“Undesign the Redline” exhibit in South L.A. explores the history of racial housing segregation
Los Angeles Trade Tech College is home to a new traveling exhibition called “Undesign the Redline,” a project that aims to educate the public about government-sponsored racial housing segregation practices.
The project is designed by the studio, “Designing the We,” and sponsored by Enterprise Community Partners.
The exhibition, which began in New York City, now travels the country. It’s been featured in other cities like Chicago, Boston and Atlanta. It will be at Los Angeles Trade Tech College in South L.A. until March 31.
The retrospective includes photographs of events like Occupy Wall Street protests; a timeline of social injustices, including the Jim Crow laws that legalized racial segregation; and a wall for attendees to leave sticky notes suggesting how American society can “undesign” the redline. It uses the history of racial housing segregation to explain the neighborhood division that continues across America today, such as the lack of development of certain lower-income communities, and the disparity in socioeconomic status between black and white people in America today. The exhibition also explores ways to undo the negative impact that’s been done by redlining.
“The exhibit…includes a timeline extending from Jim Crow to modern day social justice issues to illustrate how redlining is tied into the history of discrimination as a whole,” said Joss Tillard-Gates, the senior program director at Enterprise Community Partners.
Since the 1930s, the process of redlining has shaped America’s cities along racial and socio-economic lines. Redlining is a process used by the federal government to tell banks where it would be safe and unsafe to invest their money.
Mindy Fullilove is a professor of urban policy and health at The New School in New York City. She is featured in a video on Designing the We website explaining the history and lasting effects of redlining.
According to Fullilove, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation developed a rating system indicating areas with the highest and lowest investment risk that deterred investors from providing loans in areas with older building and large minority race populations. This severely hindered the economic growth of low-rated communities and created a positive feedback loop that kept poor areas poor until the property values dipped low enough to be targets for gentrification.
“The heart of redlining was to track what they called undesirable racial elements, meaning black people, Jewish people … Hispanics … and see where they were living or trying to move,” Fullilove said. “This sharply defined the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ on a map and then giving everybody a color code.”
James Brooks, a native of San Fernando Valley, said he’s been a victim of racial housing discrimination. He visited the exhibition earlier this month.
“My thoughts [on the exhibition] are that [it] just confirms what I’ve always known to be true,” Brooks said. “I’m in real estate, so I’ve seen the effects of redlining over and over again. I’ve seen the effects of racism in housing.”
The exhibition has particular importance in South Los Angeles, where many neighborhoods are highly segregated. According to the LA Times, Watts, for example, has a population that’s nearly 99 percent black and Hispanic and less than 1 percent white.
The exhibition seeks to demonstrate a causality between redlining policies of the past and the present day phenomenon.
Saba Mwine is an L.A. resident and employee of the Corporation for Supportive Housing, an organization dedicated to ending homelessness. She said the majority of the homeless individuals across the city are people of color. Mwine said that without addressing the history of racism in political practices, L.A.’s homeless crisis will be made harder to resolve.
“I think here in Los Angeles, and in California to a great extent, we have been very committed with our public dollars to end homelessness. That’s not going to happen as quickly as we want, or in the numbers we want to see, if we don’t address structural racism,” said Mwine, who visited the college to view the exhibition.
“Undesign the Redline” details the history of racist policies in America and their evolution into the social injustices we see in American society today.
Tillard-Gates, the senior program director at Enterprise Community Partners, said that by educating the public on past racist government policies, people can hopefully think of ways of “undesigning” the redline for the future. Tillard-Gates said redlining and its economic consequences continue to negatively impact minority communities in many aspects of life.
“[Previous government] policies were explicitly preventing black Americans and immigrants from taking advantage of the benefits of homeownership, thus creating huge disparities in … wealth. Income levels and financial security have been found to affect health outcomes, political involvement, and housing security, which is why this exhibit is necessary,” Tillard-Gates said.
