Redlined Neighborhoods, Yellowlined Recreation, Greenlined Parks: The Legacy of HOLC & Parks

The legacy of redlining is the focus of this abstract and proposed manuscript. The term “redlining” is associated with the color coding of the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) maps in the 1930s. In 1935, government lending agents were sent to 239 cities to assess city housing infrastructure and develop residential security maps. The maps presented a color code of: Green – Grade A; Blue – Grade B; Yellow – Grade C; and, Red – Grade D, for the worst housing stock, riskiest neighborhood areas, and questions about the composition of the residing population. Utilizing the maps created by the U.S. government sponsored HOLC during the 1930s, this article will engage an understanding that these maps and the accompanied area description reports, have implications on the parks and recreation field. The culture of the maps amongst legislators, city staff, investors, real estate brokers, and financiers, that it created what now know of as the modern financial mortgages system. And lastly, it also stimulated the manufacturing and supply of construction materials (brick, wood, cement, and electrical) and the broader construction industry (that comprised a third of the national labor force at that time). By learning about these maps and the accompanying data within them and the area description reports, the field can read and interpret them in order to identify clues in how neighborhoods developed in their respective cities and potentially how to overcome their legacies in the present.