In late 1979, more than a decade after the Fair Housing Act was passed, Rita and Alex Harris proudly brought their house plans to a well-known builder. They were going to build a home in north Mississippi. The conversation went well, Rita Harris said, until they told him the location of their property. 

The builder told them that was a street for white people. 

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“My husband picked up the plans off of his desk, rolled them up and left,” Rita Harris said. “But before he left, he turned to the builder and said: ‘I will get my house built whether you build it or not.’” 

Nearly a century ago, the U.S. government-sponsored Home Owners’ Loan Corporation created color-coded maps for 239 cities, including Memphis. Grade A neighborhoods, which were outlined in green, signaled to lenders that the area was desirable and that their investments were safe. Most neighborhoods where Black people lived, demarcated in red, were considered Grade D and high-risk for housing loans. 

The New Deal-era policies essentially grew homeownership for white Americans while doing the opposite for Black Americans. And, over time, the term redlining came to mean racial discrimination within housing practices. 

Even after the passage of the U.S. Fair Housing Act in 1968, homeownership remained out of reach for many people of color. 

Without property, Black Memphians couldn’t amass generational wealth, said Debra Bartelli from the University of Memphis’ School of Public Health, and wealth equals health. 

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“The more wealth you have, the better your health is,” Bartelli said. “And the reverse of that is also true.” 

In Memphis today, there are islands of white, wealthy residents living in Midtown surrounded by a swath of low-income, Black neighborhoods. Nearly a century after a federal agency drafted its color-coded housing maps, the persistent, stark division of race and wealth continues to mirror health outcomes to a tee, and life expectancy is the bluntest measure of health disparities, according to Kendra Hotz, chair of population health at Rhodes College.

Today, the continued impacts of redlining help burden Black Memphians with shorter lives and worse health outcomes than their white counterparts. 

Conditions such as hypertension, stroke, infant mortality and Type 2 diabetes are strong indicators of disparate health outcomes. Hotz said it’s not surprising that a redlined map matches a map of those diseases, since it’s a map of “concentrated, racialized poverty.” 

“It’s not natural that we have different rates of mortality. It’s a social injustice.”

Kendra Hotz
 Rhodes College’s chair of population health

Even now, people living in areas that were once marked Grade A, or “best,” by the Homeowners' Loan Corporation enjoy better health than residents who live in areas once labeled Grade D or “hazardous.” 

Michael Esposito researches racialized disparities in population health at the Washington University in St. Louis. Earlier this year, he found that people living in former Grade A neighborhoods live about five years longer on average than those living in formerly redlined neighborhoods.

Esposito’s study showed that current race-class concentrations are strongly linked to home values, and both are strongly linked to life expectancy. To Esposito, it’s proof that redlining produced long-lasting harm.

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Back to Binghampton

“Social vulnerability” is a metric that shows a community’s ability to deal with external stresses on human health, including natural disasters, human-caused disasters and disease outbreaks.

Redlining maps of Memphis show a consistent trend: Former Grade D neighborhoods have higher social vulnerability today. That vulnerability was on display during the COVID-19 pandemic. Underlying illness increased the risk of negative health outcomes, and people of color died at nearly twice the rate of white people nationally.

“When you see an area that lacks investment, you see this whole gaggle of other issues that coalesce around it — public health being one of them,” said Jason Richardson, senior director of research at the National Community Reinvestment Coalition.

Consider Binghampton. It was redlined in the 1930s. To the west and south of Binghampton were wealthy, white Midtown neighborhoods, buffered from Binghampton by a belt of yellow on the map, which meant the area was “declining.” If a neighborhood was wealthy and white but adjacent to a Black neighborhood without a barrier — major roadways or train tracks, mostly — it was considered at risk of infiltration, Hotz said.

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Residents of one pocket of Memphis’ Binghampton, located off of Summer Avenue between Scott Street and Pope Street and inside census tract No. 14, have a life expectancy at birth of 66.2 years. Census tracts 28 and 30, which also encompass Binghampton, have life expectancies of 73.2 and 69.8 years, respectively, according to National Center for Health Statistics from the Centers for Disease Control.

According to Redfin, a nationwide real estate company with a robust online data center, the median sales price for a home sold in Binghampton was $158,750 in March 2023.

Today, Binghampton scores 93% on the Social Vulnerability Index, according to the University of Richmond’s Digital Scholarship Lab, making it one of the most vulnerable areas in Memphis. Binghampton has some of the highest local rates of asthma, diabetes, high blood pressure, kidney disease, mental health problems, obesity and pulmonary disease.

But, there’s one disease where redlined neighborhoods don’t always see higher rates than former Grade A neighborhoods: cancer. Richardson said that’s because people aren’t living long enough to get cancer. 

A little more than a mile south of Binghampton, in former Grade A neighborhood Chickasaw Gardens, the average life expectancy is more than 81 years — the highest of any area included in local redlining maps, which encompasses the city of Memphis. This doesn’t include Shelby County’s suburbs, where white people moved en masse — mostly between the 1950s and 1970s as schools and neighborhoods were desegregated — but the trend has continued in recent years. 

Chickasaw Gardens has the lowest local poverty rate, the lowest minority population and some of the lowest disease rates — except for cancer. Its social vulnerability score is 3%.

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The median home sales price for Chickasaw Gardens in March 2023, according to Redfin, was $990,000. The area reached a three-year high for sale prices in August 2022, when it was $1.15 million. 

Just south of Chickasaw Gardens, across the railroad tracks at Southern Avenue, there’s another redlined neighborhood: Orange Mound. Its health outcomes, poverty rate and life expectancy mirror Binghampton.

“When you see an area that lacks investment, you see this whole gaggle of other issues that coalesce around it — public health being one of them.”

Jason Richardson
 National Community Reinvestment Coalition’s senior director of research

Chickasaw Gardens is one of the most obvious displays of redlining’s impact on present-day health outcomes. The Grade A neighborhood with the area’s best health outcomes is bordered to the north and south by Grade D neighborhoods that now have the lowest local life expectancies. 

“It’s not natural that we have different rates of mortality,” Hotz said. “It’s a social injustice.” 

Without loans available for properties in redlined neighborhoods, property values declined, attracting low-income residents and concentrating poverty in the community. Esposito said as the property value declined, so did the quality of that property. The housing stock has aged without the necessary upgrades, and this increases the likelihood of exposure to things like lead pipes and mold, which create and exacerbate chronic health problems. 

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While the federal government more recently aimed for race-neutral housing policies, the effects of years of neighborhood disinvestment, economic exclusion and limited socioeconomic mobility have endured, according to research published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine earlier this year. 

“By spatially marking neighborhoods as ‘undesirable,’ redlining helped to entrench racial segregation, facilitate the infusion of resources into white communities — through access to credit, home equity and public investment — and justify the heaping of hazards on communities of color, particularly Black neighborhoods,” Esposito said. 

An outlier near Downtown

Most former Grade D neighborhoods rank low in many markers of health. The few outliers have experienced better health outcomes because of gentrification, such as Harbor Town. 

In earlier times, wealthy Memphians avoided the industrial area, with its easy access to the river, now known as Harbor Town. Then, it was noisy and polluted, but as industry declined, the waterfront property became ripe for real estate development. 

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Now, the life expectancy hovers around 79, with some of the best health outcomes in Memphis. 

Esposito wants people to remember that an underlying racist logic motivated racist zoning practices in the first place. And those ideas must be addressed to achieve health equity. 

“Historical redlining grades are no longer a necessary instrument for maintaining the larger racist project of conflating race and risk,” he said.