In the 1930s, in the wake of the Great Depression which left many Americans reeling from economic devastation, the newly elected president Franklin D. Roosevelt dubbed himself the “new deal for the American people,” by “helping the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.” He sought to bring economic relief to millions of Americans through a collection of federal programs and projects termed “The New Deal.”
The New Deal introduced popular and progressive policies such as the National Housing Act of 1934. In essence, ideas such as the 30-year mortgage and low, fixed interest rates, for the first time, allowed lower income Americans to afford owning property. Yet behind this facade lay a sinister truth, one deeply grounded in racial discrimination: the government-sponsored Homeowners Loan Corporation. The HELC drafted intricate maps of major cities in America, with districts lined or coloured with green, blue, yellow, or red. These colours were code for “best,” “still desirable,” “declining” and “hazardous.” The areas lined in red denoted a perilous place to loan money. The HELC made little effort to hide that race was a key factor- black and brown people were considered undesirable and dangerous clients regardless of their financial situation. So when they outlined areas of sizeable black populations in red ink on maps, as a warning to mortgage lenders, they effectively isolated back people in areas that would be undervalued and, even later as the problem festered, victim to crumbling infrastructure, over-policing, and health and safety concerns.
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This image from Spectrum News reveals a redlining map from the late 1930s that discriminates against certain homeowners.
Redlining, a form of federally sanctioned discrimination, may be a practice buried under decades of history and attempts (some well intentioned and some not) to right these wrongs, but the effects and discriminatory structure that it created linger in America’s social, economic, and political landscape. As the 21st century brings a slew of imminent problems that the systems remain largely ill-equipped to tackle, it is clear that issues such as climate change will leave no one’s lives untouched. But from a historical background of structural racism and inequality, one thing remains clear: we will face these effects of these issues disproportionately and unequally.
As heat waves seared through the Pacific Northwest US this summer, back-to-back scorching temperatures and punishing sun replaced languid and breezy summer days. The neighbourhood of Gilpin in Richmond, Virginia quickly becomes the city's most vulnerable area. Greenery is far from commonplace, offering no respite from the angry glare of the sun. Front yards are paved with oppressive black concrete that traps and emanates heat. A mainly black population of more than 2,000 residents live in Gilpin’s low income housing that lacks facilities to tackle the heat, such as a centralised air conditioning system or nearby healthcare facilities.
Gilpin resident Sparkle Veronica Taylor often finds herself confronting the bearing sun in search of more greenery that is solely found in wealthier neighbourhoods.“Once we get to that park, I’m struck by how green the space is,” Taylor says, “I feel calmer, better able to breathe. Walking through different neighbourhoods, there’s a stark difference between places that have lots of greenery and places that don’t.”
Gilpin is not an outlier in its heat disparities - in cities like Baltimore, Dallas, Denver, Miami, Portland, and New York, higher temperatures largely plague neighbourhoods with poorer residents of colour. A study published in the journal Climate in January 2020 found that on average, formerly redlined districts are 2.68 degrees warmer than non-redlined areas - in some cities a 7.1 degree temperature difference is reported. Extreme heat is one of the clearest ways climate change presents itself. It is also the deadliest.
“Even without climate change in the picture, there is already this large temperature inequality in our cities,” said Jeremy Hoffman, the main author of the study and scientist at the Science Museum of Virginia. “Then, add on top of that longer and stronger heat waves brought on by climate change, so it’s kind of a double whammy for compounding inequity that is brought on by a global phenomenon amplifying a local phenomenon.”
Disparities in access to mortgages for minorities, and therefore homeownership, “created a snowball effect that compounded over generations,” said Nathan Connolly, a historian at Johns Hopkins who helped digitise the maps. Few places show the scars of redlining as bluntly as the neighbourhood of Gilpin in Richmond. The run-down and resource-scarred Gilpin that Taylor and her two children inhabit is not the same Gilpin of the early 20th century. Back then, Gilpin was part of a thriving area - both financially and culturally - known as “Black Wall Street”.
With the emergence of redlining in the 1930s, Gilpin and the surrounding predominantly black neighbourhoods gradually fell into disrepair. Black residents found it near impossible to obtain trustworthy housing financing and property values in the area plummeted.
In 1943, construction companies razed the district, putting in place monotonous and grim public housing. The construction sought to address the deplorable conditions that were as a 1941 article described it, “Children play in the poorly-paved or unpaved streets. The backyards beggar description. While there is an occasional, fairly respectable looking dwelling, the great majority are unfit for human habitation.”
The trouble is that the Gilpin Court Public Housing Project sought not to improve the lives of residents but to sterilise and remove Gilpin from the overall consciousness of the city. Without regard to the rich historical background that was the backbone of the neighbourhood and pre-established disdain and distrust for the residents, the housing project was a doomed, self-fulfilling prophecy at work.
Today in Gilpin lies mostly vacant lots, dilapidated houses, a sprinkling of convenience stores without access to fresh foods, and Gilpin Court crumbling due to under-maintenance. For Gilpin residents, they confront their own share of grim ills: 80% of the neighborhood’s household incomes fall below America’s poverty line of $15,000, 65% of its residents do not hold a high school diploma, and violence and over-policing is commonplace.
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This image shows the housing project Gilpin Court today- a lack of maintenance leaving its residents vulnerable to a host of issues.
When compounded with anthropogenic climate change and longer, harsher bouts of heat waves, “It becomes a whole circle of issues,” Sherrell Thompson, a community health worker in Gilpin says, “If you want to find any kind of healthy food, you need to walk at least a mile or catch two buses. If you have asthma but it's 103 degrees out and you’re not feeling well enough to catch three buses to see your primary care physician, what do you do?”
As the effects of climate change become more pronounced and catastrophic, we will all feel the effects. And thus, as unhoused people bear the burden of the heat left exposed to the elements and as entire neighborhoods grow hotter than others, we need to ensure that our solutions to climate change take into account these racial and economic inequalities.
When designing climate mitigation plans, we cannot afford to create standardized and uniform methods that treat people as a monolith. For us to reach some semblance of equity we need to take into account people’s existing needs and vulnerabilities, prioritizing marginalized communities. Doing so will require confronting very uncomfortable history, but as Gilpin shows us, comfort in the form of willful ignorance is a privilege of its own.
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