The effects of racist government policies are still harming communities of color decades later, recently published research suggests.
Neighborhoods in Richmond, Virginia, that were redlined – marked as “undesirable” for lending based on the assumption that people of color are riskier borrowers – are the same areas where youth violence flares up today, according to the paper, published in August by academics at Virginia Commonwealth University.
Redlining practices were accepted and widespread up until the passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968, making many Black households and other people of color unable to access mortgage credit and home ownership opportunities. Extensive research in the past few years has shown that the scars of redlining persist, particularly in terms of poorer health outcomes for residents of those areas.
The paper’s breakthrough, lead researcher Samuel J. West told USA TODAY, was to connect so-called hotspots of violence – “the regions and the neighborhoods in the city where the violence tends to sort of cluster” – with sections of Richmond that were redlined in the 1930s.
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West and his collaborators used records of trauma center visits from hundreds of youths who were the victims of violent, intentional injuries in 2022 and 2023. A whopping 86% of the areas that experienced this violence – primarily unarmed assaults – were in neighborhoods that were once redlined. Nearly two-thirds of the hospital patients identified as Black.
The city’s history speaks for itself, the researchers wrote: Richmond “has been profoundly affected by structural racism over multiple periods since its founding in 1788. Richmond served as the functional center for the chattel slavery system in the United States, the capitol city of the Confederacy during the Civil War and was one of the many cities that subjected residents to redlining lending practices.”
In an interview with USA Today, West explained how previously redlined areas wind up being hotspots for violence.
Those neighborhoods likely have less access to behavioral health resources, poorer air and water quality, and greater presence of heat islands – areas that experience higher temperatures than surrounding ones, often because of a lack of green or open space – the paper notes. But residents may also face food insecurity and low housing stability and have poor or fewer community ties with neighbors, West said.
“Think about stress as like a cup of water. Every time you have another stressor, it adds a little more water to the cup,” he said. “Everyone has a limit at which their likelihood of being aggressive to another person gets met.
“All these things add up and it’s sort of like, you keep adding heat and you keep adding pressure, things are going to boil over,” he said. “It makes a fairly strong argument that the even though redlining is over, the effects of redlining continue to directly impact the descendants of the people who were originally targeted.”
Not everyone lives in areas delineated by redlining – but all Americans should have an interest in government and industry policies that target other members of the community, West said.
“This is a downstream effect of government policy that ended over half a century ago, and it is still not only affecting just this area, but literally the people who have lived there and raised their families there all these years,” he said. “If we allow our communities to be shaped entirely by federal policy and do not play an active role in shaping those communities ourselves, then this could be us in the next 100 years.”
