Redlining refers to the practice of denying loans in certain neighborhoods because of socioeconomic characteristics rather than physical, design, or structural characteristics.
The Home Owner's Loan Corporation (HOLC) was created in 1933 to aid the housing market during the Great Depression. The HOLC created residential securities maps, better known as "redlining maps," to guide investment in US cities. These maps assigned grades 'A' through 'D' to neighborhoods to indicate their desirability for investment. Black, immigrant, and low-income neighborhoods were often given grades of 'C' or 'D,' eliminating their access to mortgage insurance or credit for decades. Although the HOLC was discontinued in 1951, the impact of disinvestment resulting from redlining is still evident in most US cities, including Louisville, today.
In 2015, Louisville Metro Government provided financial support to Joshua Poe, an independent researcher developing an interactive map titled, “Redlining Louisville: The History of Race, Class and Real Estate.” The map was launched in 2017 in concert with Redlining Louisville, a project that spurred multiple community dialogue sessions to discuss the importance of connecting Louisville’s history with its present.
The interactive StoryMap provided to Louisville Metro Government in 2017 is available online for historic purposes. This version of the map is no longer updated.
The map’s author, Joshua Poe, manages and updates a newer version of the StoryMap.
For more information about redlining in America, click on the link below for Mapping Inequality, a collaboration of three teams at four universities, including the University of Richmond, Virginia Tech, University of Maryland, and Johns Hopkins University. Downloads and data are available.
Data and Resources
- Redlining Original Description Maphtml
A simple map showing just A, B, C, D grades and colors for each redlining...
Go to resource - Redlining StoryMap Shapefilesarcgis shp
Zip of all 11 shapefiles used in the original StoryMap analysis.
...
Download - Mapping Inequality: Maps and Datahtml
Project by University of Richmond's Digital Scholarship Lab that digitized...
Go to resource
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Publisher | |
| Modified | 2020-08-29 |
| Release Date | 2017-02-27 |
| Frequency | Irregularly |
| Identifier | fe3880e0-52bf-43b8-983d-20ffbe9f3b3c |
| License | Other (Public Domain) |
| Data Dictionary | Descriptions of each of the data layers shapefiles in the ZIP.
|
| Public Access Level | Public |