My wife and I raised our three children in an “inner-city” neighborhood outside the United States. In doing so, I learned that our kids experienced many advantages growing up in a city over what I experienced coming of age in car-dependent suburbia. In recent years, Americans have been moving to Europe in record numbers, with and without children. These expats often list simply being able to walk places as a chief benefit of relocating. This raises a question. Why don’t more middle-class parents raise their children in American cities? To understand why, consider two sets of maps made eight decades apart.
80-Year-Old Maps Clarify the Mindset Behind the Downfall of America’s Urban Neighborhoods
In the 1930s, the federal government did two things independently. First, they effectively mandated that developers stop building walkable, pedestrian-oriented residential development and start building conventional, auto-dependent, suburban development.
Second, they enlisted the help of prominent people in the real estate, finance, and building industries in 239 cities across the country to create maps for assessing mortgage risk. I collectively refer to these men from the federal government and their partners in each city simply as the “mapmakers.”
Although the federal government never widely distributed these maps, they’re key to any discussion about quality of life in the present day. They shed light on the collective mindset of thousands of influential men across the country—all of whom were white and most of whom were Protestant—who devalued American cities as places to live when so much of urban America was still viable and vibrant, not unlike residential areas in European cities.
The specific federal agency that initiated the mapmaking was called the Home Owners Loan Corporation, or HOLC for short. Its mission, when created in 1933, was to enable Americans to refinance their homes at a more affordable rate to prevent people from defaulting as the Great Depression deepened. People refer to these maps as either “HOLC maps” or residential security maps.
For our purposes, HOLC maps are significant in two ways. First, they represent the extent to which traditional, walkable, urban environments existed in America immediately before the age of mass suburbia. Second, HOLC maps reveal how, in the 1930s, the federal government and its partners in the real estate and financial sectors viewed the level of desirability of different residential areas for a city.
The mapmakers divided cities into areas, then assigned each a grade of A, B, C, or D. Areas receiving a grade of A were considered “Best” and shaded green on the map. Areas receiving a grade of B were considered “Still Desirable”, and shaded blue on the map. Areas receiving a grade of C were deemed “Definitely Declining” and shaded yellow. And areas receiving a grade of D were considered “Hazardous” and shaded red. Importantly, the mapmakers wrote up an “Area Description” for each area that provides the rationale for the grade. Hundreds of these Area Descriptions contain language reflecting intensely racist views.
As a final step, the mapmakers created a rank order of all areas within each grade, with A-1 being the best of the best, and D-20 being the worst in the case, for example, where a city had 20 areas considered “Hazardous.”
On average, 70% of residential areas across all these cities were graded either “Hazardous” or “Definitely Declining.” And importantly, vested interests created these maps when America’s cities were still overwhelmingly white.
Scientific racism and the view that an individual residential structure had a shelf life much like a bottle of milk heavily influenced the grading system that shaped the maps. Mapmakers automatically considered newer housing stock better than older houses. Many real estate appraisers across the country used a manual called McMichael’s Appraisal Manual. The manual contains a list of “desirable” ethnicities to live around which includes the “English”, “Germans”, “Irish”, “Scottish”, and “Scandinavians”. Increasingly “undesirable,” people included, “Northern Italians”, “Czechs”, “Poles”, “Lithuanians”, “Greeks”, “Russians titled”, “Jews”, “Southern Italians”, “Negroes”, and “Mexicans.”
Although not every “Hazardous” area was home to Blacks, if an area contained Blacks, mapmakers automatically deemed it “Hazardous.” Mapmakers always categorized an area next to a “Hazardous” area as “Definitely Declining” out of concern that Blacks from the “Hazardous” area would encroach on adjacent neighborhoods.
Mapmaker Mentality Central to Engineering the Downfall of American Cities
Collectively, the maps reflect the mindset of people who held the power to shape cities. What subsequently happened was this: The federal government and the financial sector funneled 5 million Blacks departing from the South over 35 years (1935-1970) into sections of cities in the North and West considered “Hazardous” and “Definitely Declining.”
Within these areas, lending institutions abided by racist federal lending policies and denied Blacks the ability to get an affordable loan of a sort routinely given most every parent I knew growing up. These same policies required Whites to move to newly expanding auto-dependent locales outside of cities.
All this occurred in a republic operating as an unfettered white supremacist nation up through 1964 with implications for Black Americans regarding education, job opportunities, policing, and healing the wounds of unacknowledged racial terror.[1]
By July 1964, pathology in cities had reached critical mass, triggering urban violence and destruction in cities across the country. That month, the first of the major civil disorders erupted in Harlem and my birthplace, Philadelphia. And for the next five summers, widespread violence and destruction would consume large swaths of city after city.
As a white child of the suburbs in the 1960s and 70s, I remained oblivious to all of this.
The last major civil disorder started on July 17, 1969, in York, Pennsylvania, just twenty-five miles south of where I grew up in Central Pennsylvania. A full-out race riot between armed gangs of Black and White men produced over a hundred injuries and left a police officer dead.
Four days later, on July 21st, White men murdered a young Black woman named Lille Belle Allen in broad daylight. When sitting in the passenger seat of a car driven by her younger sister, the car stalled and came to rest between rows of homes occupied by armed white men.
With her parents in the back seat and praying aloud, Lille got out of the car to take over from her younger sister. Aware that she was a target, she put her hands in the air, pleading with the men not to shoot. In response, men fired at her from rooftops and porches.
Four of the men involved with Lille’s murder would commit suicide in the years ahead. The last man took his life in 2000, leaving behind a taped confession and a message on a napkin that read “Forgive Me, God.”
Lifelong York resident Bob Mann was fourteen the day he witnessed Lille Allen’s death. He was neither armed nor did he have any desire to kill. What he saw never left him.
For the past three years, Mr. Mann has been giving public tours of the area affected by the rioting. Below, he speaks to students from my high school, Cumberland Valley. Describing the murder, he says, “First there was one shot. Then there was a hundred shots.”
In 1968, a presidential commission released a report that looked at the root causes of 164 civil disorders that had taken place the year before during the summer of 1967. Page one of the report reads,
“What white Americans have never fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.”
Looking online at one HOLC map after another, a pattern emerges. Invariably, mapmakers categorized the most urban neighborhoods closest to the commercial center as either Hazardous or Definitely Declining. Notably, they made these determinations three decades before civil disorder would consume many of these same neighborhoods.
As evidenced by the aforementioned Area Descriptions, the mapmakers considered the inner residential core of American cities to be throwaway places inhabited by throwaway people. They engineered the downfall of urban communities long before anyone knew that 5 million Blacks would migrate north and west after World War II to play their role as too often impoverished ghetto residents with no way out.
My difficulty finding an urban environment offering a high quality of life in which to raise a family relates to decisions made long before I was born.
Data Clarifies Why There Are So Few Middle-Class Children in American Cities
In the present day, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) maintains a nationwide map showing the relative social, economic, and physical health of people living within the country’s approximately 84,000 census tracts.
The CDC assigned each census tract a Social Vulnerability Index (SVI) Score, which is based on a combination of socio-economic and health data collected by the Census Bureau and the CDC. SVI scores run between 0 and 1. The higher the value, the worse off people are within a given census tract.
Whereas you find a high SVI score of 0.833 in a poor community like Columbus Ohio’s Franklinton neighborhood, you find a low SVI score of 0.0749 in a wealthy suburb like Potomac, MD, outside Washington, D.C.
Researchers at the National Community Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC), aware of the existence of both the HOLC maps and the CDC’s SVI maps, asked a really important question. Recall that the 1930s-era mapmakers wrote off a majority of neighborhoods in American cities. And the federal government put policies in place that ensured the demise of these neighborhoods, as people like my mom and dad embraced their new suburban lifestyle. The question the NCRC asked was, how were neighborhoods in American cities faring today relative to perceptions in the 1930s?
To answer this question, the NCRC mapped census tracts—and hence their present-day SVI scores—to corresponding areas on the 1930s-era HOLC maps. (Typically, a single HOLC area would contain multiple census tracts.) Having completed the mapping of census tracts to HOLC areas, researchers could then assess how 80-year-old perceptions of neighborhoods in cities across the country aligned with the overall well-being of those same places today.
| The federal government defines census tracts so that each of the nation’s 84,000 tracts has about 4,000 people. Physical boundaries change over time to accommodate population changes. |
In the figure below, you can see how the NCRC did the mapping using Baltimore as an example. On the left side, you see Baltimore’s HOLC map. On the right side is a map of all corresponding census tracts in Baltimore extracted from the CDC’s nationwide SVI map.
In the middle, you see a diagram that shows how each HOLC area fares in the present day. On the left side, you see HOLC areas ranked from top to bottom. On the right side, you see census tracts ordered by their SVI score. You can see how census tracts are color-coded using shades of the same 4 colors used in the HOLC maps.
The mapping of HOLC areas to census tracts reveals how Baltimore changed between 1940 and today. As shown below, you can see that large numbers of HOLC areas considered “Still Desirable” (Blue) in the 1930s declined significantly, and map to census tracts in the present day that have high SVI scores color-coded in red.
Although gentrification has turned a few areas near Baltimore’s waterfront from red to green, a majority of HOLC areas have declined. And it’s been my experience that, even within a relatively healthy census tract, adjacent neighborhoods in distress can still negatively affect my sense of safety and security.
The present-day map on the right showing large swaths of neighborhoods in distress is consistent with the Baltimore that Christine and I experienced when we lived just across the city line. Importantly, Baltimore reflects reality in a majority of American cities in that many neighborhoods closest to the commercial center have the highest Social Vulnerability Index scores.
These diagrams are valuable because they provide an understanding of how a city has improved or declined over 80 years. And the overall picture is grim. The National Community Reinvestment Coalition summarizes the situation:
For decades, starting at least in the 1930s, low-income and minority communities were intentionally cut off from lending and investment through a system known as redlining.
Today, those same neighborhoods suffer not only from reduced wealth and greater poverty but also from lower life expectancy and higher incidence of chronic diseases that are risk factors for poor outcomes from COVID-19.
National Community Reinvestment Coalition
If you look at the selection diagrams for cities that appear below, you get a clearer understanding of the problem. Despite a handful of exceptions, most American cities do not offer middle-class families safe, affordable, high-quality, walkable urban neighborhoods that are connected to the commercial core.
Of the 239 American cities mapped in the 1930s, more than 150 are still available today and follow the pattern illustrated above. There are a few exceptions. Portland and Seattle, for instance, were not major destinations for Black Americans migrating out of the South. But these exceptions comprise only a small percentage of American cities.
Like Portland and Seattle, Denver has several desirable walkable neighborhoods, but there are catches. Denver’s desirable middle-class neighborhoods are neither close to downtown nor affordable to the middle class. For example, homes in Denver’s Washington Park area—which sits over four miles away from the downtown—range from $1.1 million to $4.5 million.
Denver’s residents also contend with gun violence at a level that warrants a dedicated section on the Denver Post website, as shown below.
The Denver Gazette mapped shootings in and around the downtown core of Denver and neighboring Aurora that occurred during the summer of 2023. Over a span of 94 days, 68 shootings involved 87 victims.
And looking at the SVI scores of Denver neighborhoods, we see many to the northeast and southwest of the downtown that are in crisis. What’s happening in these troubled neighborhoods affects people living in adjacent, relatively healthy neighborhoods.
The pattern of violence and poor economic and health outcomes extends to education as well. The map below shows that public school performance in Denver’s most “urban” neighborhoods lags neighborhoods to the southeast of the downtown, where there is more wealth and less violence.
Although it’s not impossible to live and raise middle-class children in an American city, you’re likely going to experience one of two distinct realities. One scenario is that you have enough money to buy into a relatively small number of safe urban environments scattered across the United States, which accounts for a tiny percentage of the national housing stock. The other scenario requires that you deal with the exposure to violence, the social and financial implications of poorly performing public schools, and a lingering sense of tension that occasionally rises to the level of fear.
My experience raising children in a city outside the United States has taught me that our racial past and the dominance of suburbia have denied the American middle class a way of life that offers tremendous benefits over the auto-dependent world we’re all familiar with. I value living life on my feet in the absence of fear. It’s a seemingly trivial ask, but, in hindsight, one difficult to grant in a nation unaware of what it’s lost through an attachment to the cul-de-sac and disassociation from what our racial caste system has cost us all.
[1] The Civil Rights Act of 1964 made it illegal for states and local municipalities to pass racist laws that the Supreme Court said were acceptable in 1896 in ruling known as Plessy v. Feguson. After 1964, it was no longer legal to structure society in such a way that separated out Black and White, and deny Black Americans access to the benefits of mainstream economic and social life. Passage of the law hardly solved all issues, but it did mark a break with the country operating as an unfettered white supremacist nation. After 1964, racist practices previously seen as normal and taken for granted became possible to challenge in the courts.
