Bringing The World Home To You

© 2024 WUNC North Carolina Public Radio
120 Friday Center Dr
Chapel Hill, NC 27517
919.445.9150 | 800.962.9862
91.5 Chapel Hill 88.9 Manteo 90.9 Rocky Mount 91.1 Welcome 91.9 Fayetteville 90.5 Buxton 94.1 Lumberton 99.9 Southern Pines 89.9 Chadbourn
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Mapping Inequality: How Redlining Is Still Affecting Inner Cities

After the stock market crash of 1929, Americans across the country were in danger of losing their houses to foreclosure. 

The federal government stepped in, providing bonds for homeowners to refinance their mortgages as part of the New Deal. But in larger cities, the government drew boundaries between neighborhoods that were eligible and ineligible for new loans. 

The so-called "risky" areas were usually low-income, African-American communities. This is widely considered the source of redlining, or denying benefits based on racial divides. Today, a project that started at UNC-Chapel Hill is drawing those original boundaries over today’s maps of inner cities to show their lasting effects.

Host Frank Stasio talks with Richard Marciano, founder of the project called "Mapping Inequality" and professor of Information Studies at the University of Maryland, and Nathan Connolly, a history professor at Johns Hopkins University.

View Marciano's interactive maps of Asheville and Durham. The national map is available here.

An appraisalreport of a red area that includes the Hayti community - a historically black neighborhood in Durham - has a description that indicates the presence of African-Americans made the area too risky for loans.

"This was formerly a good white residential street, but negroes are gradually taking up the area," it says.

Stay Connected
Will Michaels is WUNC's Weekend Host and Reporter.
Longtime NPR correspondent Frank Stasio was named permanent host of The State of Things in June 2006. A native of Buffalo, Frank has been in radio since the age of 19. He began his public radio career at WOI in Ames, Iowa, where he was a magazine show anchor and the station's News Director.
Related Content