A closer look

Redlining in Richmond

How did government agencies, real estate professionals, and homeowners uphold racist housing policies in the post-World War II period?

by Julian Ehsan, American Social History Project, The Graduate Center, CUNY

An African American Family Challenges Housing Segregation

In March 1952, Wilbur Gary and his family moved into Rollingwood, a suburb of Richmond, California. Shortly after the Gary family arrived, a mob of around three hundred white residents gathered outside the home, lobbing epithets at the family and bricks at the house, and burning a cross on the lawn. The racist mob terrorized the Gary family in part because they feared that an African American family in the community would bring property values down. The seven-hundred-unit suburb had been constructed during World War II by private developers using federal government housing finance programs (which minimized risks for private lenders and lowered costs for borrowers). But with government financing came government rules, including racial restrictions on who could buy the houses.

Government Agencies, Banks, and Real Estate Agents Institutionalize Redlining

Rollingwood, were central to redlining. Racial covenants were created by individual homeowners, homeowner associations, and real estate developers, and legally barred the sale and occupancy of homes to racial and ethnic minorities. Homes and communities with restrictive covenants, in turn, received preferential treatment from banks and the government. In the 1930s and 1940s, two New Deal agencies, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC), institutionalized redlining on a national scale. The agencies graded cities throughout the country based on neighborhood amenities and the condition of infrastructure, and most insidiously, racial and economic “risk factors” as outlined in the FHA’s Underwriting Manual. Between 1935 and 1940, the HOLC graded cities with colorful “residential security maps.” Communities were graded from A (colored green on the maps) to D (colored red, hence “redlining”), with A indicating the most desirable areas to give loans and D indicating “hazardous” areas. Residents of D or hazardous areas were less likely to get access to federally guaranteed loans, so developers avoided building in these areas because they would have to assume greater financial risks.

Redlining in Practice in Richmond, California

Redlining in Richmond and the surrounding Bay Area was most pronounced during and after World War II because federal emergency housing programs worsened Richmond’s housing segregation by insisting that temporary war housing be built on a segregated basis. Thanks to a mass migration of war industry workers from the South, the overall population of the city exploded from 24,000 in 1940 to over 100,000 in 1945. (Many of the migrants were African American, and the city’s Black population increased from 240 in 1940 to 26,000 by 1946.) Housing construction could not keep pace, so temporary housing projects were built for both Black and white workers. Yet the federal dollars that flowed into the city were disbursed according to the racist principles of redlining. The temporary projects were segregated, and the housing for Black families, built along railroads and close to the shipyards, was often shoddily constructed—sometimes posing the risk of death. Meanwhile, federal authorities built sturdier housing for white workers closer inland near white residential areas, undertook “war guest” programs to lease private spare rooms for white workers, and issued low-interest loans for Richmond’s white homeowners to renovate and subdivide their residences to increase occupancy.

Even after wartime housing emergency programs had ended, FHA policies continued to finance the building of all-white suburbs like Rollingwood. This discriminatory practice was common in the Bay Area: as one historian notes, out of more than fifty thousand private housing units financed by the FHA and constructed in the Bay Area from 1940 to 1946, only three hundred were open to African American buyers. When “unrestricted” housing was built, it was located in locations away from white residential areas, further entrenching racial segregation. According to a 1967 study by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, the unrestricted subdivision of Parchester Village was constructed in a “dubious” location in Richmond, because it was “a segregated housing island surrounded on three sides by property zoned for heavy industrial use, and is cramped between two railroad lines.”

After the war, white families increasingly left public housing for exclusionary communities like Rollingwood. Black families filled their vacancies, and by 1950, 78 percent of Richmond’s African American population lived in public housing. Still, Black families’ need for housing far outpaced its availability. With their access to housing in Richmond and its suburbs severely restricted by government redlining policies, African American families were, in the words of longtime resident Harry Williams, “farmed out” to the unincorporated town of North Richmond, where they were squeezed into poorly constructed housing and makeshift shelter, like chicken coops and tents. But government authorities were not the only actors that forced Blacks into North Richmond. Harry reflected during an oral history interview that in 1946, he and his wife, Marguerite, thought they had found a home for their family in Richmond. He soon learned, however, that the house held a racially restrictive covenant—a clause in the housing deed that prohibited the purchase and occupancy of the home by nonwhites.

Housing Covenants Restrict Home Ownership Based on Race

Racially restrictive covenants like this were present in virtually every city across the country and were central to redlining policies: HOLC and FHA appraisers regularly awarded high ratings to neighborhoods with racially restrictive housing covenants because of their ability to protect against “subversive racial hazards.” Such covenants, in turn, perpetuated segregation by maintaining all-white communities and nonwhite communities. In Richmond, as Harry reflected, racially restrictive covenants were abundant and forced Black, Mexican, and Asian families to live in specific neighborhoods. By 1960, the effects of redlining in Richmond were clear. Census data from that year indicates that areas in the center of Richmond were over 99 percent white, while families of color made up over half of the residents in areas to the south and west (near the shipyards and railroads). In North Richmond, meanwhile, around 91 percent of residents were Black.

The Lasting Effects of Redlining and Housing Discrimination in the United States

In virtually every city across the country, like in Richmond and North Richmond, government policies of redlining worked in tandem with discriminatory real estate practices to restrict the housing opportunities of African American and other minority families. In 1948, the Supreme Court ruled in Shelley v. Kraemer that the government and courts could no longer enforce racially restrictive covenants, but the use of them remained widespread. The 1968 Fair Housing Act finally made housing discrimination—including racially restrictive covenants and redlining—illegal, but the exclusionary effects of these long-standing practices left their mark. Today, most major cities are still intensely segregated along the lines of race and class, which contributes to disinvestment in social services, education, and public transit. And because home ownership is an integral piece of family wealth, communities that have historically been denied access to housing are, on the whole, poorer than their white counterparts. This is not a random consequence of history but a product of decades-long, government-sanctioned discrimination in housing.

Reflection Questions

In what ways did the government redlining policies segregate the communities of Richmond and North Richmond?

What are racially restrictive housing covenants, and why were they important for redlining policies?

In what ways did government redlining policies help perpetuate racial prejudice and fears of lower property values as expressed by residents in Document 1?

Redlining has produced racial disparities that persist to this day, including continued housing segregation and unequal levels of homeownership and family wealth. How did twentieth-century redlining policies contribute to these contemporary issues?

Additional Reading

Robert M. Fogelson, Bourgeois Nightmares: Suburbia, 1870–1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).

Kenneth T. Jackson, “Race, Ethnicity, and Real Estate Appraisal: The Home Owners Loan Corporation and the Federal Housing Administration,” Journal of Urban History 6, no. 4 (1980): 419–52.

Marilynn S. Johnson, The Second Gold Rush: Oakland and the East Bay in World War II. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (New York: Liveright Publishing, 2017).

University of Richmond Digital Scholarship Lab, Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America, https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/#loc=4/36.71/-96.93&opacity=0.8

Louis Lee Woods, II, “The Federal Home Loan Bank Board, Redlining, and the National Proliferation of Racial Lending Discrimination, 1921–1950,” Journal of Urban History 38 (2012): 1036–59.

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