The practice, formalized by the federal government in the 1930s, of marking Black and immigrant neighborhoods as too risky to lend in while steering government-backed home loans toward new white suburbs. Treated here as a policy question, it asks how a constitutional democracy built racial inequality into the ordinary machinery of mortgage lending, and why the color drawn on Depression-era maps still shows up, generations later, in the wealth, segregation, and even the health of American cities. Outlawed by the Fair Housing Act of 1968, its consequences remain measurable and its exact mechanism still debated.
In the 1930s, federal officials colored maps of American cities. Green meant safe to lend in. Red meant hazardous. The red was drawn around the places where Black families lived, marked dangerous because of who lived there, not what the houses were worth. Those maps are part of how the color of American wealth was drawn. For a generation, the government made homeownership cheap and safe for white families moving to the suburbs, and largely shut Black families out of the loans that built the middle class. The home is how most American families pass money to their children, so the exclusion did not end when the maps did. It compounded. Scholars still argue over exactly how much the maps themselves drove the harm, as against the private banks and covenants beside them. What is not in dispute is the pattern: federal mortgage support flowed overwhelmingly to white neighborhoods, and Black neighborhoods were denied.