Walk through Englewood, then stroll the 606 trail in Bucktown. The difference isn’t luck. It’s a policy hangover from the 1930s that never really ended. Maps drawn by federal bureaucrats almost a century ago still dictate whose streets get paved, which blocks see a grocery store, and where a developer will break ground on new apartments. The official story says redlining is a relic. The street says otherwise.
The Maps That Built Two Chicagos
Back in the New Deal, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation graded neighborhoods from A to D. A was green – “best” areas, mostly white, with single-family homes. D was red – “hazardous,” dense with Black families, immigrants, anyone the assessors didn’t like. Banks used these maps to deny mortgages. The government literally drew lines around Black neighborhoods and called them too risky for investment.
Those maps were public policy, not just private prejudice. And they worked exactly as designed. Families in redlined zones couldn’t buy homes. Property values flatlined. Tax revenue dried up. Schools, parks, transit – all the stuff that makes a neighborhood livable – got starved. Meanwhile, greenlined suburbs got FHA loans, highways, and a direct pipeline to wealth.
Not History – It’s a Blueprint
Fair housing laws banned the maps in 1968. But banning a map doesn’t rebuild a community. The damage was baked into the soil. Look at any redlined zone today and you’ll see the same pattern: fewer grocery stores, more payday lenders, worse air quality, higher rates of asthma. That’s not coincidence. It’s a direct result of decades of disinvestment that started with a government stamp.
Developers still avoid these areas. Not because there’s no demand, but because the financial system still sees them as risky. Appraisals in formerly redlined neighborhoods routinely come in tens of thousands of dollars lower than comparable homes in white neighborhoods. That depresses sale prices, which depresses investment, which depresses appraisals. A closed loop with no exit.
When “Revitalization” Means Displacement
When investment finally does arrive, it rarely serves the people who stayed through the lean years. Suddenly, a coffee shop appears. Rents jump. Property taxes spike. Longtime owners get letters from investors offering quick cash for their buildings. The neighborhood “improves” – and the original residents get pushed to another under-resourced area where the cycle begins again.
This isn’t organic change. It’s capital finally noticing an undervalued asset and extracting profit. The city calls it growth. Locals call it another eviction notice.
How the Money Still Flows
Banks don’t hang redlining maps on the wall anymore, but they don’t need to. Modern redlining works through algorithms and risk models that use zip codes as proxies. If you live in 60621, your small business loan application gets a different look than someone in 60614. Data from the National Community Reinvestment Coalition shows how credit access still correlates with those old HOLC grades.
Insurance companies do it too. Higher premiums in certain zip codes, even when the actual risk profile is the same. City services follow the same pattern. Tree trimming requests in Austin get answered faster than in West Garfield Park. The 311 response data bears this out – year after year, the same neighborhoods wait longer.
Infrastructure as a Weapon
The physical environment tells the story. Redlined areas have more vacant lots, fewer streetlights, older water mains. When a main breaks in Lincoln Park, it’s an emergency. When it floods a basement in North Lawndale, it’s Tuesday. The city’s capital improvement plan reads like a map of political power, not need.
Transit is another tell. The Red Line extension to 130th Street has been promised since the Nixon administration. Meanwhile, the Loop got a brand-new Washington-Wabash station in 2017. Priorities aren’t hidden – they’re budgeted.
Who Gets the Green?
The Community Reinvestment Act was supposed to fix this. Passed in 1977, it requires banks to lend in the communities they serve. Enforcement is weak, and the grades are easy to game. Banks get “outstanding” ratings while still directing the vast majority of mortgages to majority-white tracts. The Federal Reserve’s own data shows the gap persists.
Meanwhile, Opportunity Zones – a Trump-era tax break – were sold as a way to bring investment to struggling neighborhoods. In practice, wealthy investors used them to dodge capital gains on luxury projects that would have happened anyway. A report from the Urban Institute found that most Opportunity Zone money flowed to areas already gentrifying, not the truly left-behind places.
The Appraisal Gap in Real Numbers
A Black family in a historically redlined neighborhood can expect their home to be valued at roughly 23% less than a similar home in a white neighborhood, according to research from Brookings. That’s not an accident of the market – it’s a direct inheritance from the HOLC maps. The appraiser doesn’t need to know the map existed; the comps in the area are already depressed from generations of denied credit.
This is how wealth inequality compounds. The average white family in Chicago has a net worth several times that of the average Black family. The primary driver? Home equity. And home equity is built on the foundation of fair lending – which never existed in the redlined zones.
What’s Actually Fixing Anything
Some community groups aren’t waiting for the city. In Woodlawn, the Preservation of Affordable Housing coalition negotiates community benefits agreements for new developments. In Englewood, the Resident Association of Greater Englewood pushes for resident-led planning rather than top-down “solutions” from downtown consultants. These efforts chip away at the power imbalance, but they’re fighting a system designed to extract value.
There are policy tools that could work – land trusts that take property off the speculative market, public banks that lend based on community need rather than shareholder return, zoning reforms that allow multi-unit housing without displacement. None of them are radical. Most of them are blocked by the same political machine that benefits from the status quo.
The “Both Sides” Trap
Officials love to frame this as a complex problem with no easy answers. It’s not complex. It’s a choice. The city chooses where to spend infrastructure dollars. Banks choose which loan applications to approve. Appraisers choose which comps to use. These are decisions made by people with power, and they can be made differently.
The Fair Housing Act is 55 years old. If the goal was truly to undo redlining, we’d see different results by now. Instead, the patterns are stubbornly persistent because the economic incentives align with them. There’s profit in the divide.
FAQ
Is redlining still legal?
No. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 made explicit redlining based on race illegal. But the effects linger. Modern practices like credit scoring, zip code-based pricing, and biased appraisals produce the same discriminatory results without using a literal red map.
How can I tell if my neighborhood was redlined?
The University of Richmond’s Mapping Inequality project digitized the original HOLC maps. You can search by city and see the exact grades assigned in the 1930s. In Chicago, the red areas almost perfectly overlay today’s maps of poverty, pollution, and underinvestment.
Why don’t more businesses open in redlined areas?
Businesses cite lack of customers with disposable income, and banks cite lack of collateral. Both are directly caused by the original redlining. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy: deny mortgages, suppress property values, reduce local wealth, then point to the lack of wealth as a reason not to invest.
What can a regular person do about this?
Support community land trusts that keep housing permanently affordable. Pressure your alderman to allocate infrastructure dollars equitably. When you hear a developer promise “revitalization,” ask who it’s for. And vote in local elections – these decisions happen at the ward level more than people realize.
The old maps are in a museum, but the logic behind them is still cashing checks. Until the people making the money admit where the money came from, the two Chicagos will stay exactly where the government drew them.