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1. Neighborhood Socioeconomic and demographic changes in Baltimore's (BES) Neighborhoods: 1930 to 2010

   https://doi.org/10.6073/pasta/346d11d1e409ac395d18f5619b896336  

   Locke, Dexter H ( January 2019 , Environmental Data Initiative)

   This dataset was created primarily to map and track socioeconomic and demographic variables from the US Census Bureau from year 1940 to year 2010, by decade, within the City of Baltimore's Mayor's Office of Information Technology (MOIT) year 2010 neighborhood boundaries. The socioeconomic and demographic variables include the percent White, percent African American, percent owner occupied homes, percent vacant homes, the percentage of age 25 and older people with a high school education or greater, and the percentage of age 25 and older people with a college education or greater. Percent White and percent African American are also provided for year 1930. Each of the the year 2010 neighborhood boundaries were also attributed with the 1937 Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC) definition of neighborhoods via spatial overlay. HOLC rated neighborhoods as A, B, C, D or Undefined. HOLC categorized the perceived safety and risk of mortgage refinance lending in metropolitan areas using a hierarchical grading scale of A, B, C, and D. A and B areas were considered the safest areas for federal investment due to their newer housing as well as higher earning and racially homogenous households. In contrast, C and D graded areas were viewed to be in a state of inevitable decline, depreciation, and decay, and thus risky for federal investment, due to their older housing stock and racial and ethnic composition. This policy was inherently a racist practice. Places were graded based on who lived there; poor areas with people of color were labeled as lower and less-than. HOLC's 1937 neighborhoods do not cover the entire extent of the year 2010 neighborhood boundaries. The neighborhood boundaries were also augmented to include which of the year 2017 Housing Market Typology (HMT) the 2010 neighborhoods fall within. Finally, the neighborhood boundaries were also augmented to include tree canopy and tree canopy change year 2007 to year 2015. 

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2. Residential housing segregation and urban tree canopy in 37 US Cities; data in support of Locke et al 2021 in npj Urban Sustainability

   https://doi.org/10.6073/pasta/4ccbc7087959dc2a25063e589dee7718  

   Locke, Dexter H ( January 2020 , Environmental Data Initiative)

   Our goal in this paper is to examine whether there are similar patterns in the distribution of tree canopy by Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) graded neighborhoods across 37 cities. A pre-print of the paper can be found here: https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/97zcs This data packages contains: 1. City-specific file geodatabases with features classes of the HOLC polygons obtained from the Mapping Inequality Project https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/, and tables summarizing tree canopy, and in some cases other land cover classes. 2. An *.R script that replicates all of the analyses, graphs, and tables in the paper. Other double checks, exploratory, and miscellaneous outputs are created by the script too as a bonus. Everything in the paper can be done with the script; additional work outputs are also created. 3. A *.csv file containing city, the HOLC grade, and the percent tree canopy cover. This can be used to create the main findings of the paper and this flat file is provided as an alternative to running the R script to extract information from the geodatabases, combine, and analyze them. The intention is that this file is more widely accessible; the underlying information is the same. Redlining was a racially discriminatory housing policy established by the federal government’s Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) during the 1930s. For decades, redlining limited access to homeownership and wealth creation among racial minorities, contributing to a host of adverse social outcomes, including high unemployment, poverty, and residential vacancy, that persist today. While the multigenerational socioeconomic impacts of redlining are increasingly understood, the impacts on urban environments and ecosystems remains unclear. To begin to address this gap, we investigated how the HOLC policy administered 80 years ago may relate to present-day tree canopy at the neighborhood level. Urban trees provide many ecosystem services, mitigate the urban heat island effect, and may improve quality of life in cities. In our prior research in Baltimore, MD, we discovered that redlining policy influenced the location and allocation of trees and parks. Our analysis of 37 metropolitan areas here shows that areas formerly graded D, which were mostly inhabited by racial and ethnic minorities, have on average ~23% tree canopy cover today. Areas formerly graded A, characterized by U.S.-born white populations living in newer housing stock, had nearly twice as much tree canopy (~43%). Results are consistent across small and large metropolitan regions. The ranking system used by Home Owners’ Loan Corporation to assess loan risk in the 1930s parallels the rank order of average percent tree canopy cover today. 

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3. Residential housing segregation and urban tree canopy in 37 US Cities

   https://doi.org/10.1038/s42949-021-00022-0  

   Locke, Dexter H. ; Hall, Billy ; Grove, J. Morgan ; Pickett, Steward T. A. ; Ogden, Laura A. ; Aoki, Carissa ; Boone, Christopher G. ; O’Neil-Dunne, Jarlath P. M. ( March 2021 , npj Urban Sustainability)

   Redlining was a racially discriminatory housing policy established by the federal government’s Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) during the 1930s. For decades, redlining limited access to homeownership and wealth creation among racial minorities, contributing to a host of adverse social outcomes, including high unemployment, poverty, and residential vacancy, that persist today. While the multigenerational socioeconomic impacts of redlining are increasingly understood, the impacts on urban environments and ecosystems remain unclear. To begin to address this gap, we investigated how the HOLC policy administered 80 years ago may relate to present-day tree canopy at the neighborhood level. Urban trees provide many ecosystem services, mitigate the urban heat island effect, and may improve quality of life in cities. In our prior research in Baltimore, MD, we discovered that redlining policy influenced the location and allocation of trees and parks. Our analysis of 37 metropolitan areas here shows that areas formerly graded D, which were mostly inhabited by racial and ethnic minorities, have on average ~23% tree canopy cover today. Areas formerly graded A, characterized by U.S.-born white populations living in newer housing stock, had nearly twice as much tree canopy (~43%). Results are consistent across small and large metropolitan regions. The ranking system used by Home Owners’ Loan Corporation to assess loan risk in the 1930s parallels the rank order of average percent tree canopy cover today.

    

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4. The Legacy of Redlining: A Spatial Dynamics Perspective

   https://doi.org/10.1177/01600176221116566  

   Rey, Sergio Joseph ; Knaap, Elijah ( August 2022 , International Regional Science Review)

   This paper investigates the long-term impacts of the federal Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) mortgage risk assessment maps on the spatial dynamics of recent income and racial distributions in California metropolitan areas over the 1990-2010 period. We combine historical HOLC boundaries with modern Census tract data and apply recently developed methods of spatial distribution dynamics to examine if legacy impacts are reflected in recent urban dynamics. Cities with HOLC assessments are found to have higher levels of isolation segregation than the non-HOLC group, but no difference in unevenness segregation between the two groups of cities are found. We find no difference in income or racial and ethnic distributional dynamics between the two groups of cities over the period. At the intra-urban scale, we find that the intersectionality of residing in a C or D graded tract that is also a low-income tract falls predominately upon the minority populations in these eight HOLC cities. Our findings indicate that neighborhoods with poor housing markets and high minority concentrations rarely experience a dramatic change in either their racial and ethnic or socioeconomic compositions—and that negative externalities (e.g. lower home prices and greater segregation levels) emanate from these neighborhoods, with inertia spilling over into nearby zones.

    

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5. Divergent Residential Pathways from Flood-Prone Areas: How Neighborhood Inequalities Are Shaping Urban Climate Adaptation

   https://doi.org/10.1093/socpro/spab059  

   Elliott, James R ; Loughran, Kevin ; Brown, Phylicia Lee ( September 2021 , Social Problems)

   Abstract Flood risks are rising across the United States, putting the economic and social values of growing numbers of homes at risk. In response, the federal government is funding the purchase and demolition of housing in areas of greatest jeopardy, tacitly promoting residential resettlement as a strategy of climate adaptation, especially in cities. Despite these developments little is known about where people move when they engage in such resettlement or how answers to that question vary by the racial and economic status of their flood-prone neighborhoods. The present study begins to fill that gap. We introduce a new typology for classifying environmental resettlement along two socio-spatial dimensions of community attachment: (a) distance moved from one’s flood-prone home; and (b) average distance resettled from similarly relocated neighbors. Next, we analyze data from 1,572 homeowners who accepted government-funded buyouts across 39 neighborhood areas in Harris County, Texas – Houston’s urban core. Results indicate that homeowners from more privileged neighborhoods resettle closer to their flood-prone homes and to one another, thus helping to preserve the social and economic value of their homes; homeowners from less privileged areas end up farther away from both. Implications for understanding social inequities in government-funded urban climate adaptation are discussed. 

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