Why Do You Live Where You Live?
Using Interactive Maps to Connect Past Racist Housing Policy to the Present
During the 1930s and ’40s, racist government-sponsored mortgage loan practices effectively segregated every metropolitan area in the United States.
Today, many of those boundaries remain intact. Although segregation is part and parcel for any unit covering the Civil Rights Movement, most standard school curricula lack insight into the mortgage loan policies that underlie the physical separation of white communities and communities of color today. Without this context, students, especially white students, live with an incomplete and distorted history of their racialized experience.
This year in my 7th-grade English class we explored this missing history in connection with Jamie Ford’s Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, an historical fiction novel that takes place in Seattle during WWII at the advent of Japanese Incarceration. Set in Seattle’s International District (or I.D.), the book reveals a city deeply segregated not only between white communities and communities of color, but among the communities of color that made up the I.D., including African Americans migrating from the South and immigrants from Japan, China, and the Philippines. In the story, Henry Lee, a Chinese American boy, finds a companion in Keiko Okabe, a Japanese American girl, the only other student of color in the all-white magnet school where both attend on scholarship. With the issuing of Executive Order 9066, Keiko and her family are evacuated along with all of Nihonmachi which at the time represented Seattle’s largest neighborhood of color.
Before we read the book, I wanted students to be aware of the ways government-sponsored housing policy created a “zone” for citizens of color. I also wanted my students to understand how segregation made the residents of Nihonmachi especially vulnerable. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, I wanted my students to connect this past to their present, to see themselves as the collective heirs of racist government-sponsored housing policy.
To introduce the essential question — Why do you live where you live? — we looked at a color-coded Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) map of Seattle, developed by the HOLC in the 1930s. Banks used these maps to identify “desirable” areas of investment, indicated in blue and green, and areas deemed “hazardous” for investment, indicated in yellow and red, hence the oft used maxim redlining. The University of Richmond’s Mapping Inequality project houses HOLC maps specific to many urban zip codes.
First, I asked my students to find their own neighborhood on Google maps, then I handed out color copies of the HOLC maps and asked them to identify their neighborhoods again. For the vast majority of my students, their homes appear in the blue and green, north of downtown or east of Lake Washington and off the map. “My neighborhood is good. It’s blue,” Raymond announced.
Next, through the University of Washington’s Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project website, we looked at the restrictive covenants ubiquitous in neighborhoods across the city beginning in the 1920s and through the 1950s. Though not available for every city, there are many similar racial covenant mapping projects for other areas in the country, like the University of Minnesota’s Mapping Prejudice project and the map of racially restrictive covenants published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. At the Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project website, students scrolled through an alphabetical list to find their neighborhood and read the overtly racist deed restrictions. Aside from some semantic variation, all covenants (or deeds) explicitly forbid anyone who was not white and of European ancestry to rent or buy. A sample covenant from the Laurelhurst neighborhood located in Northeast Seattle states the following:
No person or persons of Asiatic, African or Negro blood, lineage, or extraction shall be permitted to occupy a portion of said property, or any building thereon; except domestic servants may actually and in good faith be employed by white occupants of such premises.
Here, I made sure that my students understood that the covenants were born out of the same racist real estate policies that created the mortgage loan maps in the first place. Covenant or not, it was the realtors and the government-backed industry they represented that maintained segregation.
Next, we used the site’s interactive map tool where one can isolate for a particular racial demographic and chart its movement over time, from the 1940s to the present. Although it may be difficult to find similar tools for other urban areas, some do exist, and for most places a current racial demographic map could be used for comparison.
Because the Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project’s demographic map is so detailed, I devoted ample class time for students to interact with it on their own. As I walked around the class, I noticed many students naturally exploring the demographic for which they identify, but with some nudging they began to make the connection between the colors of the mortgage loan maps and the residential distributions of race that the interactive map reveals. For example, red areas on the mortgage loan maps tend to indicate communities of color — even to this day.
“What’s the connection between the redlining map we looked at first and the interactive map you’ve been exploring?” I asked.
“North Seattle doesn’t change much,” Lucy responded.
“Good noticing. What’s happening downtown and south of downtown?” I prodded.
“As you go from 1940 to 2020 you see Black neighborhoods are getting bigger but only in south Seattle,” she responded.
At this point, student responses suggested a better understanding of the correlation between housing policy and race in the city. Nonetheless, I wanted to give students a fuller picture of what racist policy looked like on the ground. The map shows historically white neighborhoods in the north changing little over time, while historically redlined neighborhoods expand into adjacent white neighborhoods near downtown. “Why do you think white homeowners in white neighborhoods began to move out?” I asked. “Since segregation was normal, people were probably used to living around people that looked like them,” Jeremy responded.
This was a perfect opportunity to push against the myth that persistent patterns of segregation are the result of personal choice, i.e., de facto, when in fact housing segregation was de jure, a direct outcome of policy and law. To capture this distinction, we watched Segregated by Design, a short animated film based on Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law. The film effectively documents the practice of blockbusting whereby white realtors convinced white homeowners that their property was diminishing in value. Some brokers went so far as to pay Black mothers to push their own children in baby strollers into white neighborhoods to convince white homeowners the demographics of the neighborhood were changing, and the property was losing value. The realtors then convinced white homeowners to sell below the market rate. In turn, realtors sold back to Black families above market value, making a profit while encouraging white flight.
Students expressed surprise at such tactics. “How was this legal?” Michelle asked.
“It wasn’t technically legal,” I responded. “But agents were making a lot of money and city officials did nothing to stop it.”
After the video, I asked students to name other factors that contributed to white flight and segregation.
“White homebuyers didn’t have to put any money down,” Miranda shared.
“Black families couldn’t get mortgages,” Gabe added. “They had to pay for their homes in full, if they wanted to buy.”
Despite the abundant visual data, a close reading of racist deeds specific to their neighborhoods, and the brazen tactics used by real estate agents portrayed in the short film, many of my white students still struggled to connect past policy to the current demographic of their own neighborhood. “How might the policies of the past that we are learning about impact where you currently live?” I asked.
When no one raised a hand, I followed up: “How many of you consider the neighborhood you live in to be diverse?” Many students of color, but also many white students raised their hands. “How many think this classroom is diverse?” I continued. This time, for the most part, students of color put their hands down, while white students kept them raised. Some students of color scoffed. Some laughed outright. I realized then that for many of my white students whose lived experience has thus far been predominantly white, diversity, in their minds, seemed to equate to the mere presence of a few people of color in a majority white space. The moment served as a testament to the insidious way a century of racial segregation impacts both the marginalized and the privileged. “That’s interesting,” I said. “We clearly have a difference of opinion around the definition of diversity. Since we’ve been talking about segregation, is diversity the opposite of segregation, or is there a better word?” This prompted a short, but important discussion about the differences between integration and diversity.
We then looked at current census data specific to zip codes in Seattle to better grasp the extent to which our city remains segregated. On censusreporter.org, I modeled the search isolating for race in the zip code of our school’s location, where we find that of the roughly 53,000 residents, about 45,000 are white, while Asians, the second largest demographic, number approximately 7,500. I then asked students who live in a different zip code to find the top two racial categories and take note of the numbers. Finally, I asked the class to respond to the following prompt in a short paragraph: “Explain how policies of the past have impacted the neighborhood where you currently live. Make sure to mention the resources we used, including the 1936 redlining map of Seattle, restrictive covenants, the interactive map, and U.S. census data.”
Not surprisingly responses varied depending on the student’s residence. “African Americans and Asians populate my area . . . this is because African Americans were grouped into one area as we saw on the map and have continuously spread but only to the south,” shared Sahara, who lives in historically redlined South Seattle. “The history of redlining has influenced where people live.” Christina, who resided in North Seattle, wrote, “I live in Wallingford. Wallingford is labeled blue and ‘desirable’ on the redlining map from 1936, where the International District is red and labeled ‘hazardous.’ After they made redlining illegal it’s still hard for people of color to gain access to majority white neighborhoods like Wallingford.”
Judging from the responses, students seemed to have a better understanding of the ways housing policy and practice created racial division in our city. Of course, a century of segregation means that racial division is also a division of opportunity, income, and health. One tool I might use in the future to explore this is the University of Richmond’s Not Even Past, which connects the HOLC maps to current Social Vulnerability Indexes (a number used by the Centers for Disease Control that combines 16 social and economic factors including poverty, lack of access to transportation, and crowded housing).
As we began our shared reading of Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, not only did students have a better grasp of the forces that created the demographic boundaries present in the book, but they also made real connections between policies of the past and the reality of the present. This exposure to the historical forces that shaped our city is one small but significant step in educating our students to better understand the roots of racism, racist policies, and their lasting impact on the ways we live and think today.