Redlining Continues to Reverberate in Seattle Nearly a Century Later in Pedestrian Deaths

by Phil Manzano

Could the decades-old government housing discrimination program, commonly called redlining, have anything to do with pedestrian fatalities today?

According to a recent national study that compared federal redlining maps of the Home Owners' Loan Corporation with data on 2010—2019 pedestrian deaths from the national Fatality Analysis Reporting System, the answer is yes.

"Historical redlining policy, initiated in the 1930s, has an impact on present-day transportation inequities in the United States," a study published in April in the American Journal of Public Health (AJPH), titled "Structural Racism and Pedestrian Safety: Measuring the Association Between Historical Redlining and Contemporary Pedestrian Fatalities Across the United States," concluded.

The study's authors say this may be the first study to specifically link redlining to present-day pedestrian fatalities. Their report shows the need for cities to address not just individual behavior in pedestrian deaths but also the lack of safe streets that make redlined communities more dangerous for pedestrians.

"The divestment that redlining generated created an entire set of circumstances that persist today," said Dr. Jamila Porter, co-author of the study and chief of staff at the de Beaumont Foundation. "This is a huge entrenched problem that has been and continues to be perpetuated by policies of the past."

The study found that redlined neighborhoods, which segregated People of Color, were likely to have double the incidence of pedestrian fatalities today compared to affluent neighborhoods. In particular, Black and Indigenous pedestrians had dramatically higher death rates in proportion to the population as a whole.

"Basically we show that redlining is having an adverse impact not just on the individual people walking through the communities but the community itself, the way that it was built and structured," Porter said.

The study is especially relevant in light of increasing pedestrian deaths nationally, which have reached a 41-year record high, according to the Governors Highway Safety Association study released Friday, June 30: "GHSA projects 7,508 pedestrians were killed in traffic crashes in 2022, the highest number of pedestrian deaths since 1981."

The GHSA study notes that "it is well documented that people of color are disproportionately overrepresented in pedestrian fatalities," particularly Black people.

"They [redlining policies] leave a long shadow, they continue to affect communities and people," said James Gregory, professor of history and director of the Civil Rights and Labor History Consortium at the University of Washington. Based on the UW group's research on racial restrictive covenants, the Washington State Legislature passed a pioneering law this year that provides compensation to victims of discrimination from racial restrictive housing covenants.

Coming out of the Great Depression, the federal government wanted to stimulate home buying and bank lending through the Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC) and Federal Housing Administration (FHA), Gregory explained. In the mid-1930s, HOLC created city maps to guide bankers in making safe mortgage loans by ranking neighborhoods green, blue, yellow, and red, with red meaning "hazardous" for bankers to make loans in those neighborhoods. Those designations were guided by racially restricted neighborhood covenants and the federal government rewarded banks making mortgage loans in green, predominantly white areas with lower interest rates.

Huge swaths of the Central District, the South End, and White Center were designated red, "Hazardous," or yellow, "Definitely Declining."

"Any community that had any significant number of People of Color was automatically marked red," Gregory said. "So that's why redlining becomes this term, a synonym for segregated, marked-off neighborhoods where for generations, basically, these are the only neighborhoods for the most part where anybody who's Black, Asian, Latinx, or Indigenous could live, and often Jews were forced into the same neighborhoods and excluded from others."

The "Structural Racism and Pedestrian Safety" study said, "Redlining legalized discrimination in housing and systematized structural racism on a national scale … By tying the presence of Black people to low property values, negating the generational wealth of Black households, cementing the racial wealth gap, and perpetuating disinvestment in segregated Black neighborhoods, redlining continues to adversely affect community health throughout the United States."

The study found a "significant relationship between structural racism via historical redlining and contemporary, neighborhood-level inequities in pedestrian fatalities across the United States."

Comparing pedestrian fatalities reported from 2010—2019 to redlining maps, the study found that areas marked red or "hazardous" had 2.6 pedestrian fatalities per 100,000 people versus 1.1 fatalities in areas labeled green or "Best." The study also found that the fatality rate decreased from red to yellow, blue, and green neighborhoods.

The study's findings confirm what Ed Ewing, executive director of Bike Works, sees on the streets in the South End.

"I wasn't terribly surprised," he said. "It's one more data point, one more example of this institutional, structural bias … and then you look at the demographic that's in the crosshairs of all that, and it's Black and Brown communities."

As Ewing read the study, he reflected on the number of pedestrian fatalities along Rainier Avenue South and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, which have the highest pedestrian fatalities in the city.

"I don't think it's a coincidence, it is intentional and it's so embedded that it becomes the structure," he said.

Porter and Ewing agree that remedying community street infrastructure built around redlining will take time, financial and human resources, and a shift in thinking about pedestrian safety.

For one, Porter says, traffic safety programs like Vision Zero focus erroneously on pedestrian behavior.

"We can no longer focus on individual behavior, but instead we have to look at the larger policy landscape that's governing how communities have become structured the way they have," Porter said. "And that will help us understand what's needed to dismantle the situation we've gotten ourselves into."

City planners and administrators need to look at how to redress areas affected by discriminatory policies.

"Basically, redlining isn't an accident, Porter said. "It was an intentional policy that was adopted by the federal government and implemented at the local level in over 200 cities at least. So we have to be just as intentional in trying to undo that harm of disinvestment that was done over the course of almost a century."

Though the practice of redlining was formally overturned by Congress in 1968 with the Fair Housing Act, discriminatory housing practices persisted. In Seattle, Black advocates called attention to unfair lending practices, and in the mid-1970s the City Council passed a law making redlining illegal.

The challenge, according to Porter, will be to look back and see how discriminatory policies adversely affected Communities of Color and how that knowledge can be at the center of infrastructure and development decisions today.

"What we're learning through this study and through other studies and other work," Porter said, "is that redlining, like other policies, such as Jim Crow, led to intergenerational neighborhood disinvestment. It changed the entire trajectory of how neighborhoods would be built, who would be able to live there, what infrastructure was built there — whether it's residential housing, or civic buildings, or parks — it changed everything."

Featured Image: Home Owners' Loan Corporation Security Map and Area Descriptions, January 10, 1936. (The Seattle Public Library photo spl_maps_nara_001, contributed by the National Archives, Records Group 195, Records of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board [FHLBB], 1933-74, City Survey File, Seattle, Washington.)