2024/06/18 by Scott Markley, Steven R. Holloway · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Environmental Justice and Health Disparities
paper · doi:10.1080/24694452.2024.2350993
openalex publication_date 2024/06/18 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/15
A rapidly expanding body of research has sought to connect the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation’s (HOLC) so-called redlining maps to a wide array of present-day social injustices. The assertion is that these maps helped entrench emerging cogeographies of racial segregation and devaluation that have continued to reproduce racial-spatial inequities through time. We argue that such arguments likely underestimate the ongoing power of racism by narrowly focusing on the map grades rather than on racial segregation itself. To investigate this possibility, we conduct a set of statistical analyses that decouple race from redlining. These analyses produce two main findings. First, postwar Black population growth did not occur in all HOLC redlined neighborhoods evenly but was most concentrated in those areas that either had an initial Black population or that were adjacent to them. Second, whereas HOLC grade was a stronger predictor of neighborhood home values than Black population share until about 1970, the latter has become the more salient factor since. Thus, rather than obliquely highlighting the persistent geographies of racialized devaluation by way of the HOLC grades, researchers should instead focus on the racially uneven geographies of value directly.