Without knowing at least a bit of Baltimore history, one cannot truly know Baltimore City. Nicknamed “Charm City,” Baltimore has an incredibly complicated history with division and government intervention regarding race relations. Though Baltimore has been through countless policies contributing to racialized segregation, the 1937 Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) redlining map and the detached 0.8 mile highway “to nowhere” urban renewal project abandoned in the 1970s, are two main top-down strategies by governmental forces that have consequences still seen today regarding health, economic disinvestment, and racial devalorization.

Prior to the Civil War, Baltimore was already a diverse Southern city. Between 1870 and 1900, many ex-Confederate southerners, European refugees, and African Americans moved into the city, doubling Baltimore’s population from 250,000 to 500,000 (Power 1983). As neighborhoods developed along racial and ethnic lines, frequent divisions between and within communities occurred. In the 1880s, around 250 upwardly mobile black families moved to Northwest Baltimore, away from ‘disreputable’ or less affluent black neighborhoods (Power, 1983). In white communities, two main approaches were taken to protect themselves from racial integration. White middle-class Baltimoreans began fleeing to the suburbs through patterns of white flight, while others used housing ordinances, homeowners’ associations, and blockbusting to discriminate against and segregate Black Baltimoreans. These individual actions by white Baltimoreans began to collectivize, marginalizing Black voters and prohibiting neighborhood integration (Power, 1983). 
In 1910, a white homeowner sold their property to a Black buyer, breaking the city’s accepted color barrier. This break in tradition led to collective white backlash, prompting official and unofficial housing discrimination policies across Baltimore City (Power 1983). Thus, the first ever segregation ordinance in 1910 was created: Ordinance 610. This policy “was the first of three race-based housing ordinances in Baltimore,” and “many cities across the United States and even the world modeled” similar discrimination by law after Baltimore’s precedent (Armenti & Lothstein, 2021). The Supreme Court deemed the ordinances unconstitutional in 1917, but in the 7 years the ordinances existed, they led to racially dictated housing lines and policies that still impact the city today.

In the 1930s, the HOLC developed a perceived risk of lending standardizations across American cities. The grading system heavily factored ethnic composition of neighborhoods and deemed Black residential areas and racially shifting neighborhoods as inherently ‘risky’ for investment. Maps of these cities used a four-color grading system, with red-colored areas, marked as “hazardous,” hence the name “redlining” (Jackson 1985: 29). While this practice set a nationally formalized precedent, Jackson affirms that the HOLC did not “initiate” considerations of race and ethnicity in real-estate appraisal (Jackson 1985: 30). Rather, these redlining practices by the HOLC were built upon a long history of racial segregation, especially in Baltimore.
Baltimore’s 1937 HOLC map confined “hazardous” black neighborhoods to the outskirts in the east and west of Baltimore City, declaring housing along the central business strip to have the most appeal, only accessible to affluent white residents (HOLC 1937). These houses were declared the most “safe” for investment, appealing for economic purposes as they were the most accessible to business, transit, and commerce (HOLC 1937). As this “safe” housing was only available to white homeowners, nonwhite people were excluded from these economic and transit resources, only able to live in  “hazardous” areas with poor housing maintenance and low homeownership (HOLC 1937).  Looking at the 2020 census map, racial mapping patterns are still reflective of policies from the 1930s. The legacy of redlining continues to shape Baltimore’s racial and economic landscape, having catastrophic impacts on Black Baltimorean’s wellbeing and overall disinvestment. Morgan State University’s Lawrence Brown coined the visible racial divide as the “Black Butterfly” and “white L” (Theodos et al., 2019). (This has been clarified in red overtop the maps below.) 

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