Institutionalized Racism: Redlined Districts Then and Now in Boston, Detroit, and Los Angeles.

In the late 1930s, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) used a process called redlining to section off districts in an attempt to signal the level of risk to lenders. Consequently, lenders felt justified in turning away non-white borrowers, effectively leading to segregated communities. This practice carried on through the mid-1960s, after which some communities underwent socio-demographic transformations due to gentrification, urban renewal, and deindustrialization, amongst other things. This paper analyzes the current demographic trends in Boston, Detroit, and Los Angeles to determine to what extent the resulting segregation from redlining practices has persisted. Redlining and census data from 1930 and 2020 were obtained and analyzed in order to compare the racial demographics over time. White vs. non-white population in redline districts in 1930 versus 2020 were compared in each of these cities. Whereas percent change between white majority and non-white minority provides a demographic trend over time, a local spatial autocorrelation (LISA) analysis helped to identify dense areas of minority population. Lastly, the index dissimilarity, interaction, and isolation were used to better expose persistent levels of segregation. This research provides one example of how historical GIS analysis can be done using diverse datasets to show spatio-temporal patterns of importance to ongoing issues of social justice and inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]