OAKLAND: REDLINING & DEMOGRAPHICS

With few exceptions, the racial makeup of present-day Oakland (1st image) corresponds to the red-lining map from 1937 (2nd image). The areas of “higher” residential grades (green and blue) are today predominantly white, whereas the areas of “lower” grades (yellow and red) are today predominantly Black, Asian, Hispanic. This is no coincidence.

During the New Deal, the government-backed Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) created these maps of “residential security” (which was determined by rates of what they called “racial infiltration”) as a means to segregate the American city.

These maps determined who was eligible for the New Deal’s generously-subsidized, government-backed mortgages. These mortgages 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—were ineligible for such loans and were not given the financial 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 to which white people were moving en masse.

The financial incentives created by red-lining heavily encouraged white people to move to the racially-restricted suburbs, while forcing people of color to stay in the city center. This was government-designed segregation, and the loss of urban population meant the loss of tax-base in cities, leading to fewer services and urban decay. Federal and state antipathy towards the increasingly black “inner city” exacerbated the downward spiral.

Within red-lined areas, people who already owned their own home or business often became dispossessed anyway, as highways later came plowing through. The highways took the red-lines off the map, and built them in the real world. Red-liners were particularly concerned with eliminating “border-line” zones in which physical connections could allow further “infiltration.” Thus highways were often intentionally built as barriers between differently graded areas.

[Note: image contains offensive language] This image highlights selected comments from the 1937 red-lining map of Oakland—comments which reveal in the red-liners’ own words the racist intent behind their work.