classifications apar theid homelessness ‘race’ infrastructure
urbanism zoning by joshua craze
above: the original Oakland Residential Security Map, prepared by Division of Research and Statistics, Federal Home Loan Bank Board and the Appraisal Department of Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, 1939. 1 green: first grade, then blue, yellow and red. hatched: sparsely settled, double hatched: industrial
neighbourhoods discussed in this article
less total than those implied by national borders. Eldridge Cleaver described them as ‘racial Maginot lines’; step across them and you realise you are living in two countries, not one. In the same era in which Andre Gunder Frank proposed a model of capitalist relations that saw centres exploit a third-world periphery for raw materials and labour, the Black Panthers pointed out an internal colonisation: the centre of Oakland was exploited by its periphery, just a few blocks away. Between the managers in Piedmont and the workers of West Oakland, there were red lines. They first divided Oakland in 1937, in a housing survey for the Home Owners Loan Corporation. All neighbourhoods west of Broadway were given a security grade of red, indicating racially mixed neighbourhoods. Residents inside the red lines found it almost impossible to get loans. These lines, which functioned as an effective barrier to African-American mobility, were kept in place through a variety of mechanisms. Schemes to encourage suburban workers to move into commuting
In Oakland, California, there used to be red lines on the street, drawn so thick you could see them. They ran through the colour gradient, from black in West Oakland through various shades of gray, before turning into a solid white block that extended up into the foothills, to Oakland’s Bible Belt, an area noted for its high concentration of churches, and for its white homeowners who actively attempted to keep out black buyers. Soon I will take a flight, and pass from Francophone countries colour-coded blue in my atlas, into the pink of the former British colonies. Border-crossings after long journeys are the movements most commonly associated with migration. Borders inscribe differences in spatial form and mark the legal change from one state to another. Yet national boundaries mark only the most visible of these borders. They can occur, not just when moving to a different continent, but even moving down the street. The differences entailed by Federal Housing Association zoning lines were no
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