State & Local Government Policy, Business and Technology

Map of the Month: Redlining Louisville

Data-Smart City Solutions: Redlining, the denial of services or the refusal to grant loans or insurance to certain neighborhoods based on racial and socioeconomic discrimination, can be a hard issue to understand, let alone talk about.

But Louisville Metro Government is making strides to spread understanding and awareness of how the discriminatory lending practices of the 1930s have had longstanding impacts to this day through the use of an interactive map that illustrates the effects of redlining on housing development, disinvestment, and lending patterns. The Home Owner’s Loan Corporation (HOLC) was created by the federal government during the Great Depression to bolster the housing market, but the HOLC created lopsided residential securities maps that assigned grades indicating neighborhood desirability for investment – communities of color were typically given low grades, and although the HOLC was discontinued in 1951, the practice left minority neighborhoods significantly disadvantaged in terms of wealth building and property values.

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