At age 68, Paula Coar-Gueye contemplates retirement, but works a lot. She’s a teacher’s aide and runs a small business from her Roxbury home, crafting clothes from brilliantly colored African cloth. Every bit helps to pay the rent.
Owning a home has long been an elusive goal for her family.
“My mother always wanted to buy a house,” Coar-Gueye said. “My father had a really good stable job, he was a merchant marine. He came back and forth, but he made decent money.”
But like most people of color in that era, her father could not get a home loan. Growing up in the 1950s and '60s, Coar-Gueye watched as white neighbors left, and Roxbury became a neighborhood inhabited almost exclusively by people of color.
That segregation happened not only in Boston, but urban areas across the country. And it was intentional. A nationally-touring exhibit called "Undesign the Redline," created by the New York City-based firm Designing the WE, aims to explain the history of redlining across the country.
“Why are we hyper-segregated in America?” said April De Simone, the co-founder of Designing the WE. “How do we arrive where we have disproportionate numbers of people who live in more desirable areas look one way and those who don’t look another way?”
On display through December at the Jamaica Plain Brewery, it features a wall-sized map of Boston, where each neighborhood is assigned a color.
“Blue and green are the most desirable areas,” said De Simone. “Red is considered hazardous and undesirable.”
All of Roxbury is colored red. The term red-lining was coined in the 1960s, but the practice was formalized in the 1930s, with color-coded maps developed by the federal government.
“These security maps are the introduction of a sort of nationwide appraisal system,” said De Simone, “of how you’re going to determine how you’re going to invest in an area.”
Blue and green meant a neighborhood was a safe place for banks to back loans. Red was high risk. The color on the map was determined, in large part, by neighborhood demographics.
"In the survey, you had the word 'negro,' asking, 'What is the percentage of negroes that live in this area?'" said De Simone.
That same 1930s land survey also tallied the number of foreign-born residents.
“It’s Irish, Italian, Jewish,” she said, “who are also considered undesirable.” But the status of those immigrant groups changed after World War II when they joined an exodus from the city to the suburbs, where home ownership helped create the country’s middle class.
"Certain groups get to say, 'I don’t want to live here and I want to access suburban housing,'" she said. “White flight is what happened.”
Meanwhile, federal policy promoting racial segregation continued. The "Undesign the Redline" exhibit includes this passage from a Federal Underwriting Manual used into the 1950s: "If a neighborhood is to retain stability it is necessary that property shall continue to be occupied by the same social and racial classes. A change in racial or social occupancy generally leads to instability and a reduction in value."
Red-lining, De Simone said, not only excluded people from owning — and potentially profiting — from home ownership, but confined them to areas of poverty and minimal investment.
Until recently.
Amid a growth in population — and popularity in urban living — once red-lined areas are being gentrified. Case in point: Jamaica Plain’s Egleston Square. Long populated largely by people of color, census data indicates more than a third of the population makes less than $25,000 a year.
“Now we have a policy to redevelop the area and give it tons of investment, but we’re not protecting the residents that lived there,” said Alex Ponte-Capellan, an organizer with the housing advocacy organization City Life/Vida Urbana.
About a block away from the lively mix of bodegas and barbershops that have long defined the neighborhood, sleek new apartment buildings are going up.
“Rents are going to look like $4,000 to $5,000, even, for a three-bedroom,” said Ponte-Capellan. “The rents are sky-rocketing and people are moving out.”
As for the people with the means to move in, Ponte-Capellan said they’re likely coming from communities where the color on a long-ago map was something other than red.
