Measuring racial segregation, homeownership rates, home values since 1940
Drawn in cities across the country to separate "hazardous" and "declining" from "desirable" and "best," codified patterns of racial segregation and disparities in access to credit. Now economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, analyzing data from recently digitized copies of those maps, show that the consequences lasted for decades.
As recently as 2010, they find, differences in the level of racial segregation, homeownership rates, home values and credit scores were still apparent where these boundaries were drawn.
"Did the creation of these maps actually influence the development of urban neighborhoods over the course of the 20th century to now?" said Bhash Mazumder, one of the Fed researchers, along with Daniel Aaronson and Daniel Hartley. "That was our primary question."
The economists now believe that appraisers like the one in Bedford-Stuyvesant weren't merely identifying disparities that already existed in the 1930s, and that were likely to worsen anyway. The lines they helped draw, based in large part on the belief that the presence of blacks and other minorities would undermine property values, altered what would happen in these communities for years to come. Maps alone didn't create segregated and unequal cities today. But the role they played was pivotal.
"The availability of credit has really significant impacts on every dimension of neighborhood life, in terms of the quality of real estate, the willingness of investors to come in, the prices of property, the emergence of predatory practices," said Thomas Sugrue, a historian at New York University. "These are all direct consequences of the lack of affordable loans and affordable mortgages."