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Racist Housing Practices From The 1930s Linked To Hotter...


In cities around the country, if you want to understand the history of a neighborhood, you might want to do the same thing you'd do to measure human health: Check its temperature.



Redlining refers to the federal government's practice in the 1930s of rating neighborhoods to help mortgage lenders determine which areas of a city were considered risky. The federal Home Owners' Loan Corporation made maps and shaded neighborhoods red that it deemed "hazardous." That risk level was largely based on the number of African Americans and immigrants living there. The practice, along with the other segregationist housing policies of the time, had lasting effects — from concentrating poverty to stifling home ownership rates.


"It's like stepping into a parking lot from a park. You would feel that relatively quickly," says Vivek Shandas, a professor of urban studies and planning at Portland State University, who co-authored the study. "It was very surprising when we saw that it was a pattern that we were seeing consistently across the country."



"Those communities are much more likely to face grave consequences in terms of their human health, their financial health or generally their ability to cope with these effects," Shandas says.

The way cities are built often creates what is known as an urban heat island, meaning they tend to be hotter than their rural surroundings. That's largely because cities usually have more pavement and concrete, which absorb heat and release it slowly. They also tend to have fewer trees, which cool the air and provide shade. Cities in general are hotter, but green space and concrete also aren't distributed evenly across an urban area. That can create micro heat islands within a city.



"Research on environmental justice has yet to really try to understand how systems are at work that may cause inequities," says Morgan Grove, a research scientist at the Forest Service's Baltimore Field Station and co-author of the service's study. "There are these explanations that require understanding history to understand why we see what we see today in cities."


"The policies of segregation that were followed by the federal government were so powerful that they determine the racial landscape of today," says Richard Rothstein, a distinguished fellow at the Economic Policy Institute and the author of The Color Of Law: A Forgotten History of How our Government Segregated America. "African Americans are restricted to neighborhoods because the other neighborhoods are now unaffordable to them, restricted to neighborhoods where there are fewer trees, where there is more heat."

The 1968 Fair Housing Act prohibited ongoing housing discrimination, but it didn't look backward on the damage already done, Rothstein says.

"Unless explicit action is taken to subsidize people who are denied the right to move into those kinds of homes in the 20th century, to now subsidize them to move," Rothstein says. "You can't undo the damage. You need explicit policy, race-based policy. You need affirmative action in housing."


"Honestly, the results of these studies confirm what we've been talking about for years," says Sarah Lillie Anderson, senior manager of tree equity programs at the nonprofit American Forests. "Our cities, they're not like jungles where they developed just by natural selection on their own. People designed these places, which means that they were designed for particular people, and that means that not everybody was held in mind when plans for cities and communities were made."

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