Planning spatial obsolescence: mapping the historical geographies of racialized devaluation

Keywords: HOLC, redlining, historical geography, racial capitalism, housing, cartography
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Saturday
Session Start / End Time: 2/26/2022 02:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/26/2022 03:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 39

Abstract

The Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) was a New Deal-era federal agency that, among other tasks, mapped and graded thousands of urban neighborhoods across the US. A main purpose of this massive program was to communicate the level of risk that certain neighborhood attributes—including racial composition—posed to future returns on property investment. In recent years, interdisciplinary debates over the actual impact of the maps on the metropolitan landscape have erupted. Some researchers have linked the map grades to present-day social inequalities, implying a connection between ongoing racial inequities with HOLC “redlining.” Others, however, have argued that the maps were never actually used for “redlining” and are thus of limited utility to researchers today. Largely missing from these accounts is a broader geographical reckoning with what the HOLC mapping program reveals about how and why the private-public real-estate nexus aimed to tighten the bonds linking race and value in residential space in this moment. Extending the boundaries of the debates, I argue that the HOLC maps and their accompanying field notes offer an indispensable window into a larger project to demarcate and contain the devaluation underpinning capital accumulation in Black and other non-white spaces.