Reassessing HOLC redlining maps to support claims of environmental injustice.

Mujahid et al. (1), citing two papers by Hillier (2, 3), state that “redlining, a practice that became institutionalized through the federal Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) security maps created in the 1930s, is one significant policy that influenced current neighborhood conditions.” However, these papers do not support the authors’ primary assumption, that HOLC maps are the basis for redlining. This is important, because the authors use these maps to compare present-day cardiovascular risk to historical redlining practices, eventually concluding “that historical redlining has an enduring impact on cardiovascular risk among Black adults in the United States.”

In fact, Hillier’s work (2, 3) reaches precisely the opposite conclusion about HOLC maps, finding that these maps did not form the basis for historical redlining. Recent work by Fishback et al. (4), comparing Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and HOLC lending practices between 1933 and 1940, also strongly supports this contention. They found that, while the FHA did engage in discriminatory lending practices, “The FHA’s exclusionary pattern predates the advent of the infamous maps later made by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) and shows little change after the drafting of those maps. In contrast, the HOLC itself broadly loaned to such neighborhoods and to Black homeowners. We conclude that the HOLC’s redlining maps had little effect on the geographic distribution of either program’s mortgage market activity, and that the FHA crafted and implemented its own redlining methodology prior to the HOLC.”

Fishback et al. (4) acknowledge the widespread notion among scholars that HOLC maps formed the basis of redlining, thereby creating a chain of causality responsible for present-day disparate and discriminatory impacts to Black communities, including claims of environmental injustice. Present-day patterns of urban segregation unquestionably have a basis in systemic racism, but they are likely the result of a confluence of many forces and actors, as seen in zoning practices (5). The use of HOLC maps as the basis of institutionalized redlining practices by HOLC and other private and public lenders seems questionable. It would appear that a careful reappraisal of the role of HOLC maps as the foundational basis for drawing epidemiological and socioeconomic conclusions about legacy effects of redlining may be required.