Educational Equity
Read my latest research.
Web Map by BNORDENG_depaul_edu
Item created: May 21, 2023 Item updated: May 21, 2023
Description
How Does 1930-1940 Land Use Policy Continue to Affect Our Communities Today? And ... Can Qualified Opportunity Zones Be Used to Remedy the Problem?
HOLC Redlining Practices:
In the 1930s-1940s, the U.S. government created the Home Owners' Loan Corporation to provide loans to families at risk of foreclosing on their mortgages. HOLC created maps of cities with populations of 40,000 or above to grade areas on the perceived risk of loan default. The maps contained racist evaluations of land tracts. Although there is no evidence of HOLC loans being denied to people of color, their assessments were shared with the FHA, National Board of Realtors, and Lenders. There is substantial evidence that these organizations used a similar grading technique to deny home loans to non-white families. This historic lending practice of denying loans and economic opportunities to people of color and economic disadvantage is called "Redlining," due to the fact that the lowest-grade HOLC areas were outlined in red. This map contains the HOLC grading layer, provided by the Esri Living Atlas, in which Graded maps for 149 U.S. cities can be found. Map grades are opaque red, yellow, green, and blue to designate HOLC grading levels on the map.
Current Community Indicators of Disadvantage
In 2021, President Biden issued Executive Order 14008, which did several things. One of these things was to create a screening tool to identify communities disproportionately impacted by climate change and economic hardship. The purpose of this tool, the Justice 40 Initiative, is to identify communities in need of economic and environmental assistance. It was created in 2022 by the Council on Environmental Quality. In the map, this layer is the Justice 40 Initiative Layer. Disadvantaged areas are shaded in transparent grey/blue.
The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act designates thousands of "Opportunity Zones" in which investment is incentivized to help create jobs and strengthen low-income areas. Under this act, states may designate up to 1/4 of low-income census tracts as Opportunity Zones. However, not all are located in low-income areas. In 2022, the Opportunity Zones Transparency, Extension, and Improvement Act was introduced in Congress but failed to become law. The Qualified Opportunity Zones layer designates Opportunity Zones in transparent pink shading.
Questions to consider:
What areas on the map show overlap between formerly HOLC Redlined grades and current Justice 40 "Disadvantaged" evaluations?
How could past discriminatory practices have shaped communities into what we see today?
What "Disadvantaged" areas overlap with "Qualified Opportunity Zones"?
Is the Opportunity Zone program being well utilized to boost economic and social well-being in disadvantaged communities?
This map contains 3 layers:
1. HOLC Graded areas 1930-1940
2. Justice 40 Initiative -Climate and Justice Screening Tool for Disadvantaged Communities (2022)
3. Qualified Opportunity Zones in effect now, created in 2017
All data links for this map were taken from the Esri Living Atlas, with additional information from the University of Richmond Mapping Inequality Project.
Layers
Justice40 Tracts November 2022 Version 1.0
Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC) Neighborhood Redlining Grade
Terms of Use
Where Do Formerly HOLC Redlined areas overlap with Disadvantaged and Opportunity Zones? by Betty Nordengren is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-Sharealike 4.0 International License. HOLC background information referenced from the work of the Mapping Inequality Project by the University of Richmond.