The Beauty of Zero

Community

Contributed by DC Department of Energy and Environment

“The deep racial and ethnic inequities that exist today are a direct result of structural racism: the historical and contemporary policies, practices, and norms that create and maintain white supremacy. Structural racism continues to disproportionately segregate communities of color from access to opportunity and upward mobility by making it more difficult for people of color to secure quality education, jobs, housing, healthcare, and equal treatment in the criminal justice system.”

Redlining: Part 1

Institutional racism directly related to the building industry showed up in the practices of redlining and restricted covenants, whereby African Americans were prevented from buying homes in, and displaced from, many neighborhoods.

The following map, created by the Federal Housing Administration, shows Washington, DC and the surrounding areas were redlined.



The Federal Housing Administration (FHA) was established in 1934 to subsidize the private development of new housing and promote homeownership by insuring mortgage loans, thereby reducing interest rates and down payments. FHA used race as a criterion for loan approvals; 98 percent of the loans it insured between 1934 and 1962 went to white borrowers.

Segregation compounds injustice by inhibiting the accrual of generational wealth, health, and prosperity for communities of color, leaving affected communities further and further behind the progress of white communities.

Redlining: Part 2

Local leaders are working to dismantle legacies of racism in their communities. Click here to learn more about racial equity work in Arlington, Virginia. 

Racial equity is not an end game. It is an ongoing process of intentional, systematic inclusion to overcome the persistent legacies of intentional, systematic exclusion. We ask our member institutions to implement policies and processes that create meaningful access points for historically marginalized peopleinto their organizations and work. Together we can work towards a more inclusive, just, and beautiful zero-carbon future.

This interactive map and research, courtesy of Prologue DC, shows the history of federally instituted redlining in Washington, DC. Italicized text was sourced directly from an FHA Housing Market Analysis in 1937 characterizing each area.

Please interact with the map to find places that you are familiar with in Washington, DC that have a history of redlining and restrictive covenants. How did policies like redlining operate where you live and work?

All five green areas (A-E) are associated with white residency, as are the G areas, in red, which represent the "lowest grade of residential property…designed for use of white persons, and "are composed of scattered uncontrolled developments…no homogeneity of property design or racial grouping."

F areas were said to be "showing effects of negro occupancy; many of the structures are in poor condition and are rapidly tending to become slums if not already in that category."

Described as "the poorest grade of housing in the metropolitan district," H areas were "developed especially for negroes or have been left open for negroes to build for themselves…The only possible future for properties in these areas is that the present scattered structures may be razed and new planned subdivisions instituted in their place."

Preventing access to capital through redlining, along with racially restrictive deed covenants confined much of DC’s black population to substandard, overcrowded housing, and prevented most African Americans from moving into new subdivisions beyond the city’s old boundaries.

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