Racist Housing Practices From The 1930s Linked To Hotter Neighborhoods Today

Vacant rowhouses line a portion of Franklin Square, a formerly redlined neighborhood in Baltimore. New research shows many communities subjected to discriminatory housing practices in the 1930s are hotter today.

Ian Morton for NPR

In cities around the country, if you want to understand the history of a neighborhood, you might want to do the same thing you’d do to measure human health: Check its temperature.

That’s what a group of researchers did, and they found that neighborhoods with higher temperatures were often the same ones subjected to discriminatory, race-based housing practices nearly a century ago.

In a study of 108 urban areas nationwide, the formerly redlined neighborhoods of nearly every city studied were hotter than the non-redlined neighborhoods, some by nearly 13 degrees.