Worcester Business Journal

December 12, 2022

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12 Worcester Business Journal | December 12, 2022 | wbjournal.com REDLINING: An Economic Legacy Renters in Worcester neighborhoods The neighborhoods hit hardest by the spikes in rent since 2010 are largely those ranked lowest in 1936 by the Home Own- ers' Loan Corp. assessment. % of housing 1936 zone occupied by & ranking renters in 2020 1 40.9% 2 26.8% 3 31.7% 4 50.3% 5 72.2% 6 90.2% 7 76.1% 8 22.6% 9 70.0% 10 92.4% 11 73.7% 12 51.4% 13 58.2% 14 75.5% 15 78.4% Note: The 2020 median income is based off the Census tracts most aligning with the 1936 map, as calculated by the Worcester Regional Research Bureau. Source: University of Richmond, American Community Survey Non-white population Since the 1936 assessment by the Home Owners' Loan Corp. determined which Worcester neighborhoods should get financial investment largely based on the race and ethnicity of their residents, the neighborhoods that suffered from the least investment have the largest non-white populations in the city. 1936 zone % non-white & ranking population in 2020 1 35.1% 2 44.6% 3 75.3% 4 72.5% 5 73.7% 6 66.4% 7 86.7% 8 72.6% 9 83.3% 10 80.1% 11 79.3% 12 73.0% 13 88.8% 14 88.6% 15 89.5% Note: The 2020 median income is based off the Census tracts most aligning with the 1936 map, as calculated by the Worcester Regional Research Bureau. Source: University of Richmond, American Community Survey lineates neighborhoods in a straightfor- ward and unempathetic way. It ranks the sections in 15 categories drawn in some funky shapes to outline where certain demographics and races live, as well as where factories are. e top area is near Hancock Hill and the section surrounding most of Salisbury Street, which has some of the city's biggest and oldest homes and "are occupied by professional men and busi- ness executives," according to the HOLC assessment. e second best section, according to the map, is the Tatnuck and West side area of the city, which has no apparent "detrimental influence" and "some of the better class Jewish people" concentrated in the area. Near Elm Park is the sixth best neighborhood and has people collecting rent in two family homes for "$65 to $80 a floor." As you get further down the list of redlined neighborhoods, the areas are more defined by the people who live in them. e ninth best area in the city is near Beaver Brook where, "there is a small concentration of negroes southeast of Beaver Brook playground, although it is not spreading to adjacent streets." e 12th ranked neighborhood, near today's Graon Hill and Union Hill, is "princi- pally inhabited by Jewish people of the poorer class." is is standard language of the time for HOLC maps. It not only deals with wealth, home types (multi-family homes are less desir- able for a neighborhood than single-fam- ily), and geography, but also race and ethnicity. "It is straight out of [HOLC's] play- books, and I think if you read similar maps from other cities the language actually – I've read it for some other cities – resonates," said Deborah Martin, professor at Clark University's Graduate School of Geography. "It's typical. Taking different demographic groups and ascribing home value or certain charac- teristics to them and talking about it in a dispassionate way. It's classic that the Jewish neighborhoods and any neighbor- hood with any Black people in them are definitely declining – they are declining by definition to the HOLC because of those categories." ose categories and the way the HOLC maps were designed out of a legacy of racist policy set forth aer the Civil War to slow integration and keep wealth and property out of Black people and other minority groups' hands. Home ownership has been viewed as a way for middle-class families to accrue wealth since the early 1900s. Davidson's family bought a home and started to build a new life in the middle, out of poverty. "For my father's family," Davidson writes, "the dreams fulfilled by this house had meant a climb from bare subsistence to the middle." But for the people in those neighbor- hoods redlined in 1936, the dream of homeownership is an impossible prom- ise, and when Worcester goes through an economic wave causing rental prices to spike – like they have from 2010 to 2022 – those residents are the ones who suffer the most. I n the early 20th century, President Woodrow Wilson's administration made it a point of emphasis to make homebuying easier because the government feared the Marxist Russian revolution that took hold would jump to the United States and threaten the country's capitalist system, according to Richard Rothstein, author of "e Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America" and a distinguished fellow of the Economic Policy Institute and a senior fellow emer- itus at the urgood Marshall Institute of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. To stop that, the government believed getting white Americans to become homeowners would keep them invested in the capitalist system, according to Rothstein. At the same time, zoning policies had been put into place by various cities and towns since the end of the Civil War. Lo- cal officials segregated cities and pushed Black people out of small towns and into more and more crowded areas of cities. Even with the push by the government to get white families into home own- ership, it was still too expensive. Banks usually required 50% down payments for a loan and for the loans to be paid off in five to seven years. When the Great Depression hit, that kind of financial commitment became impossible. So, in 1933, President Franklin Roo- sevelt and his administration created HOLC, which was charged with buying existing mortgages close to foreclosure and giving those owners new loans up to 15 years. e new loans made it so own- ers paid little interest, and the borrower Continued from page 13 Deborah Martin, professor at Clark University's Graduate School of Geography PHOTO | EDD COTE

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