spatial equity

Philadelphia Redlining Map

Redlining Maps for GIS

I received several questions during the spring semester about redlining maps; where to find them, and how many were made. Known officially as Residential Security Maps, they were created by the Home Owners Loan Corporation in the 1930s to grade the level of security or risk for making home loans in residential portions of urban areas throughout the US. This New Deal program was intended to help people refinance mortgages and prevent foreclosures, while increasing buying opportunities to expand home ownership.

Areas were evaluated by lenders, developers, and appraisers and graded from A to D to indicate their desirability or risk level. Grade A was best (green), B still desirable (blue), C definitely declining (yellow), and D hazardous (red). The yellow and red areas were primarily populated by minorities, immigrants, and low income groups, and current research suggests that this program had a long reaching negative impact by enforcing and cementing segregation, disinvestment, and poverty in these areas.

The definitive digital source for these maps is the Mapping Inequality : Redlining in New Deal America project created at the University of Richmond’s Digital Scholarship Lab. They provide a solid history and summary of these maps and a good bibliography. The main portal is an interactive map of the US that allows you to zoom in and preview maps in different cities. You can click on individually zoned areas and get the original assessor or evaluator’s notes (when available). If you switch to the Downloads page you get a list of maps sorted alphabetically by state and city that you can download as: a jpeg of the original scanned map, a georeferenced image that can be added to GIS software as a raster, and a GIS vector polygon file (shapefile or geojson). In many cases there is also a scanned copy of the evaluators description and notes. You also have the option for downloading a unified vector file for the entire US as a shapefile or geojson. All of the data is provided under a Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike License.

Providence Redlining Map
Redlining Map of Providence, RI with graded areas, from the Mapping Inequality Project

There are a few other sources to choose from, but none of them are as complete. I originally thought of the National Archives which I thought would be the likely holder of the original paper maps, but only a fraction have been digitized. The PolicyMap database has most (but not all) of the maps available as a feature you can overlay in their platform. If you’re doing a basic web search this Slate article is among the first resources you’ll encounter, but most of the links are broken (which says something about the ephemeral nature of these kinds of digital projects).

How many maps were made? Amy Hillier’s work was among the earlier studies that examined these maps, and her case study of Philadelphia includes a detailed summary of the history of the HOLC program with references to primary source material. According to her research, 239 of these maps were made and she provides a list of each of the cities in the appendix. I was trying to discover how many maps were available in Rhode Island and found this list wasn’t complete; it only included Providence, while the Mapping Inequality project has maps for Providence, Pawtucket & Central Falls, and Woonsocket. I counted 202 maps based on unique names on Mapping Inequality, but some several individual maps include multiple cities.

She mentions that a population of 40,000 people was used as a cut-off for deciding which places to map, but noted that there were exceptions; Washington DC was omitted entirely, while there are several maps for urban counties in New Jersey as opposed to cities. In some case cities that were below the 40k threshold that were located beside larger ones were included. I checked the 1930 census against the three cities in Rhode Island that had maps, and indeed they were the only RI cities at that time that had more than 40k people (Central Falls had less than 40k but was included with Pawtucket as they’re adjacent). So this seemed to provide reasonable assurance that these were the only ones in existence for RI.

Finding the population data for the cities was another surprise. I had assumed this data was available in the NHGIS, but it wasn’t. The NHGIS includes data for places (Census Places) back to the 1970 census, which was the beginning of the period where a formal, bounded census place geography existed. Prior to this time, the Census Bureau published population count data for cities using other means, and the NHGIS is still working to include this information. It does exist (as you can find it in Wikipedia articles for most major cities) but is buried in old PDF reports on the Census Bureau’s website.

If you’re interested in learning more about the redlining maps beyond the documentation provided by Mapping Inequality, these articles provide detailed overviews of the HOLC and the residential security maps program, as well as their implications to the present day. You’ll need to access them through a library database:

Hillier, A.E. (2005). “Residential Security Maps and Neighborhood Appraisals: The Home Owners’ Loan Corporation and the Case of Philadelphia.” Social Science History, 29(2): 207-233.

Greer, J. (2012). “The Home Owners’ Loan Corporation and the Development of the Residential Security Maps“. Journal of Urban History, 39(2): 275-296.

Average Distance to Public Libraries in the US

A few months ago I had a new article published in LISR, but given the absurd restrictions of academic journal publishing I’m not allowed to publicly post the article, and have to wait 12 months before sharing my post-print copy. It is available via your local library if they have a subscription to the Science Direct database (you can also email me to request a copy). .

Citation and Abstract

Regional variations in average distance to public libraries in the United States
F. Donnelly
Library & Information Science Research
Volume 37, Issue 4, October 2015, Pages 280–289
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.lisr.2015.11.008

Abstract

“There are substantive regional variations in public library accessibility in the United States, which is a concern considering the civic and educational roles that libraries play in communities. Average population-weighted distances and the total population living within one mile segments of the nearest public library were calculated at a regional level for metropolitan and non-metropolitan areas, and at a state level. The findings demonstrate significant regional variations in accessibility that have been persistent over time and cannot be explained by simple population distribution measures alone. Distances to the nearest public library are higher in the South compared to other regions, with statistically significant clusters of states with lower accessibility than average. The national average population-weighted distance to the nearest public library is 2.1 miles. While this supports the use of a two-mile buffer employed in many LIS studies to measure library service areas, the degree of variation that exists between regions and states suggests that local measures should be applied to local areas.”

Purpose

I’m not going to repeat all the findings, but will provide some context.

As a follow-up to my earlier work, I was interested in trying an alternate approach for measuring public library spatial equity. I previously used the standard container approach – draw a buffer at some fixed distance around a library and count whether people are in or out, and as an approximation for individuals I used population centroids for census tracts. In my second approach, I used straight-line distance measurements from census block groups (smaller than tracts) to the nearest public library so I could compare average distances for regions and states; I also summed populations for these areas by calculating the percentage of people that lived within one-mile rings of the nearest library. I weighted the distances by population, to account for the fact that census areas vary in population size (tracts and block groups are designed to fall within an ideal population range – for block groups it’s between 600 and 3000 people).

Despite the difference in approach, the outcome was similar. Using the earlier approach (census tract centroids that fell within a library buffer that varied from 1 to 3 miles based on urban or rural setting), two-thirds of Americans fell within a “library service area”, which means that they lived within a reasonable distance to a library based on standard practices in LIS research. Using the latest approach (using block group centroids and measuring the distance to the nearest library) two-thirds of Americans lived within two miles of a public library – the average population weighted distance was 2.1 miles. Both studies illustrate that there is a great deal of variation by geographic region – people in the South consistently lived further away from public libraries compared to the national average, while people in the Northeast lived closer. Spatial Autocorrelation (LISA) revealed a cluster of states in the South with high distances and a cluster in the Northeast with low distances.

The idea in doing this research was not to model actual travel behavior to measure accessibility. People in rural areas may be accustomed to traveling greater distances, public transportation can be a factor, people may not visit the library that’s close to their home for several reasons, measuring distance along a network is more precise than Euclidean distance, etc. The point is that libraries are a public good that provide tangible benefits to communities. People that live in close proximity to a public library are more likely to reap the benefits that it provides relative to those living further away. Communities that have libraries will benefit more than communities that don’t. The distance measurements serve as a basic metric for evaluating spatial equity. So, if someone lives more than six miles away from a library that does not mean that they don’t have access; it does means they are less likely to utilize it or realize it’s benefits compared to someone who lives a mile or two away.

Data

I used the 2010 Census at the block group level, and obtained the location of public libraries from the 2010 IMLS. I improved the latter by geocoding libraries that did not have address-level coordinates, so that I had street matches for 95% of the 16,720 libraries in the dataset. The tables that I’m providing here were not published in the original article, but were tacked on as supplementary material in appendices. I wanted to share them so others could incorporate them into local studies. In most LIS research the prevailing approach for measuring library service areas is to use a buffer of 1 to 2 miles for all locations. Given the variation between states, if you wanted to use the state-average for library planning in your own state you can consider using these figures.

To provide some context, the image below shows public libraries (red stars) in relation to census block group centroids (white circles) for northern Delaware (primarily suburban) and surrounding areas (mix of suburban and rural). The line drawn between the Swedesboro and Woodstown libraries in New Jersey is 5-miles in length. I used QGIS and Spatialite for most of the work, along with Python for processing the data and Geoda for the spatial autocorrelation.

Map Example - Northern Delaware

The three tables I’m posting here are for states: one counts the 2010 Census population within one to six mile rings of the nearest public library, the second is the percentage of the total state population that falls within that ring, and the third is a summary table that calculates the mean and population-weighted distance to the nearest library by state. One set of tables is formatted text (for printing or just looking up numbers) while the other set are CSV files that you can use in a spreadsheet. I’ve included a metadata record with some methodological info, but you can read the full details in the article.

In the article itself I tabulated and examined data at a broader, regional level (Northeast, Midwest, South, and West), and also broke it down into metropolitan and non-metropolitan areas for the regions. Naturally people that live in non-metropolitan areas lived further away, but the same regional patterns existed: more people in the South in both metro and non-metro areas lived further away compared to their counterparts in other parts of the country. This weekend I stumbled across this article in the Washington Post about troubles in the Deep South, and was struck by how these maps mirrored the low library accessibility maps in my past two articles.