Mapping Inequality was made by three teams from four different universities. The data presented represents the tracking of mapping inequalities, “Among the thousands of area descriptions created by agents of the federal government’s Home Owners’ Loan Corporation between 1935 and 1940″(Robert K. Nelson, LaDale Winling, Richard Marciano, Nathan Connolly, et al., Mapping Inequality). Essentially this DH project reveals all the housing crisis that occurred from the 30s to the 40s in over 35 states. This data is presented primarily as a multimedia narrative. The goal of this project was to organize the mapping injustices and discriminatory patterns of the federal government’s Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC); explaining and tracking the creation of redlining. In the ‘Downloads & Data” section, we are given access to a variety of maps coded by color from different states and their respective cities. The cities coded in red represent hazardous neighborhoods that banks and mortgagers were advised to stay away from while the green coded areas were classified as desirable. These standards were heavily influenced by racism and xenophobia; Black and Immigrant neighborhoods were more than often coded red meanwhile wealthy white neighborhoods were coded green. The city I zoned into was Houston, TX, the findings of these researchers were relevant considering what is the most Black populated neighborhood Third Ward and what is the most Latine populated neighborhood Fifth Ward, were red coded areas from the scanned copy of the mapping plans done by the HOLC; recorded by these digital humanist. The historical and political attributes of this project targets those interested in current housing crisis such as politicians or residents of these neighborhoods. Overall this project is very intricate and huge as it has picture, contract/legal statements, and mapping records of what HOLC was doing in the mid 1900 .
2 thoughts on “Blog Post #2: Reverse Engineering “Mapping Inequality””
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As I was looking into the project to have more background to comment on, I zoomed in on Kanas City, Missouri. District D5 was described as “containing the principal negro habitat,” and it was in the red. This is interesting because it seems to reflect what still exists today within the housing prices of specific locations that seem “less desirable” because they contain something other than white people. I wonder, would a map that tracked housing prices using the same color scale, where less was red, return the same or something very similar to the map shown through this project?
I appreciate your comment a lot, your question about tracking housing prices and their patterns also applies to the current house market in Texas (my home state). Currently housing costs have increased dramatically forcing a lot of displacement especially in Fifth and Third ward (neighborhoods that were marked red in the map).
…Education accessibility would also be a color coded map I’d like to see, in order to measure if the behaviors of redlining have a relationship to the current education crisis in Texas/Nationally.