About This Unit

Residential segregation is the master inequality: where people live determines schools, jobs, air, credit, policing, and wealth, which is why Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton called it "American apartheid" — not a residue of prejudice but a linchpin actively maintained. This unit examines segregation as measured fact, ongoing practice, and policy object. Its historical instrument is the map: in the 1930s, the federal Home Owners' Loan Corporation graded neighborhoods A through D, coloring "hazardous" — overwhelmingly Black — areas red, and those security maps trained a century of disinvestment. Jacob Faber's empirical work shows the maps' fingerprints still legible in today's racial geography; the University of Richmond's Mapping Inequality project puts the maps themselves, for more than two hundred cities, in learners' hands.

The unit's contemporary thread asks how segregation persists after the laws that built it were repealed. Elizabeth Korver-Glenn's study of working real estate agents, lenders, and appraisers documents "race brokering": the ordinary professional routines — steering, valuation, networking — through which housing markets re-produce racial sorting today, no conspiracy required. Matthew Desmond's Evicted adds the renter's side: eviction as a churning force that disproportionately removes Black women and their children from housing and from stability itself. Against this machinery the unit sets the equity question — appraisal-gap remedies, fair-housing testing and enforcement, and what it would take for homeownership to build Black wealth rather than extract it.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this unit, learners will be able to:

• Explain how residential segregation is measured, how it was deliberately produced, and why it functions as a linchpin connecting racial inequalities across domains.
• Read a HOLC security map as a primary source: decode its grading logic, and evaluate the evidence connecting 1930s grades to present-day outcomes.
• Identify the contemporary market mechanisms — brokering, appraisal, lending, eviction — through which segregation and housing wealth gaps persist without explicitly racial rules.
• Evaluate one housing-equity intervention (fair-housing testing, appraisal reform, eviction right-to-counsel, down-payment assistance) for the mechanism it targets and the evidence behind it.

Keywords

• Residential segregation
• Redlining
• Race brokering
• Appraisal gap / devaluation
• Eviction
• Fair housing

Open Educational Resources

• "Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America." Digital Scholarship Lab, University of Richmond (third edition, 2023). Explore the archive.

Interactive digital archive · Open access.

The award-winning archive of HOLC security maps and area descriptions for more than two hundred cities, fully georeferenced and searchable, with scholarly introductions for dozens of them. Learners can open the original appraisal sheets and read the graders' own words — neighborhoods marked down for the "threat of infiltration" of Black and foreign-born residents — making the racial logic of federal credit policy a primary source rather than a paraphrase. The infrastructure for the unit's first case study and one of the digital humanities' most consequential public projects.

• "Long Island Divided." Newsday investigation, 2019. Read the investigation.

Investigative journalism · Open access.

Newsday's three-year undercover investigation sent paired testers — identical finances, different races — to real estate agents across Long Island and recorded the results: evidence of unequal treatment in 40 percent of tests against Black testers, including steering toward different neighborhoods and unequal service. The investigation demonstrates fair-housing testing as method, shows present-tense discrimination in the New York region your learners know, and triggered state hearings and reforms — journalism functioning as enforcement.

• Eviction Lab, Princeton University. Explore the database.

National database and mapping tool · Open access.

The first national database of evictions, built by Matthew Desmond's team: filings and judgments mapped to the neighborhood level, with rankings, trend tools, and research briefs documenting that eviction concentrates in Black neighborhoods and falls hardest on Black women renters. Gives the unit's rental thread its data instrument — learners can pull eviction geography for the Bronx and test it against the unit's redlining maps, two eras of housing extraction on one screen.

• Perry, Andre M., Jonathan Rothwell, and David Harshbarger. "The Devaluation of Assets in Black Neighborhoods." Brookings Institution, 2018. Read the report.

Research report · Open access.

The study that quantified the appraisal gap: comparing homes of equivalent quality and amenity, those in majority-Black neighborhoods are valued an average of $48,000 lower — roughly $156 billion in aggregate lost equity. The report supplies the unit's headline number for devaluation, its method is legible to non-specialists, and its framing — Black assets as systematically underpriced rather than Black neighborhoods as deficient — reverses the deficit narrative learners will meet elsewhere.

Key Scholarship

• Korver-Glenn, Elizabeth. Race Brokers: Housing Markets and Segregation in 21st Century Urban America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. Publisher page (DOI).

Book.

Korver-Glenn embedded with Houston's real estate agents, lenders, developers, and appraisers to document how segregation is made now: professionals brokering race through routine practice — racialized referral networks, steering framed as service, appraisals importing neighborhood stereotypes into price. Crucially, she also documents agents who actively counter these routines, showing the practices are choices, not market necessities. The unit's contemporary-mechanism anchor: discrimination as workflow.

• Faber, Jacob W. "We Built This: Consequences of New Deal Era Intervention in America's Racial Geography." American Sociological Review 85, no. 5 (2020): 739–775. Read the article (DOI).

Journal article.

Faber's quantitative demonstration that the HOLC maps did durable work: cities mapped by the program in the 1930s remain measurably more segregated today than comparable unmapped cities, with effects persisting nearly a century. The article closes the evidentiary loop the unit's primary sources open — from the graders' pens to present-day census tracts — and models how historical policy effects are identified rather than asserted. Pairs directly with the unit's first case study.

• Desmond, Matthew. Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. New York: Crown, 2016. Book site.

Book.

Desmond's Pulitzer-winning ethnography of Milwaukee renters and landlords establishes eviction as cause, not just symptom, of poverty — and as racially patterned: in segregated cities, Black women face eviction at rates comparable to Black men's incarceration ("Black men are locked up; Black women are locked out"). The book carries the unit's renter thread, supplies the human texture behind the Eviction Lab's maps, and shows profit being made at the bottom of the housing market — extraction without ownership.

• Sharkey, Patrick. Stuck in Place: Urban Neighborhoods and the End of Progress toward Racial Equality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Publisher page.

Book.

Sharkey's multigenerational analysis shows neighborhood inequality inherited like a family trait: more than seventy percent of Black children raised in the poorest quarter of neighborhoods remain there as adults, and the disadvantage compounds across generations in ways income alone cannot capture. The book gives the unit its temporal depth — segregation as something that happens to lineages — and its sober assessment of why place-blind mobility policy underperforms.

• Massey, Douglas S., and Nancy A. Denton. American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Publisher page.

Book.

The field's foundational statement: segregation measured systematically (the dissimilarity and isolation indices learners will meet everywhere), shown to be deliberately constructed and actively maintained, and theorized as the linchpin that concentrates poverty and transmits disadvantage. Three decades on, the book's measurement toolkit and its central claim — that no urban inequality can be addressed while segregation stands — remain the unit's baseline against which the newer scholarship measures change and persistence.

Case Studies

• Reading the Red Lines: A Gallery Walk Through Mapping Inequality

The Mapping Inequality archive of HOLC maps and area descriptions · Virtual gallery-walk analysis.

A virtual gallery walk through the Mapping Inequality archive in which learners open the original HOLC security maps and area descriptions for cities they know, decode the grading logic in the appraisers' own words, and trace the patterns the unit's readings describe onto the maps that helped produce them. The case study closes with the scholarly answer to "did the maps matter?" — the persistence evidence connecting 1930s grades to present-day outcomes.

• Testing the Market: Long Island Divided and the Appraisal-Gap Cases

Newsday's Long Island Divided investigation and the appraisal-gap cases, 2019–2024 · Enforcement-and-remedy analysis.

A two-part enforcement-and-remedy analysis in which learners first reconstruct Newsday's paired-testing method and findings and assess testing as evidence — why fair-housing enforcement depends on it, and what its limits are — then examine the appraisal-gap cases of 2021–2024, in which Black homeowners received dramatically higher valuations after "whitewashing" their homes for a second appraisal, and the federal task-force response. The case study maps each remedy — testing, litigation, appraisal reform — onto the market mechanism it targets.

Questions for Reflection

1. On the maps: Open a HOLC map for a city you know and read the area descriptions in the graders' own words. What logic did they apply, what language did they use, and where do you see that logic surviving in how neighborhoods are talked about today?
2. On Faber and persistence: "The maps were drawn ninety years ago" is sometimes offered as reason to move on. Using the persistence evidence, explain how a discontinued program can keep producing effects — through what carriers (credit, equity, schools, perception) does a 1930s grade reach the present?
3. On Korver-Glenn: Race brokering locates segregation in professional routine rather than personal animus. Why does that relocation matter for remedy — what does training, regulation, or industry reform look like when the problem is workflow? Use one of her documented practices.
4. On Desmond: "Black men are locked up; Black women are locked out." Unpack the parallel: in what ways does eviction function like a record — following people, compounding, and closing doors? Where does the parallel break down?
5. On Sharkey: Sharkey shows neighborhood disadvantage passed down like a family trait — more than seventy percent of Black children raised in the poorest quarter of neighborhoods remain there as adults. What changes when segregation is understood as something that happens to lineages rather than to individuals? Take one mobility-based remedy — a housing voucher, a move-to-opportunity program, place-blind aid — and assess it against the multigenerational evidence.
6. Synthesis: Homeownership is the standard American advice for building wealth. Drawing on at least two of the unit's materials, assess the advice for a Black family today: through what mechanisms does ownership build their wealth, through what mechanisms is it taxed away, and what one policy change would most shift the balance?

Further Readings and Resources

• Rothstein, Richard. The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. New York: Liveright, 2017. Publisher page.

Book.

The comprehensive account of de jure segregation: Rothstein documents how government at every level — federal underwriting rules, public-housing siting, local zoning, court-enforced covenants — deliberately segregated American cities, making today's racial geography a constitutional injury rather than an accident of private preference. The book is treated at length elsewhere in this project; it is listed here as the unit's historical companion, the policy narrative behind the maps and mechanisms this unit works through.

• Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta. Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. Publisher page.

Book.

Taylor's history of what came after redlining: when the federal government finally opened mortgage credit to Black buyers around 1970, real-estate speculators, lenders, and appraisers turned the new programs into machinery of extraction — decaying houses sold at inflated prices, profits taken on the way to foreclosure. Her term "predatory inclusion" names the pattern: access granted on terms that strip wealth. The bridge between this unit's redlining past and its equity present.

• Rucks-Ahidiana, Zawadi. "Theorizing Gentrification as a Process of Racial Capitalism." City & Community 21, no. 3 (2022): 173–192. Read the article (DOI).

Journal article.

A theoretical article arguing that gentrification is best understood as a process of racial capitalism — the profitable revaluation of urban space that depends on prior racialized devaluation. Rucks-Ahidiana builds the argument from the housing-market mechanisms this unit examines, connecting appraisal, lending, and neighborhood reputation to the module's framing concept and to the subject of its gentrification unit. For learners who want the theory that joins the unit's mechanisms drawn out explicitly.

• Trounstine, Jessica. Segregation by Design: Local Politics and Inequality in American Cities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Publisher page (DOI).

Book.

A political-science account of segregation's quiet machinery: local government. Trounstine shows how city land-use policy — zoning, annexation, the siting of public goods — was used to produce and defend segregation, and how those decisions determined which residents received services and which bore costs. Quantitative and historical at once, the book complements the unit's market focus by showing that the rules of the game, not only the players, do segregating work.

• Brown, Lawrence T. The Black Butterfly: The Harmful Politics of Race and Space in America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021. Publisher page.

Book.

Brown maps Baltimore's "Black butterfly" — the wing-shaped spread of the city's Black neighborhoods flanking a whiter central spine — and traces how a century of policy produced and maintains the pattern. The book pairs diagnosis with prescription, proposing a redevelopment-equity agenda for repairing what racialized disinvestment built. A city-scale application of the unit's frameworks that learners can set beside their own city's map, and a model of scholarship written for civic use.

• National Fair Housing Alliance, annual Fair Housing Trends Report. Browse the reports.

Annual enforcement and complaint data.

The National Fair Housing Alliance's annual Fair Housing Trends Report compiles complaint data from private fair-housing organizations and government agencies — the running national record of housing discrimination as reported and enforced. Private fair-housing groups, not government agencies, handle the large majority of complaints, which is itself a lesson in how enforcement actually works. The place where learners check the present tense of everything above: what discrimination looks like in this year's filings.

• "A Forgotten History of How the U.S. Government Segregated America." Rothstein interview, NPR Fresh Air, 2017. Listen to the interview.

Radio interview (audio with transcript).

Rothstein's Fresh Air conversation laying out the de jure argument in interview form, with a full transcript on the page — how federal, state, and local governments segregated America by design, told through the specific policies and places that did the work. The accessible audio entry into the argument where the book itself is beyond a learner's time budget, and a model of a scholar translating an archive into public speech.