In 1933, during the Great Depression, the federal government of the United States created the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) to provide low-interest mortgage loans. A year later, in 1934, the northern authorities also created the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) to guarantee mortgages made by private banks.
Local authorities in Richmond, Virginia, lacked much information about borrowers and the local public, so they decided to create neighborhood security maps. The rating of each neighborhood could vary from A, the best possible grade, to D, denoting that it was a dangerous place. A was represented by the color green, B by blue, C by yellow, and D by red.
These maps were also used by private companies, mainly banks and insurers, exacerbating a vicious cycle that made it difficult for certain neighborhoods to progress, restricting them from various types of services for a long time.
Can you already imagine which neighborhoods were type A and which were type D? Green or type A neighborhoods were predominantly inhabited by white families. Red or type D neighborhoods were those where most of the residents were African American or immigrants.
More than 80 years after those discriminatory policies, their consequences are still very much present. Neighborhoods marked in red in the 1930s today show temperatures 3 to 7°C higher than neighborhoods marked with other colors. Red neighborhoods have fewer trees. This has a significant impact on the area because trees not only provide shade but also help cool the air around them through the continuous transpiration or evaporation of water from the surface of their leaves. The reason these neighborhoods have fewer trees is because local investments were directed to white neighborhoods after the suburban boom following World War II. This is not surprising given the high racial segregation in the United States at the time, and considering that decision-making political positions were occupied by white men. The lack of trees in paved neighborhoods makes them a furnace for their residents in summer and hot days, and without fresh air currents, they are forced to use more fans or air conditioners, assuming they can access them in the first place, increasing the electrical consumption expenses of these areas compared to the rest of Richmond’s neighborhoods. An interesting but highly relevant fact in this regard is that these areas concentrate the majority of phone calls requesting medical help or ambulances due to people suffering from heat strokes. Climate injustice exists and is integral to racial injustice.
Am I sure that the categorization of these neighborhoods was based on racial criteria? Yes. The pattern repeats nationally in the United States, and this is only beginning to be visualized thanks to data openness and the work of various research teams like the one at the University of Richmond, which digitized and published documents from that time to facilitate public access.
Let’s remember that in the first half of the 20th century, the United States was still marked by racial segregation. It is significant that at that time the main local and federal authorities were usually white people. Therefore, it is not surprising that investments were directed to areas where this social group resided. In fact, analyzing the documents in question, we can observe notes from real estate appraisers clearly indicating the racial factor in this matter. One of them rated a neighborhood as Yellow or Type C and made the following clarification:
This area is yellow mostly because of the school for white children located within the area of African Americans, designated D-8, and because African Americans from D-9 frequently pass through to access William Byrd Park, located to the west. For this reason, these properties lose value.[76]
The appraiser literally wrote that part of the problem was that African American people and families walked through the area.
Even today, neighborhoods marked in red are still predominantly populated by low-income African American or Hispanic residents. These results are repeated in neighborhoods of more than a hundred cities analyzed under the same hypothesis.
Finally, in 1968, the Fair Housing Act[77] was passed, prohibiting discrimination by direct housing providers such as landlords and real estate companies, and other actors such as local governments, banks, and housing insurance companies. Thus, discrimination based on skin color, sex, country of origin, and disability was prohibited in the US real estate market ecosystem.
A bias today can create an injustice that perpetuates for decades. At the same time, it takes decades for a tree to grow sufficiently, and that is why it is important to start planting trees in these neighborhoods right now. Let’s not wait decades to see the biases in the data sets that feed our AIs; let’s address it before it’s too late.
[76] Plumer, B., & Popovich, N. (2020). How Decades of Racist Housing Policy Left Neighborhoods Sweltering. New York Times. Retrieved October 11, 2021, from https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/08/24/climate/racism-redlining-cities-global-warming.html.
[77] The Fair Housing Act. (2015). Civil Rights Division. U.S. Department of Justice. Justice.gov. Retrieved October 11, 2021, from https://www.justice.gov/crt/fair-housing-act-1.