Racial Residential Segregation in Greater Boston

HOLC appraisers based the grades that they assigned each neighborhood on racist, anti-immigrant, and classist assumptions. The grades they assigned were:

These areas were considered the most desirable for home lending. They were almost exclusively White and high-income.

These areas were also considered desirable for lending. They were also almost exclusively White and high-income. Blue areas were also areas that appraisers thought would become more desirable over time.

People looking for loans in areas that received a C grade were unlikely to receive them. Appraisers thought that C-grade areas were on the decline, usually due to racist ideas about the influx of immigrants of people of color.

The D-graded areas is where the term 'redlining' comes from. People in areas with a D-grade were completely excluded from the federally-backed loan program. These areas were usually where people of color, working class, and immigrants lived.

The HOLC appraiser comments were explicit with the racist, anti-immigrant, and anti-working class assumptions they used to grant access to federally-backed home loans.

Take, for example, comments on the appraisal of a neighborhood in Boston's  South End :

"Negro heavily concentrated north of Ruggles St. on the west side of Washington. Jewish centered near Columbus Square. A large territory with some streets showing better expereiences than the balance of the section....Availability of funds for home purchase: Very limited."

A different, B-graded neighborhood in  Allston-Brighton  gets a markedly better assessment, though still explicitly antisemitic:

"New construction of brick two-family selling $12,500-14,500, singles from $8400-9500. Along Commonwealth Ave., are good apartments. Definite infiltration of high class Jewish... Availability of mortgage funds for home purchase: Yes."

All original redlining documents, including maps and appraisals, have been digitized by the University of Richmond Digital Scholarship Lab and are available at this link:

Use the slider to explore redlining areas in Boston. Use the + and - buttons to zoom in and out, click and drag to navigate across the map.

'Blockbusting' was a practice in which speculators bought properties in all-White or predominately White neighborhoods and rented or sold those properties to Black residents at above-market prices.

These speculators would then spark fear among white neighbors about the decline of their neighborhood, resulting in Whites leaving the neighborhood and accepting below-market value for their homes on their way out.

Despite a 1971 Boston rule that imposed a $50 fine on real estate agents accused of blockbusting, the practice continued to make headlines throughout the 70's.

In Boston, one of the groups accused of blockbusting was called the Boston Banks Urban Renewal Group (BBURG), a bank consortium created in 1963 to issue federally-insured home loans to low-income Black families.

On face value, BBURG seemed like a solution to segregation—finally, banks were happily lending mortgages to Black Bostonians. Yet, the BBURG loans were only given out in a concentrated inner-city area, furthering segregation. BBURG lenders also 'blockbusted' in Mattapan, using racialized fear tactics to encourage White Jewish people to sell their homes for below-market value.

This map shows the official boundaries for BBURG lending, from a June 3rd, 1971 article in the Boston Globe. The boundary contains parts of Jamaica Plain, Roxbury, Dorchester, Mattapan, and parts of South Boston.

Notice, also, that the BBURG lending areas were all graded "C" or "D" in the 1930's HOLC maps.

In this way, area-selective lending to Black home buyers further codified segregation that was previously enforced by the denial of loans to homeowners in the same area.

Alongside blockbusting and the rise of the suburbs, highways also contributed to residential segregation. The 1956 Federal Highway Act funded the development of several highways that connected Boston to its newly-developed outlying suburbs. With new easy transportation between suburban homes and jobs in the city, White and wealthier people left the city in droves.

One such highway project was Route 128, known also as the "Yankee Division Highway". A report 1975 titled  Route 128: Boston's Road to Segregation  explored how the building of Route 128 contributed to residential segregation.

The report found that the new highway concentrated wealth and industrial employment in the suburbs and away from inner city residents.

At the same time, people in the suburbs resisted the building of public and affordable housing. Zoning laws restricted construction of apartments, making the suburbs unaffordable for anyone but the wealthiest people. These processes further segregated the Boston area.

The authors of Route 128: Boston's Road to Segregation frankly summarized the harm done by suburbanization along Route 128 (pp. 42):

Route 128’s history represents a social failure approaching disaster in terms of its impact on the poor and minority groups. There was an absence of social planning and a misuse of the region’s physical resources. While planning was nonexistent in few towns, it was of poor quality in others. In those towns which had the time and the funds, physical planning succeeded almost too well. These towns are beautiful, although their beauty was paid for, in part, by the ugliness of others. Their gains, from the larger perspective, were the region’s loss.

Other highway projects were successfully stopped by community organizers. Boston's proposed "inner belt" highway, shown as gray dots on the map, would have cut through several Boston neighborhoods and displaced 7,000 people from their homes.

Starting in 1966, over 500 homes were demolished between Forest Hills and the South End, resulting in widespread community protests. The project was finally canceled in 1969, and the already-demolished corridor would later become the underground Orange Line subway with a surface corridor park.

Boston's urban renewal areas are shown here. Click on a neighborhood for more information, including the original project funding amount.

The New York Streets project (1956-1957), Boston's first urban renewal project and the first of several in the South End, demolished several acres of the so-called  New York Streets area , a 24 acre, 12-city block area in the northeast corner of the South End. By 1957, 321 buildings had been demolished and over 1,000 working-class residents displaced from their homes.

Just  a few blocks away  and a decade later, a largely Puerto Rican community in the South End formed the  Inquilinos Boriquas en Acción  (IBA) in 1968 to resist an urban renewal project that threatened to demolish their homes. Flyers were distributed to gather support for the movement, with the slogan “No nos mudaremos de la Parcel 19” (“We shall not be moved from Parcel 19”).

The organization successfully campaigned to stay in their neighborhood, and to have control over the redevelopment plan. The result of this powerful community organizing was the development of Villa Victoria ("Victory Village"), an affordable housing community in the South End, which has become a national model in community organizing and affordable housing.

  IBA summarizes their own successes best: 

IBA has expanded its affordable housing portfolio to include 667 units that are strengthened by comprehensive programming. IBA’s work is a daily reminder of what can be achieved with effort, determination and community organizing.

During the boom of urban renewal, activists and community members began to raise concerns about inequitable distribution of urban renewal funds and efforts.

In the telegram on the right from 1960, Black organizers of Roxbury's   Freedom House Civic Center Association   expressed outrage to Boston Mayor John Collins about racial discrimination in urban renewal site selection.

The telegram is continued on the next page.