The map is from the 1930s. The results are not. Designing the WE’s Braden Crooks brought his “Undesign the Redline” exhibit to the NAR Expo in Washington to show how Great Depression-era federal housing policies drew lines that still define today’s markets, from the affordability crisis to valuation bias to the racial wealth gap.
Designing Brayden Crooks WE
The federal government announced it in writing.
Neighborhood descriptions attached to neighborhood risk maps from the 1930s used language such as “Detrimental Effects: Black Infiltration” to justify cutting off entire neighborhoods from federally backed mortgages, Braden Crooks, co-founder of Designing the WE, told an audience at the National Association of Realtors’ 2026 Legislative Conference in Washington, D.C.
FHA’s own underwriting manual instructs lenders to assess whether “incompatible racial or social groups” exist and predict whether a neighborhood will be “invaded” by such groups, he said.
“I don’t mince words,” Crooks said. “I have nothing to hide.”
Crooks was presenting “Undesign the Redline,” a traveling exhibit that Designing the WE brought to the NAR Expo at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center. This exhibit traces the history of redlining and its effects, from Great Depression-era federal housing policies to the affordability crisis, rich-poor gap, and valuation bias that define today’s markets.
Part of the exhibit highlighted NAR’s fair housing advocacy work and examples of local organizations taking action on affordable and fair housing across the country.
Map grading areas by race
The exhibit focuses on maps created by the Homeowners Loan Corporation in the 1930s and 1940s. The map assigned color-coded risk ratings to neighborhoods in 239 American cities. Green meant free lending. Red meant danger.
Crooks said the FHA used the same framework to decide where to insure mortgages, effectively separating red- and yellow-coded areas from the loan products that built America’s middle class.
That result was no accident. Crooks said the geography of American cities today, with its concentration of poverty in urban centers and surrounding wealthy, white suburbs, is a direct product of these policies. Real estate values in areas coded red are undergoing a downward cycle, he said. Banks withdrew and businesses closed.
Crooks said the Chicago Fed later showed that pre-redlining integrated districts often had higher property values, meaning the property value argument used to justify the map was not only discriminatory but false.
Private real estate strengthens the system
Private real estate strengthened the system. The scammers read private real estate textbooks of the time that claimed black homebuyers should “give up their desire” to live outside established neighborhoods because they would cause “economic chaos” in white neighborhoods.
He said Detroit developers erected a 6-foot-tall concrete wall along Eight Mile Road to physically separate the all-white residential area from nearby black neighborhoods after the FHA initially refused to insure the project because it was too close to racial lines. Crooks said FHA approved the project after the wall was built. The wall, known as Burwood Wall, still stands.
“Once this gets introduced into national policy and requires banks, insurance companies and mortgage issuers to look at racial makeup, it becomes a self-fulfilling policy,” Crooks said. “Race and property values are now intertwined, and here we are.”
Expansion of damage over decades
The damage worsened over several decades. Mr. Crooks briefed the audience on large-scale urban redevelopment demolition, the construction of freeways through residential neighborhoods, and what he called “planned downsizing.” This was a budget strategy used by cities including New York in the 1970s to pull services from redlined neighborhoods and preserve resources for greener neighborhoods.
The first to be cut was the fire department, he said. Crooks said parts of the South Bronx have lost nearly 80 percent of their built environment within 10 years.
Mr Crooks said the wealth effect was still there. He cited data showing that 80% of young first-time homebuyers now receive help from family members for a down payment, and linked this figure to intergenerational wealth accumulated or not accumulated along the lines of redlining. He says evaluation bias remains a documented expression of the same logic today.
“Even today, you have evaluation bias,” Crooks says. “These ideas are introduced as policy, but they are not completely debunked.”
What local organizations can do now
The exhibit concludes with examples of NAR and local associations and organizations committed to fair housing, affordable housing, and community reinvestment. Crooks said “Designing the WE” localizes exhibits to specific communities and encourages participants to bring exhibits to their own markets.
Email Jesse Healy
