Red lines tend to be rather ominous.
Your teacher may have drawn them all over that essay you turned in in second grade, showing you how wrong you were about everything in your tiny human life, scarring you emotionally forever.
Those red lines don’t get any less emotionally taxing when they are drawn on a map to designate neighborhoods that are ‘hazardous’ as they were in the 1930s.
So let’s talk a little about how redlining, both past and present, has impacted our ability to plan and prepare for, respond to, and recover from disasters and climate change.
There are a lot of articles out there describing the continuing negative impacts of redlining, and especially how that plays into the disparately extreme impacts climate change will have on those segregated communities – so, if you are interested in learning more about that, check out this article from Scientific American or this one from NPR, because that’s not precisely what we’re diving into today.
For this post, the main goal is to provide a thoughtful analogy meant to allow some space to consider why redlining can have such a highly negative impact within the realm of disaster preparedness, response, and recovery.
So, what is redlining? Check out our podcast episode this week to get a little deeper into the how’s and why’s, but let’s get a brief definition of the practice – redlining is a racist housing practice that began in the 1930s and was unashamedly accepted as the federal norm for decades, mortgage lenders and banks literally drew lines around neighborhoods and colored them red in order to indicate that these largely minority (mostly black) neighborhoods were “hazardous” places in which to provide loans and services.
Today, it is against the law to draw these lines on maps and consider it company policy to withhold lending and services specifically to minority populations. However, according to the Center for Investigative Reporting’s 2016 report, it absolutely still happens, even if it looks a little different and tends to be officially denied.
Redlining has historically meant significant disinvestment from these communities and neighborhoods and does to this day, which obviously impacts the resource availability, infrastructure accessibility, and socioeconomic status of these segregated areas.
So, with that in mind, let’s take a look at this graphic I put together, and think a little more deeply about what this could mean for redlined (whether officially or not) communities in the face of disasters and emergencies.
Today, we’re going to redline your garden.
Let’s translate the garden analogy to real-life communities.
Disinvestment, lack of adequate infrastructure and utilities (or absence of them), lack of access to financial resources and credit, decreased support from local and state governments, etcetera, leads to a dearth of resources and support that are essential in preparing for, responding to, and recovering from disasters and emergencies.
So, similar to a lack of leaves on a plant, redlined communities have no protection from disaster – the infrastructure is subpar and unlikely to stand up to a crisis, and the non-physical support systems like emergency funds and financial assistance simply are not there. Similar to shallow, weak root systems, redlined communities have not been provided the resources needed to build strong support systems and resilience strategies.
We discussed some of these issues in our previous post and podcast episode on income inequality and socioeconomic status, so feel free to check those out to learn more about the specifics of how lack of access to healthcare and lack of financial resources can impact a community’s ability to build resilience.
Be sure to check out this week’s Cool-It Toolkit post to learn what you can do to address the effects of redlining in your area – whether you are a planner, government official, response agency, environmental nonprofit, or just an everyday citizen wanting to make a difference.
Reach out to us in the comments below or through Instagram or Twitter, @globallyheated, if you’ve seen other effects of redlining as pertains to disaster, or if you have another fun analogy that could help explain why redlining makes communities vulnerable!
