May 05, 2025 from 12:00 PM to 01:00 PM
"The government-sponsored Home Owner’s Loan Corporation (HOLC) graded and mapped the credit-worthiness of neighborhoods across many US cities in the 1930s. To determine risk, local realtors and appraisers graded areas on an A-D scale. Places graded “A” were shaded in green and “greenlighted” for bank investment, while on the other end, those graded a “D” were colored red, and “redlined”, discouraging banks from investing in these areas. An important body of work ties this gradient to inequitable trajectories of investment, development, and well-being for communities. Recent work extends the legacy of redlining to neighborhood crime, and especially violence. But can neighborhoods counter the historical footprint of these grades? Building on the revitalization thesis, we argue that Latino immigration helps disrupt the tendency for redlining to set neighborhoods on trajectories of disadvantage and disinvestment, and potentially violence. Using San Antonio, Texas as our case study, we investigate the homicide trajectories of graded communities from 1950 to 2011. We find that not all redlined areas face the same fate over time. Specifically, redlined neighborhoods with the greatest amount of immigration along with a sizeable share of co-ethnics experienced much less violence over time than redlined places with less Latinos and immigrants. While it is important to highlight the role of institutionalized, government-sponsored housing policy interventions in making or breaking the well-being of neighborhoods, exploring heterogeneity in the fortunes of redlined communities cautions against structural determinism in light of the potential for Latino immigrant revitalization."
Presented by the Maryland Population Research Center. More details and registration link on the MPRC website.
Copyright (c) District of Columbia Sociological Society. Contact us: dcsociologicalsociety@gmail.com
