Redlining and Tourism in 1939 Chicago
This project aims to look at one of America's most diverse cities, Chicago, by examine the links between redlined districts and tourism in the city.
Between 1935 and 1940, a New Deal agency, the Home Owners' Loan Corporation, color-coded over 250 maps to indicate the credit-worthiness of districts. Real estate developers and mortgage lenders were consulted in the creation of these maps, with the intent to prevent foreclosures and refinance homes, using criteria such as income levels and racial demography to determine the grade each district received. These practices resulted in redlined districts where mortgages were deemed too high of a risk to distribute, which affected neighborhood development.
In 1939 the HOLC released the Chicago color-coded maps. That same year, the Illinois Guidebook was published by another New Deal agency, the Federal Writers' Project as part of the Works Project Administration. This guidebook outlines automobile tours of Chicago suggested for toursits visiting the city. Comparing the HOLC red-lined maps and the routes designated in the guidebook, we sought to uncover the biases, or lack there of, that the FWP would have in creating tours for a city with plenty of redlined districts. We assumed the tours would avoid neighborhoods that had been redlined, however our results proved otherwise. Click on the "Maps" tab to interact with the project, where we overlayed the redlined maps with the routes and descriptions written in the guidebook, and read about some of our findings.
