Understanding and Undesigning the Redline
Impact Hub Baltimore, where Invested Impact is located, recently hosted an exhibit by Designing the We, in partnership with Enterprise Community Partners, on the history of redlining and its effects. ‘Undesign the Redline,’ was direct, comprehensive, and deeply compelling. It also got right to the heart of the nature of inequity in American cities, and shed light on why we at Invested Impact do what we do.
The exhibit’s physical presence and direction lend its wealth of data a visceral, tangible impact on viewers. Walking into the Impact Hub, one was struck with the deep, smarting reds of the exhibit’s expansive multi-room design, and the sheer volume of text, data, and historical documents present both a sensory and statistical experience of the pervasive nature of redlining’s effects.
Compound its affecting layout with the way interactive elements build up the exhibit’s visualization of redlining, and the whole experience becomes more than an exercise in the history of bad policy; it turns into something personal. That was Undesign the Redline’s most important triumph: using the context of its own existence and the experiences of those who interact with it as touch points for understanding its subject matter. The exhibit succeeded at comprehensively illuminating the connection between a series of policy decisions, the costs those decisions imposed on the humans beings that endured them, and everything in between.
On a tour of ‘Undesign the Redline,’ one might experience everything from somber empathy to righteous frustration to hope in social progress. There’s a visible disparity in terms of prosperity and investment across Baltimore and ‘Undesign the Redline’ makes it clear just how much that disparity owes to racist public policy. It’s a complicated story that, as the exhibit so deftly teased out, illustrates the complicated legacy of American development.
As the exhibit laid out in daunting detail, the New Deal, a fresh wave of relief for many struggling people, laid the groundwork for a system of deprivation in urban communities of color. The National Housing Act of 1934 hemmed such communities in and flagged them as undesirable, creating a vicious cycle of flight and disinvestment by capital interests.
Maps of major cities like New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, were drawn over in red, yellow, blue, and green to mark levels of investment-worthiness by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA). These maps allowed for certain residents becoming able to access loans, jobs, and connections in certain areas — and blocked their access to others. In essence, Jim-Crow-like policies became a precondition for national recovery, and they had real material effects on the losing parties in that bargain.
In Baltimore, those material effects have been tangible and long-lasting. As the Washington Post reports, rates of prosperity have been consistently low in areas redlined during the New Deal and rates of homeownership, income, education, and even health conditions have been constrained or worsened into the present day as a result of redlining closing off of resources and opportunity.
There is, of course, no scarcity of observation of this trend. After the unrest precipitated by the handling of Freddie Gray’s death, CNN Money published basic numbers about Baltimore that further damn the city’s racial wealth legacy. As they report, in Baltimore, black households make nearly half as much as white households, young black men are almost four times as likely to be unemployed as young white ones, and buildings in redlined neighborhoods like Sandtown-Winchester and Harlem Park have an almost one in four chance of being vacant.
As is clear from the data, redlining has had seriously adverse effects on large swaths of the population in Baltimore. What started as prejudice made policy has turned into a multi-generational ecosystem of disenfranchisement. What remains to be tackled in its entirety is how to go about untangling the mess.
Dismantling the effects of a century of practices like redlining is critical. In the face of such a damaging history, a compelling case has been made for paying reparations to affected communities. However, a lump sum, no matter how proportional to the scale of the damage, can’t reverse a legacy of disenfranchisement on its own. That requires broad and lasting investment.
If the goal is to close the gap in wealth between urban communities of color and their more prosperous counterparts, a strategy must include the promotion of business ownership. As ‘Bridging the Divide,’ a study by the Aspen Institute, elaborates on, rates of wealth mobility between black wage workers and white wage workers are highly uneven, while rates of wealth mobility between black and white entrepreneurs are essentially equal. In business ownership, a clear method for building black wealth presents itself.
Unfortunately, as the Center for Global Policy Solutions reports, rates of business ownership and management among blacks and Hispanics are lower than average. As both the CGPS and the Aspen Institute propose, that is because the existing wealth disparity produces a lack of access to capital for minority entrepreneurs to start and grow markets within in their communities to cater to. This is the vicious cycle that redlining kickstarted seventy years ago.
Nonetheless, a way forward is clear and compelling. Through mission-minded investing, capital can be infused into communities across Baltimore, business and local wealth can be allowed to grow, and a toxic cycle can be reversed. Impact investing marries business and sustainability with economic justice. Outside the public sector, there is still room for serious work to be done building wealth in communities across the city. That’s the pervasiveness of redlining’s consequences. Let’s work together to rid Baltimore of its marks.
