To get an understanding of how infrastructure transforms communities, there’s no better place to start than the Federal Housing Authority “redlining” housing maps.
Commissioned by the federal government in the 1930's, these maps were critical to decisions of where and what type of infrastructure, lending and housing each neighborhood of each American city would be able to receive.
“The FHA promoted home ownership in new – and primarily suburban – neighborhoods so long as they were white and not ethnically or economically diverse,” writes Antero Pietila in Not in My Neighborhood: How Bigotry Shaped a Great American City.
FHA maps were created for every major city in the US. Original assessment documents unearthed by researchers at the T-Races project reveal the cold, casually racist way in which data collectors consigned vast neighborhoods to neglect and poverty.
Nowhere is infrastructure so obviously structurally racist as with the vast interstate highway system.
By the 1950's and 60's, during the Interstate Highway building boom, the process of routing roads through black communities was so common it even had a name among critics: “White roads through black bedrooms.”
The result was decay, pollution, and crime.
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