Redlining’s Environmental Toll
The city of Richmond, Virginia drew up its redlining map in the 1930s, with four “zones”: green, blue, yellow and red. Nearly a century later, the original green and blue zones, inhabited primarily or exclusively by whites, turn out to continue to enjoy advantages over the yellow and red zones, which (a) have less tree cover, (b) are more densely built, (c) have fewer communal amenities (parks, playgrounds), and (d) tend to have more paved-over areas such as parking lots and highways (which often split up once-unified neighborhoods, much to their detriment), all of which contribute to (e) differences in average temperatures of between 5 and 15 degrees Fahrenheit during hot summer days. Currently, Richmond suffers from an average of 43 excessively hot (+90 degrees) days per season; by 2089, this will have doubled to 86 days.
The state capital (pop. approx. 230,000) is home to the University of Richmond, which together with several partner universities has created an invaluable digital library of the U.S.’ redlining maps. It’s accessible here, and it is probably the most important archival source for those investigating the history of the HOLC (Home Owners’ Loan Corporation) and the original maps which created – or intensified and calcified – housing discrimination by race (and relatedly, by economics) throughout American cities.
Here’s how it worked: Starting in the 1930s, HOLC began “mapping” cities for the purpose of financing – in other words, marking up the existing street maps of cities to determine eligibility for a home loan mortgage (and how much of the appraised value that mortgage would cover) depending on the “desirability” of the neighborhood in which one was purchasing. Green areas were the most desirable (“best”), followed by blue (“still desirable”), yellow (“declining”) and finally, red (“undesirable”) (hence the term “redlining”).
The focus here is on the Virginia state capital’s least- and most-desirable neighborhoods today, but what happened in Richmond throughout the 20th century and into the 21st has been replicated in countless cities across the country – it’s not a “North-South” or “East Coast-West Coast” phenomenon, it’s a national one. Each city has its own (hi)story, it is true – but the general plot line is the same, with minor variations, nearly everywhere.
What the authors did was study the maps to identify those neighborhoods redlined in 1935-1940 and then overlay them with a map of the hottest neighborhoods today – and there’s a very close overlap. The anecdotes mostly come from a redlined neighborhood called Gilpin which displays all the characteristics leading to extreme heat conditions noted above:
“There are few trees along the sidewalks to shield people from the sun’s relentless glare. More than 2,000 residents, mostly Black, live in low-income public housing that lacks central air conditioning. Many front yards are paved with concrete, which absorbs and traps heat. The ZIP code has among the highest rates of heat-related ambulance calls in the city.”
Here’s what researchers studying city heat conditions across +100 cities in America found:
“Across more than 100 cities, a recent study found, formerly redlined neighborhoods are today 5 degrees hotter in summer, on average, than areas once favored for housing loans, with some cities seeing differences as large as 12 degrees. Redlined neighborhoods, which remain lower-income and more likely to have Black or Hispanic residents, consistently have far fewer trees and parks that help cool the air. They also have more paved surfaces, such as asphalt lots or nearby highways that absorb and radiate heat.”
When Richmond was redlined in the 1930s, every single black neighborhood received a grade of “D” (“least desirable”). Other parts of the city received a grade of “C,” because Blacks “sometimes walked” through them. White neighborhoods more or less automatically received grades of “B” or “A,” and this determined the higher level of public – and private – investment over the course of the next 80 years, down to the present.
Initial bias and consequent loan discrimination had a “snowball effect”:
“That inequity likely influenced urban heat patterns, too. Neighborhoods with white homeowners had more clout to lobby city governments for tree-lined sidewalks and parks. In Black neighborhoods, homeownership declined and landlords rarely invested in green space. City planners also targeted redlined areas as cheap land for new industries, highways, warehouses and public housing, built with lots of heat-absorbing asphalt and little cooling vegetation.”
Today, these historical practices-inequities translate into a much sparser tree cover in formerly redlined neighborhoods like Gilpin, and this has contributed to the big difference in summer temperatures among Richmond neighborhoods. The difference today in “green canopy” is remarkably: 42% of the area in neighborhoods deemed the “best” in the 1930s have tree cover today, compared to 12% in formerly redlined neighborhoods like Gilpin. That translates into an average difference of +5 degrees on a hot day in redlined neighborhoods, which can reach +15 degrees on exceptionally hot days in Gilpin.
Why does this matter?
“During a heat wave, every one degree increase in temperature can increase the risk of dying by 2.5 percent. Higher temperatures can strain the heart and make breathing more difficult, increasing hospitalization rates for cardiac arrest andrespiratory diseases like asthma. Richmond’s four hottest ZIP codes all have the city’s highest rates of heat-related emergency-room visits.”
And this in turn translates into a shocking difference in life expectancy: the average in Gilpin is 63, while that in Richmond’s (white, middle-class) neighborhood of Westover Hills is 83.
Today, Richmond is consciously trying to come to terms with its racist and redlining past, which has resulted in environmental racism – the disproportionate suffering of Blacks and other minorities (in some big cities today, that means Hispanics) due to practices which fail – or exacerbate – to mitigate the effects of climate change.
One thing the city has vowed is the goal “…of ensuring that everyone in Richmond is within a 10-minute walk of a park, working with the Science Museum of Virginia and community partners to identify city-owned properties in vulnerable neighborhoods that can be converted into green space. It’s the city’s first large-scale greening project since the 1970s.”
In another formerly redlined neighborhood (Southside), there’s a new community garden, which also serves as a gathering-spot for neighbors: “We have people holding cookouts, people doing yoga and meditation here, they can get to know their neighbors. It reduces social isolation” (Duron Chavis of Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden, which backed the effort).
But city planners and officials need to beware as they plan for and implement “greening” initiatives – the latter can lead to gentrification, so care has to be taken to ensure that, when new housing is built, it’s affordable.
It’s a big challenge for the future, and it’s only one of a passel of big challenges which we need to meet in order to achieve racial equity – others include health, education, and economic disparities, all of which must be addressed both separately and in conjunction with environmental justice initiatives like Richmond’s.