Op-Ed: How Redlining Housing Discrimination Continues to Impact Seattle Today

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Seattle's Central Area was redlined and historically blocked from bank loans, with the 1936 federal Home Owners’ Loan Corporation maps identifying the area as "hazardous" and predominantly Black. (Graphic by Elijah Wright)

Seattle is one of the fastest-growing cities in the nation, fueled in large part by its booming tech sector. While this growth has caused housing prices to surge with increased demand across the city, not all communities are being impacted equally. To understand why some neighborhoods are disproportionately vulnerable to modern pressures like gentrification and displacement, we must look into the past to the practices that deliberately set up this inequality.

From the very beginning, Seattle was exclusionary, being founded with legislation that expelled the native Duwamish people and prevented them from residing within city limits. These segregationist roots persisted throughout the decades, with many explicit anti-Asian and anti-Black policies being enacted in the 19th and 20th centuries. One of the specific practices of this discrimination was redlining, an incredibly influential form of housing discrimination that prevented certain communities from being able to access home loans or often other forms of equity like small business loans.

The term redlining is often applied broadly to describe various forms of housing discrimination; the term, however, comes from a specific practice orchestrated by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC). This federal agency was established by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, along with the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), both in an effort to expand homeownership and make it more accessible for Americans.

As part of this effort, HOLC developed “Residential Security” maps of every major American city. The idea was that these maps would assess the riskiness of granting home loans in different neighborhoods, with areas ranked from Grade A (Green/ “Best”) to Grade D (Red/ “Hazardous”).

https://www.theurbanist.org/seattle-redlining-reimagined/?ref=daily-articles-newsletter