How the Federal Government Made the Maps That Crippled Black Neighborhoods

“Building off several previous projects, Mapping Inequality is a database of more than 150 federal ‘risk maps,’ the New Deal DNA that would dictate decades of disinvestment in cities. These maps, as Oscar Perry Abello writes for Next City, illustrate ‘how the great government-backed wealth-creation machine of the 1930s only worked for white people.’

 

They’re a reminder that letting huge swaths of the American city fall apart was essentially federal policy beginning in the Great Depression, when banks began to withhold lending from certain communities based on color-coded risk maps.”

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