FINDINGS:
  
  • ​All approaches supported the hypothesis that HOLC appraisals (Grading) INCREASED RACIAL GEOGRAPHIC SEGREGATION.

Exploring Possible Mechanisms:

• Data limitations preclude a robust analysis of the mechanisms responsible for HOLC’s segregationist effect on appraised cities (e.g., there are no reliable data tracking racial preferences over time within places).
  
  • One possible mechanism for which reliable data exist is shifting racial populations. It is possible, for example, that neighborhood appraisals served as a signal to mobile white families that racialized geographic advantage would be secured via redlining (i.e., government-enforced racial boundaries would preserve the color line).
  • Conversely, redlining may have signaled that a city had a non-trivial black or immigrant population, which persuaded white, native-born households to move away from that city.
  • Provide some evidence that inter-city migration may have been shaped by the distribution of HOLC appraisal.
    
    • Another potential mechanism connecting appraisal to segregation is racialized sorting within cities due to HOLC. For example, neighborhood ratings may have made it more difficult for both black and white households to cross the color line due to the financial disincentives of integration created by HOLC. Tom Note – Note in the paper that there were “many” implications to The New Deal and HOLC that extend far beyond racial Geographic segregation. Because that serves as the basis for myriad off shooting negative implications in all facets of life.
  • ​​​​HOLC likely hardened racial borders between neighborhoods within cities.
  • HOLC shaped both inter- and intra-city sorting, resulting in differentiated segregation trends between graded and ungraded places.
  • HOLC may have had more than twice as large an effect on black-white dissimilarity in the South. Tom Note – Where other discriminatory factors exacerbated the impact of HOLC.

COUNTERFACTUAL HISTORIES:

• My primary argument here is that had the color line not been granted federal backing and encouragement, the national rise in segregation during the middle of the twentieth century would have been less severe.
• Had a “white noose” of suburban affluence not emerged around the black ghetto (Rothstein 2017:201), racial differences in educational attainment (Reardon et al. 2019; Reardon and Owens 2014; Wodtke et al. 2011), wealth accumulation (Conley 1999; Desmond 2017; Flippen 2004; Oliver and Shapiro 2006), and politics (Ananat and Washington 2009) may not have been as severe and may not have provided segregation the “momentum” it continues to have (Krysan and Crowder 2017).

Question 5

Discussion

Answer 5

• These findings corroborate claims that New Deal housing policies had enormous effects on racial geography in the United States by encouraging segregation through the drawing and grading of neighborhoods.
• Tom Note – Also worked against the Structural Functionalist perspective of race where HOLC prevented Assimilation.
• There is also an element of Symbolic Interactism here. The meaning we give to a neighborhood with or without minorities living there determines our resulting behavior.
• Here, 19^th Century individuals assigned negative meaning to living near minorities and that meaning resulted in behavior that transformed individual racism into policy that became structural.
• This was the opposite of CONTACT HYPOTHESIS!
• ​The New Deal heavily subsidized the segregation of white people and capital from black people.Tom Note – CONFLICT THEORY
• Racialized places provide opportunities for white families’ upward mobility (Lipsitz 2011) and the disproportionate immobility of disadvantaged black families (Sharkey 2008, 2013).Tom Note – CONFLICT THEORY
• The lasting effects of HOLC, FHA, and the GI Bill not only encouraged and institutionalized racist ideas about black people and black places (Kendi 2016; Lipsitz 2011; Sugrue 1996), but invested heavily in them, by restricting black families’ access to capital, and increasing white families’ access. The segregationist legacy of New Deal housing policies endorsed the idea that racism was a tool with which white Americans could improve their neighborhoods, at the expense of black neighborhoods.
• Generations later, this inheritance, or non-inheritance, remains one of the most powerful structural determinants of racial stratification (Desmond 2017; Faber and Ellen 2016; Massey 2007; Oliver and Shapiro 2006).