About This Case Study

In the late 1930s, the federal Home Owners' Loan Corporation produced "residential security maps" for American cities, grading every neighborhood on a four-letter scale: A ("Best," colored green), B ("Still Desirable," blue), C ("Definitely Declining," yellow), and D ("Hazardous," red). Behind each colored area sat a standardized appraisal form in which local real estate professionals recorded the neighborhood's "favorable" and "detrimental" influences, its inhabitants — occupation, income, percentage "foreign-born," percentage Black — and the "threat of infiltration" by either. Mapping Inequality, a digital archive built by the Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond (third edition, 2023), has georeferenced these maps and area descriptions for more than two hundred cities and put them online, searchable and readable in full. The puzzle the archive presents is how ordinary the documents look: mundane government paperwork, in the dry language of risk and value — and yet this is the instrument through which federal credit policy drew a color line around American neighborhoods.

This case study reads the maps through the concept of redlining — the practice, named for these very documents, of channeling mortgage credit away from neighborhoods graded hazardous, which were overwhelmingly the neighborhoods where Black and immigrant families lived. The analytical move is to read the map as an instrument rather than a description: to ask what work the grades did — who could get a federally backed loan, whose home could build equity, whose block was starved of investment — and to find the racial logic not in slurs but in the appraisal form's own categories, where the presence of Black residents is itself recorded as a hazard to value. The sociologist Jacob Faber supplies the closing question: did the maps matter? His research compares cities the program mapped with comparable cities it never reached and finds the mapped ones measurably more segregated nearly a century later. You will walk a gallery of four graded areas in a city you know, read the graders in their own words, trace the logic across the map — and then weigh the evidence that the lines they drew are still organizing the present.

Before You Begin

Have ready:

• Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America (Digital Scholarship Lab, University of Richmond) — the archive you will walk through.
• Jacob W. Faber, "We Built This: Consequences of New Deal Era Intervention in America's Racial Geography", American Sociological Review (2020) — for the closing question; the abstract and findings are enough if the full article is beyond your time budget.
• A note-taking surface — paper, a document, or a shared doc if you are working in a group.

A note on language: the area descriptions reproduce the racial vocabulary of 1930s real estate — including "Negro," "infiltration," and cruder characterizations of Black, immigrant, and Jewish residents. The documents are quoted and read here as evidence of the logic being studied, not endorsed; expect the language, and read it as data.

Before you begin, write down, in a sentence or two each:

• Think of how neighborhoods in a city you know are ranked in everyday talk — "good area," "sketchy," "up-and-coming." Who does the ranking, and what do you suspect it is actually tracking?
• Can a map discriminate? A grade is just a letter and a color — by what mechanism could a letter on a 1930s map reach into the present?

The Exercise

Phase 1: Building the Gallery (8–10 minutes)

Open Mapping Inequality and find a city you know — where you live, grew up, or have family. New York City works well as a default: the archive holds the HOLC maps for all five boroughs, including the Bronx. Orient yourself: find the grade legend, click a few areas, and locate the area-description form that opens with each one. Then build your gallery by choosing four areas as stations — one of each grade, A through D — ideally areas whose present-day character you know something about. If your city is not in the archive, choose the nearest mapped city; the exercise works anywhere the maps exist. Note the area codes of your four stations before moving on.

For groups: agree on one city together, then either walk the same four stations or assign one grade's station to each member.

Phase 2: At Each Station (25–30 minutes)

Visit your four stations in order, from A to D. At each one, open the area description and work through the same five prompts — and describe before you interpret:

1. The grade and the ground. Record the grade, the color, and where the area sits in the city. What is physically there, according to the form — housing type, age, condition?
2. The inhabitants, as recorded. What does the form say about who lives here — occupations, incomes, and the fields for "foreign-born" and Black residents? Copy the exact phrases.
3. Favorable and detrimental. What does the grader list as the area's favorable and detrimental influences? Note especially where the presence or "threat of infiltration" of particular people is itself listed as a detriment.
4. The prediction. A grade is a forecast of property-value risk. What, on this form, is being treated as the risk — the buildings, the economy, or the neighbors?
5. The voice. Who is speaking on this form — what kind of professional, with what assumptions — and to whom? Remember the audience: lenders deciding where federally backed credit would flow.

For groups: if stations were divided, each member works their own; keep notes in a shared document so the gallery assembles as you go.

Phase 3: Reading Across the Gallery (12–15 minutes)

Now step back and read the four stations as one document. What vocabulary recurs from station to station — and how does the language change as the grades descend from A to D? State, in a sentence, the grading logic: what did it take for an area to be "Best," and what was sufficient to make it "Hazardous"? Then lay the map against the present: for each station, note what you know of the area today — its reputation, its housing, who lives there — and mark where the 1930s grade still seems legible on the ground and where the area has departed from it. Treat the map as making an argument about the city; your job is to state that argument in your own words.

For groups: assemble the shared logic first, then go station by station on the present-day comparison, drawing on whichever member knows each area best.

Phase 4: Returning to Faber — Did the Maps Matter? (10–12 minutes)

Your gallery shows what the maps said. The remaining question is what they did. Faber's study compares cities the HOLC mapped in the 1930s with similar cities it never mapped, and finds the mapped cities remain measurably more segregated today — an effect persisting nearly a century. Bring that finding to your gallery:

• Through what carriers could a 1930s grade reach the present? Trace at least two — credit and lending, home equity and inheritance, school funding, insurance, neighborhood reputation — from the grade on your map to an outcome today.
• Why does Faber's comparison of mapped and unmapped cities matter? What does it let him claim that simply pointing at a red area on the map — as you have been doing — cannot?
• The strain test. Where does "the maps did it" fit the evidence well, and where does it strain? Consider that segregation predates the maps and the graders often recorded lines already being drawn by covenants, violence, and local custom; that other instruments — zoning, urban renewal, private lending — did their own work; and that some redlined areas have since gentrified, which complicates a straight line from grade to present. How do you state the maps' role precisely: cause, codifier, accelerant?

For groups: work the carriers together, then spend the most time on the strain test — assign one member to argue the maps were decisive and another that they merely recorded, and see where the evidence leaves you.

Closing Reflection

In two or three sentences, complete this thought:

In the graders' own words, what made a neighborhood hazardous was __________. Asked whether the maps mattered, my answer — and the evidence for it — is __________. The part of this analysis I find hardest to hold steady is __________.

Write the most specific version you can; the value is in quoting the logic exactly and stating the maps' role precisely rather than loosely.

A Note on Modes

Solo mode. Work through the phases in order, keeping your station notes as you go. The four station readings from Phase 2 and your answer to "did the maps matter?" in Phase 4 are the central artifacts; keep them for use with the unit's questions on the maps and their persistence.

Group mode (3–6 people). Designate a timekeeper. Phase 1 is collective (one city, four stations); Phase 2 divides naturally by station; Phase 3 assembles the shared reading; Phase 4 works well with assigned positions on the strain test. If time is short, the closing reflection can be assigned as individual writing after the session.

After the Case Study

• Mapping Inequality publishes scholarly introductions for dozens of cities and makes its full data downloadable; reading the introduction for your city, or downloading its area descriptions, extends the gallery into research.
• For the study behind the closing question — the design, the comparison cities, the persistence estimates — see Jacob W. Faber, "We Built This: Consequences of New Deal Era Intervention in America's Racial Geography," American Sociological Review 85, no. 5 (2020), in the unit's Key Scholarship.
• The method here — reading bureaucratic paperwork as a racial instrument — travels: appraisal forms, credit scores, and risk models today can be read with the same five prompts you used at each station, asking what each one records as a hazard and for whom.