Historical Redlining Is Associated with Disparities in Environmental Quality across California

Abstract

Historical policies have been shown to underpin environmental quality. In the 1930s, the federal Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) developed the most comprehensive archive of neighborhoods that would have been redlined by local lenders and the Federal Housing Administration, often applying racist criteria. Our study explored how redlining is associated with environmental quality across eight California cities. We integrated HOLC’s graded maps [grades A (i.e., “best” and “greenlined”), B, C, and D (i.e., “hazardous” and “redlined”)] with 10 environmental hazards using data from 2018 to 2021 to quantify the spatial overlap among redlined neighborhoods and environmental hazards. We found that formerly redlined neighborhoods have poorer environmental quality relative to those of other HOLC grades via higher pollution, more noise, less vegetation, and elevated temperatures. Additionally, we found that intraurban disparities were consistently worse for formerly redlined neighborhoods across environmental hazards, with redlined neighborhoods having higher pollution burdens (77% of redlined neighborhoods vs 18% of greenlined neighborhoods), more noise (72% vs 18%), less vegetation (86% vs 12%), and elevated temperature (72% vs 20%), than their respective city’s average. Our findings highlight that redlining, a policy abolished in 1968, remains an environmental justice concern by shaping the environmental quality of Californian urban neighborhoods.