Redlining and the Home Owners' Loan Corporation maps (1930s-1968)
During the New Deal, the federal Home Owners' Loan Corporation graded cities block by block, coloring neighborhoods with Black residents red — 'hazardous.' Private lenders, insurers, and real estate agents used those grades to deny mortgages and services to entire communities, a practice that became known as redlining.
Black families were denied federally backed mortgages in massive numbers, locking them out of postwar homeownership and wealth building.
The practice helped create segregated cities that still show service gaps along racial lines decades later.
The D.C. case involves a company excluding two majority-Black ZIP codes from standard delivery service. Whole neighborhoods cut out of services that others receive echoes redlining's geographic pattern.