'Redlining' the British city.
| Author | Wetherell, Sam |
| Position | INEQUALITIES |
In 1935, the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC), one of the many new and clumsily named federal bodies created as part of the New Deal, set out to draw maps of more than two hundred of America's largest cities. The HOLC was one of several bodies tasked with overseeing the federal underwriting of millions of American mortgages, a means of restoring confidence in a housing market that had flat-lined since the Depression. The HOLC's maps were colour coded, indicating the different levels of risk associated with each neighbourhood. Neighbourhoods deemed creditworthy were coloured green or blue, while those deemed too 'hazardous' to be given mortgages were coloured red. The maps were drawn at a time of unashamed white supremacy and it is no surprise that the neighbourhoods which were 'redlined' tended to be those that housed African Americans. For more than a generation, the 'redlining' of black neighbourhoods in urban America by both public and private banks excluded millions of black Americans from the privileges of home ownership. This history continues to shape the unequal racial geography of American cities, decades after the legal segregation of urban space ended.
The disastrous long-term effects of 'redlining' are acknowledged by many American academics, journalists and policy-makers. In a now famous 2014 article, for example, Ta-Nehisi Coates called for reparations, not just for centuries of slavery, but also for the discriminatory mortgage practices faced by black Americans in the twentieth century. (1) Over the last few decades, US historians have drawn attention to the various ways in which the New Deal operated selectively, leaving millions of black Americans behind as it secured social mobility and middle-class stability for a generation of whites. Social security, tuition-free college and subsidised home ownership were just some of the engines of prosperity that excluded, either de facto or de jure, large numbers of black Americans, with consequences that still shape the life experiences of black people in the US. To paraphrase Ira Katznelson, the mid-twentieth century US state was an affirmative action programme for white people. (2)
As an urban historian who has spent much of the last decade living in the United States, I have often wondered what a comparable story might look like from the perspective of Britain's twentieth-century history. Were there ways in which the modernising forces of social democracy structurally excluded people of colour at the level of housing and urban space, and with similarly harmful long-term consequences? In fact many recent historians of Britain have indeed drawn attention to the ways in which British systems of welfare and economic development--which were implemented and expanded during a period of significant Commonwealth migration--operated selectively on the grounds of race. The existence of longstanding practices of exclusion has been evidenced in Kennetta Hammond Perry's work on policing; Radhika Natarajan's work on community; Nadine El-Enany's work on borders; and Rob Waters's work on black radicalism (among many others). (3) I want to add to this scholarship with some brief reflections about the structural ways in which race, social democracy and housing intersected in Britain in the twentieth century. In doing so, I will sketch out some of the ways in which 'redlining' might be a useful concept for thinking about British as well as American urban history.
Council housing and migration
During the fourteen years between the 1948 British Nationality Act and the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, Britain had open borders within what remained of its disintegrating empire. Although people of colour had lived in Britain for hundreds of years, this decade saw the arrival of significant numbers of new migrants from the West Indies and South Asia.
During years when London's population was being hollowed out by slum clearances and new town building, many migrants settled in neighbourhoods such as Brixton and Notting Hill that were being evacuated of white residents and were in many instances still pock-marked by bomb craters. (4) Many first-generation migrants settled in lodging houses owned by their employers. Those who tried to rent on the private market were often at the mercy of white landlords, many of whom refused to accept black lodgers or tenants. Overwhelmingly, this migrant generation lived in precarious and overcrowded conditions, shaped by poverty and by exclusion from other types of housing. In the early 1960s, compared with other city dwellers, Commonwealth migrants were more than five times more likely to live in overcrowded housing, and without exclusive access to a stove or a sink. (5)
The first two decades after the war also marked the peak of Britain's experiment with mass public housing. Wartime bombings and postwar population increase had necessitated a massive boom in public and private housebuilding. In the first twenty years after the war, local authorities were building an average of 172,000 council homes a year. (6) Council homes with indoor bathrooms, fitted kitchens and central heating systems...
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