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Abstract
Two critical rediscoveries in sub/urban scholarship have emerged alongside one another in recent years. On one side, a resurgent interest in racial capitalism has recast capitalist processes as inseparably connected to racism. On the other side, renewed attention on the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation’s (HOLC) so-called “redlining” maps sparked an explosion of studies linking this New Deal-era federal surveying program to a series of present-day socio-spatial inequities across the United States. Despite their parallel development and overlapping interests, these lines of scholarship have seldom come into contact. In this dissertation, I bring them together to enrich our collective understanding of each.Specifically, I advance two main arguments. First, I contend that the “racist theory of value” expressed throughout HOLC’s mapping materials has been a key innovation for managing the geographies of devaluation in racial capitalism. Through my qualitative engagement with the HOLC maps and their attendant field notes for Atlanta, Georgia and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, I uncover two related cartographic narratives of value that suggest a “racist theory of value” in formation. Focusing on the perceived temporal and spatial threats of non-white residents, respectively, these value narratives highlight a key function of racial housing segregation in racial capitalism: to delimit and contain the devaluation immanent to capital accumulation in Black spaces.
Second, I contend that the current HOLC literature’s narrow focus on how the maps’ D-graded areas overlay present-day social injustices undersells the significance of racism in shaping the contemporary sub/urban housing landscape. By decoupling race from the map grades in my statistical analyses, I show that since 1980, a neighborhood’s Black population share has had a far more salient impact on its home values than its HOLC grade. Accordingly, I propose that scholars treat the HOLC mapping materials as reflective rather than prescriptive. Rather than obliquely investigating the persistent geographies of racialized devaluation by way of the HOLC maps, I suggest researchers shift their focus to the racially segregated geographies of value directly.