“It feels like planners in the U.S. sort of exist in a history vacuum. It’s important for them to look at this information and understand that a lot of city planning really involves dismantling systems like zoning and redlining.”

The City of Louisville press release of February 14 includes a link to the redlining map.

City begins community conversation to combat redlining

 ... Local urban planner Joshua Poe has developed the interactive story map entitled “Redlining Louisville: The History of Race, Class and Real Estate.” This tool illustrates the ways that redlining has affected housing development, disinvestment and lending patterns in Louisville since the 1930s. By layering data sets such as vacant properties, building permits and property values, the map shows how the intentional redlining that was devised in the 1930s has had consequences that are evident still today.

Examples of conventional redlining that still exists today include refusal to provide delivery in certain areas, business loan denials regardless of credit-worthiness and refusal to write property insurance policies or dropping property owners from insurance coverage altogether.

Other forms of redlining, referred to as reverse redlining, also exist. Examples of reverse redlining include offering services low-income residents at higher prices, higher interest rates and excessive service fees or inferior products. This example may come in forms such as payday loans, cash advances, and expedited tax returns.

This story made it all the way to CityLab, but let it be duly noted that former New Albanian resident Poe's work on this topic goes back many years, as Jeff Gillenwater noted in this space in 2013.

Poe: "The design seems better suited to simply facilitate crime than livability."

Friend and former neighbor Josh Poe is the sort of engaged and educated person who regularly challenges and improves upon my thinking; in short, the sort New Albany still tends to lose too often. He continues the good work here, reminding that certain community outcomes are the direct result of careful planning rather than random market occurrences, often for the most egregious of reasons. If you don't think it still happens and happens here, I invite you to check out the school district mapping in western New Albany sometime.

It's wonderful to see Josh's efforts bearing fruit. Will Greg Fischer's hyperbole translate into action? That's always the biggest question.

Louisville Confronts Its Redlining Past and Present, by Brentin Mock (CityLab)

A new online mapping project is aimed at dismantling the Kentucky city’s grim legacy of racial segregation.

 ... “When I started the research, I hoped that it would be used at the grassroots level, and I also hoped it would be used by planners,” says Joshua Poe, the urban planner who developed the project. “It feels like planners in the U.S. sort of exist in a history vacuum. It’s important for them to look at this information and understand that a lot of city planning really involves dismantling systems like zoning and redlining.”

On the website, users interact with a city map from 1937 that shows how the city was carved up for real estate investment purposes. Poe discovered a trove of documents in D.C.’s National Archives that show how lenders used race, class, and the number of immigrant families residing in an area to determine its value. Users can view these documents from the maps and also compare the city’s racial and class population distribution between 1937 and 2010.