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Boundaries, Districts, and Zones in New York City: Redlining in NYC

This guide covers how to find cartographic materials related to the internal boundaries, districts, and zones of New York City.

Redlining

As defined by Merriam-Webster, redlining is the process of "withhold[ing] home-loan funds or insurance from neighborhoods considered poor economic risks." In the United States, this process was often racially motivated, and was considered a legal practice until 1968's Fair Housing Act. 

Many of the redlining maps that currently exist today were created between 1935-1940 by the Home Owners' Loan Corporation - a federal agency. Neighborhoods would be graded based on their residential security, which was the "relative security or riskiness of those areas for banks, saving and loans, and other lenders who made mortgages." From these grades, maps accompanied by "Area Descriptions" were created.

When reviewing these redlining maps, some questions you can answer are:

  • What were the demographics of different neighborhoods? How does that compare to today?
  • How did redlining affect where people can live?
  • How has redlining affected the services that are afforded to certain neighborhoods?
  • How does redlining still affect our neighborhoods today?

Please see below to see the resources that are available to conduct research into this topic as it relates to the United States as a whole, and to New York City specifically.

Resources on Redlining in the United States

For maps of redlining in the United States, we highly recommend utilizing Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America, which aggregates the maps and collected documentation related to redlining into one portal. To use the portal:

  • In the main face of the portal, you can click on the highlighted sections of the relevant maps of interest to get datasets and demographic information. 
  • To get the scans of the maps themselves, you will click the tab titled "Downloads & Data." In the search bar located in the middle of this page, type the borough/city of interest to get the resources associated with this region. Resources include scans of the maps, scans of the "Area Description Reports," and data files (Shapefile, GeoJSON, and georectified images).

For New York City specifically, you can find these maps and datasets at the following links:

Mapping Inequality Map Page

Please note that the scans of maps and area descriptions are in the public domain. To create this portal, they utilized the following collections:

From these results, you can also checkmark any of the other listed formats. See below for a list of recommended materials when "Text" is checkmarked: