Moving the Line by Joe Steele

In the 1930‘s, the Home Owner’s Loan Corporation was conceived with the singular purpose of providing federal support on mortgage underwriting risk. In practice, the firm quantified that risk largely through the lens of perceived racial desirability. The borders drawn by the HOLC, literal red lines that demarcated neighbourhoods to be starved of investment, still express contemporary inequalities in socioeconomic security. In general, there persists today in America an embedded network of such structural factors, contributing to unequal social outcomes. Compounding the issue of discursively challenging these structures are broad misconceptions on their character and import. However, with issues as directly geospatial as redlining and de jure segregation, there exists an opportunity in visual media to create direct, concise, and easily-interpretable representations of typically oblique content- content that remains both vital to contemporary social welfare, and fundamentally misunderstood by the American layman.