The Hazards of maps
After my outing to East Palo Alto, I decided to look up old redlining maps of the area. I want to overlay street tree information with historic redlining to see what emerges. The search for a redlining map of East Palo Alto became much more complicated than I imagined. I found a good source of redlining maps that cover several larger cities along the way. East Palo Alto was not one of them.
However, here is what I did find.
Richmond University (of Richmond, VA) has done an impressive job of gathering a significant amount of searchable information on redlining maps and plotted it into an easy-to-use interactive map of the US. This is part of their Mapping Inequality: Redlining in The New Deal America project.
Though I did not yet find a source for redlining maps of East Palo Alto, I took this newfound source and started to look at the East Bay from a 1937 map. A small kidney-shaped “D1” red patch in North Berkeley caught my eye on the map. Knowing Berkeley a little, I guessed it was a slide area.
Robert K. Nelson, LaDale Winling, Richard Marciano, Nathan Connolly, et al., “Mapping Inequality,” American Panorama, ed. Robert K. Nelson and Edward L. Ayers, accessed February 13, 2021,https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/#loc=12/37.84/-122.273
Here is what I read when I looked up D1:
This is a “slide” area that has been known since 1915, at which time slides occurred as much as thirteen feet on a lot…It goes on to talk about slide risks, and notes that the area would be “best” (green) or “still desirable” (blue) were it not for the risk of landslide.
I then looked up the red area next to the bay on the northwest edge of the map. Area D3.
The majority of people in this district are of Latin extraction; Italians, Portuguese, etc… Loans in this area should be upon a highly restricted basis.
In 1937 being of Latin extraction; Italians, Portuguese etc. was marked like a landslide hazard for risk assessment. The question is, who was at risk?
If you are interested in reading more about redlining and the long-term adverse impacts it is still having on our communities today, here are some articles and posts.
A note for the uninitiated. HOLC stands for Home Owners’ Loan Corporation
Redlining was made unlawful in 1968 with the Fair Housing Act.
