# Redlining

*A state-sanctioned housing policy engineered segregated credit, neighborhood disinvestment, and the racial wealth gap later blamed on Black communities themselves.*

> Black's Encyclopedia — the sourced record of Black American life.
> Portal: History & Migration · Status: In review · Revised: July 25, 2026 · Revisions: 1
> Canonical: https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/redlining-6480

## Questions this record answers

- How did redlining shape Black wealth in the United States?
- Who designed redlining and why?
- Was segregation in housing created by private prejudice or government policy?

## Summary

Redlining engineered the housing market that locked Black families out of mortgage credit, pushed them into disinvestment, and then saddled them with the blame for the conditions the policy created.

## The archive's standing

Redlining is one of the central machines of twentieth-century American inequality: a federal and private mapping system that turned race into credit risk and neighborhood decline into policy. The archive holds it as deliberate state-backed design, not accidental market drift. Its power lies in the fact that it made exclusion appear neutral while producing racialized outcomes by law and practice.

## The record

Redlining named the practice of marking Black neighborhoods and other nonwhite districts as bad credit risks, especially through federal housing policy and private lending standards in the New Deal era and after. The result was not merely discrimination in one market; it was the systematic stripping of access to mortgages, insurance, and appreciation that built middle-class wealth for white households.

## Policy, not deficiency

The policy did not emerge from Black failure. It was a state-sanctioned method of allocating opportunity upward to white suburbs and away from Black urban neighborhoods, with long afterlives in segregation, wealth inequality, school finance, and municipal tax bases. The later story that Black neighborhoods “declined” on their own reverses cause and effect.

## The archive’s record

Black newspapers, housing-rights organizing, and Black scholarship have long identified the structure as engineered exclusion rather than private happenstance. The documentary record is abundant because the harm was public, but the official language often softened its racial purpose in bureaucratic terms. The archive names the policy plainly because the policy itself named Black life as a hazard.

## Sources

1. Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States, Oxford University Press, 1985.
2. Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, Liveright, 2017.
3. Federal Housing Administration, Underwriting Manual, 1938, National Archives and Records Administration, Record Group 31.
4. Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, Residential Security Maps and Area Descriptions, 1930s, Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.

## Related records

- https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/united-states-federal-housing-administration
- https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/federal-housing-administration-mortgage-insurance-program
- https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/united-states-housing-segregation-before-world-war-ii
- https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/urban-renewal
- https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/united-states-interstate-highway-system-and-black-neighborhoods

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Cite as: Black's Encyclopedia, "Redlining," revised July 25, 2026. https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/redlining-6480

Text under the Black's Record License: cite the record, keep attribution attached, cite the revision date.