With a few exceptions, the racial makeup of present-day Buffalo (first image) corresponds to the redlining map from 1936 (second image). The areas of “higher” residential grades (green and blue) are today predominantly white, whereas the areas of “lower” residential grades (yellow and red) are today predominantly African-American and Hispanic. This is no coincidence. During the New Deal, the government-backed Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) created these maps of “residential security,” entirely based on race. Of the red-graded neighborhoods immediately surrounding downtown, including Ellicott and Wilert Park, the map simply states, “An extremely old section which has been taken over by Negros and Italians of a poor type.”

These maps determined who was eligible for the generously-subsidized, government-backed mortgages which enabled white people in cities across the country to become homeowners and begin to build the generational wealth that today is the underpinning of much of the white middle class. People living in the red-lined areas--overwhelmingly people of color--where ineligible for such loans and were not given the leg up which the government had given white people. Many remained renters, unable to afford their own homes or to move to the newly built, racially-restricted suburbs. Within the redlined areas, many of the people of color who did own their own home or business would become dispossessed anyway, as highways and urban renewal targeted their neighborhoods. Generally given much less than the value of their property and restricted from moving anywhere but the red-lined areas, many of these folks’ only option was the new, shoddily built public housing projects--or leaving the city altogether.