Worcester Business Journal

14 Worcester Business Journal | December 12, 2022 | wbjournal.com ose effects for Worcester in 2020 include 75% of its homes being owned by white people in a city whose popula- tion is 67% white, while about half of all renters are people of color, according to the WRRB report "Static Income, Rising Costs: Renting in the Heart of the Com- monwealth" released on Dec. 12. As housing costs have spiked in Worcester over the past decade, the renters are the ones who are impacted the most. T he map of Worcester foretells the way the city will grow as it moves through the 20th and into the 21st centuries. Patterns arise, and there's even a larger knock-on effect by the way the areas are drawn because each redlined neighborhood has an outsized impact on the ones around them. For example, the seventh district, which is modern day Vernon Hill, went from the seventh best district in the city in 1936 and dropped to the 12th in 2020 because of how the map and the neigh- borhoods around it impacted the homes there. e district is almost surrounded by the 15th district, one of the two red neighborhoods delineated on the origi- nal map. Vernon Hill is an old neighbor- hood of triple deckers, and because of its proximity it becomes an area where it's harder to get a loan. is decrease in property value also makes it a place where the government might want to build a highway, like I-290. "Planners for the Interstate Highway System designated Black and brown areas as undesirable and either destroyed them to make way for highways or located highways in ways that separated the neighborhoods from job-rich areas," Heather McGhee writes in "e Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together." Families were already leaving Vernon Hill before I-290 was constructed, but once it weaved its way along the border with the redlined District 15, the neigh- borhood's future reverses. "Part of what happened to [Vernon Hill] is that Water Street was decimated when 290 went through and separated the owners from their property," Martin said. "But also, those owners were relo- cating to the West Side. You have that happening not at the same time but they feed into each other." Homes near highways or under high- ways or along highways are traditionally less valuable because of noise, pollution, and traffic. ey're the opposite of the American dream home society was sold. Around the same time I-290 was being built, a lot of the homeowners in Vernon Hill moved to the West Side. ey owned property and businesses in the Water Street neighborhood and were already beginning to move out. "e Jews on Vernon Hill owned the businesses on Water Street – the [home] owners worked in the businesses on Water Street," Martin said. "But it was a more middle and upper class, and in fact they are some of the same people who, in the 30 years aer this map was drawn, relocated maybe even only 20 to 30 years, relocated to primarily zone 2." Zone 2 was the second best area in the city to live and there Jews were regard- ed for their "pride in homeownership," according to the 1936 redlined map. Martin points out they had more income and thus considered a better-class Jewish person. With I-290 on an overlay of the old redlining map of Worcestrer, the high- way runs through four of the five 1936 zones listed at the bottom of the 2020 Social Vulnerability Index, and its im- pact can be attributed to part of Vernon Hill's decline against its perception in 1936, which was high because it was the top of the hill and included "rich people," according to the HOLC assessment. "Highways are built where red and yellow lines were," Martin said. "Because that was where poor people were that you could displace and were dispropor- tionately renters, and that was a self-ful- filling prophecy." What happens in an area like Vernon Hill is that investment disappears. Without investment, it struggles to keep up and the cycle of devaluation con- tinues until homeowners are all either pushed out, leave or pass away and their family sells the property to speculative buyers more interested in creating wealth, not through property value but by collecting rent. S ince these cycles have compounded problems in Worcester's neighbor- hoods over the past 86 years, the redlining map largely hasn't changed. "Being graded with a 'C' or a 'D' in 1936 is today associated with higher pov- erty rates, a higher non-white popula- tion, a lower median income, and a high- er percentage of renter-occupied units even aer more than 80 years," WRRB writes in its report "Static Income, Rising Costs: Renting in the Heart of the Com- monwealth" released on Dec. 12. Using Census tract data from 2020, the neighborhoods with the greatest portion of renter-occupied units in the city lines up with the old redlining map, showing the same areas impacted by redlining are now more than 80% rental units. Now in 2020, more than 75% of Worcester homes are owned by white people while 7.5% are owned by Black people, 10% by Latino, and 6% Asian. At the same time, the number of white renters in Worcester is 51.1% compared to 47.5% of renters who are Latino, Black, and Asian. Since housing costs have spiked in Worcester between 2010 and 2022, homeowners are less likely to be cost-burdened today than renters, with 28% of homeowners spending more than 30% of their income on housing vs. 51% of renters is cycle won't ease as rent in the city continues to rise, WRRB writes. e average cost of rent increased 80% from March 2015 to August 2022, from rough- ly $1,000 to a little more than $1,800 per month. Part of the reason for the spike in rents over the past seven years has been the slow increase of new homes coming on- line in Worcester, as the city added 1,848 new housing units from 2010 to 2020, an increase of 2.6% (compared to 3% both in Worcester County and Massachusetts and 7% nationally). ere's constant talk at the city level for the need for housing in the city, which is nothing new. ere has been a housing shortage in America dating back to the beginning of the 20th century and then especially aer veterans returned from the two World Wars. And it's fallen on the city to figure out how to ease that shortage by determining where housing would be built and what kind of housing it would be. "It is about City Hall making an em- phasis on who is the kind of developer we want to come into the city," said Ra- mon Borges-Mendez, associate professor of community development and plan- ning at Clark University in Worcester. "Would you like developers coming into the city that don't really think about what they are trying to do and are committed to the difficulties of understanding how you put together affordable housing? Or do you want to bring people who are free marketers who are just in the market of making a big buck? ere is a difference." One of the people in charge of much of the early 20th century housing in the city was Raymond Harold, chairman and CEO of First Federal Savings and Loan Association, treasurer for the Worces- ter Home & Equity Cooperative Bank, chairman of the Worcester Housing REDLINING: An Economic Legacy Continued from page 13 PHOTO | EDD COTE Daina Harvey, professor of sociology and anthropology at The College of the Holy Cross

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