I’ve never seen one.
Warning! Incoming autistic data-dump post!
You’ll never see a legible HOLC map for Raleigh because there was no HOLC map for Raleigh. As the maps were not actually made public until the 1980s, it’s entirely possible that an as-yet-undiscovered series of HOLC or FHA maps of smaller cities exists, but as Noelke et al note in this 2022 paper, “HOLC residential security maps were created for 239 cities, which had populations that exceeded 40,000 people.” Raleigh in 1930 had 37,379 people, and so just missed the cutoff.
That is not to say that redlining never occured in Raleigh, or more generally in cities that didn’t have HOLC maps drawn during the '30s. Aaronson et al compared cities just under the population threshold with those just over it, and found the smaller cities experienced broadly similar trends in homeownership and property values, and to some degree other unidentified confounding variables are likely influencing trends related to cities with lower 1930 populations. In any event the general effects of redlining practices seem to have occurred in places beyond the 239 HOLC cities.
The FHA itself drew its own maps after the end of the war, though only a few of these maps are publicly available. FHA relied more on statistical tables and may not have produced many actual maps, especially because local real estate agents and banks knew about the HOLC maps (produced in 1937-38 and originally intended to be secret) and frequently requested to have copies of them, which for whatever reason FHA didn’t want; not drawing maps and just using data tables probably saved FHA some headaches. (Why keep the maps secret? Surely they weren’t embarassed about being racist in 1935; were they hoping the redlining data constituted a competetive advantage against private lenders? Would that matter?)
FHA, however, started insuring mortgages in 1935, predating HOLC by a couple of years. As Fishback et al discuss in a 2022 paper, FHA actually was much worse about avoiding redlined areas than HOLC was, both before and after the production of the HOLC maps. HOLC actually did a lot of lending in redlined and yellowlined areas, whereas FHA insured very few properties in those areas. Because FHA outlasted HOLC by 70 years, it actually did far more damage than HOLC, even if we assume that FHA’s lending and insurance practices were fully reformed after the 1968 Fair Housing Act (an assumption I don’t actually think is justified).
It seems fair to conclude that the Home Owners Loan Corporation and its maps are neither the source nor the primary driver of redlining. But because they present the data visually (and because the written information on which they were based is so viscerally repugnant), they’ve become the focus of both public and scholarly ire directed at the practice of redlining itself. There’s been plenty of debate over whether the HOLC maps created redlined neighborhoods or whether they merely reflected already-established practice in the cities where they were made, but I’d argue it’s not relevant in light of Fishback et al whether HOLC was the chicken or the egg. The maps are visual evidence of practices and biases that already existed and that continued to exist after the maps’ creation.
If you want to dig through the actual digitized HOLC maps or accompanying data tables, the University of Richmond, and Scott Markley of Cornell have done a lot of the work of making those maps and data available and easy to access. There’s just nothing there for Raleigh; to quote Noelke et al, “Many cities with the least HOLC coverage are in regions which have experienced significant growth since the 1970’s in the Sun Belt or in western metros like Phoenix, Houston, Atlanta, and Raleigh-Durham.”
What can we make of Raleigh and redlining? Well, we know it happened. When Clarence Poe turned a chunk of his farm into Longview Gardens starting in 1934 he covenanted the property to prevent any of the lots or homes from being sold to non-whites (a covenant that didn’t expire until 1965). While on the local school board, he explicitly denied the requests of Black residents living in the St Augustine’s neighborhood for a local high school, because the newest White high school, Broughton, was on the other side of town from Longview, and he believed his White subdivision wouldn’t succeed if the closest schools were Black schools (at the time, the closest Black high school was Washington, which is now an elementary school on Fayetteville just south of MLK). He even had Raleigh Blvd built well beyond the needed capacity to act as a boundary between his perfect White neighborhood and the Black neighborhoods of the east end. (These fun details and more can be found in Elizabeth Herbin-Triant’s 2019 book Threatening Property.)
Ultimately given that it seems HOLC’s maps were more a reflection of existing bias than the source of new bias, I think we can assume that FHA lending in Raleigh between 1935 and 1968 or later would have taken place in the same environment as the one that produced the HOLC map of Durham. It should be possible to create a map of Raleigh’s redlined neighborhoods, if someone wanted to put in the time to search through public records to identify properties that did and did not receive FHA mortgages or insurance during that period and cross-tabulate that info with records of the property owners and addresses involved, following the methodology of Fishback et al. (Also, this would produce a map demonstrating the FHAs actual in-fact historical practice, so nobody could say “well the HOLC maps are just informational and don’t prove redlining was an actual practice.”) Sounds like a masters thesis to me if anybody’s looking for ideas for their MURP or MPA program…
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Thanks for all that detail and especially for the explanation of why we can’t find a redline map for Raleigh.
That said, and after checking the data, it’s shocking to know that Durham was 40% larger than Raleigh in 1930.
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