By Madeline Reinsel

The legacy of redlining – the 20th-century mapping practice that denied loans and other services to minorities based on their neighborhoods – continues to resonate in cities. New research from Virginia Commonwealth University and Virginia State University finds a spatial overlap between formerly redlined neighborhoods and violent injuries among youth in the city of Richmond today.

“What we’re seeing now is this pattern in present-day Richmond, nearly a century after redlining began, where adolescent youth that live in these communities are still at this tremendously elevated risk of incurring violent injuries and experiencing violence in their community,” said Samuel West, Ph.D., an assistant professor at VSU and an affiliate faculty member in the VCU Health trauma center’s Injury and Violence Prevention Program.

In 1934, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation and the Federal Housing Administration began using demographic information to identify and map “desirable” and “undesirable” neighborhoods with low and high lending risks, respectively. The most “undesirable” neighborhoods, with high lending risks and “D” ratings, were typically highlighted in red.

While the program was outwardly intended to smooth the path to homeownership in the wake of the Great Depression, white homebuyers were given better lending terms than Black and other minority homebuyers when purchasing homes in majority-white neighborhoods. While redlining officially ended in 1968 with the passage of the Fair Housing Act, researchers have found that present-day residents of historically redlined neighborhoods have poorer health and shorter life expectancies than residents of nonredlined communities.

“The effect of redlining on violence has never been tested in the city of Richmond,” West said. “And it’s important to find the effects here in Richmond, since it has quite the history of being the epicenter of racist policy, the center of the slave trade and the capital of the Confederacy.”

The researchers used data from 261 patients, ages 10-24, who were admitted to VCU Health’s Level 1 trauma center to spatially map youth violence across the city in 2022 and 2023. Patients in the study were the victims of violent, intentional injuries, such as assault or abuse. The data was collected by the VCU Clark-Hill Institute for Positive Youth Development and encompasses 148 neighborhoods delineated by the city of Richmond.

Among the patients, 62% self-identified as Black, 17% identified as white, and 18% identified as mixed race or “other.” The remaining patients identified as Asian or were unable to self-report their race. In other attributes, 13% percent of the patients self-identified as Hispanic or Latino, and 72% of all patients were covered by Medicaid.

Strikingly, approximately 70% of the patients injured across both years were female, and 25% were victims of child abuse, including child sexual abuse. Additionally, while discussions of youth violence typically concentrate on gun violence, this study found that less than 2% of the injuries were from guns.

The results, published in the American Journal of Community Psychology, paint a different picture than what the public might expect, the researchers said, and emphasizes the need for better community development policies.

“People may be surprised by the large proportion of females injured by violence, as most studies, especially those focusing on firearms, report males as the majority of victims,” said Nicholas Thomson, Ph.D., a forensic psychologist in the VCU School of Medicine and the director of research for the Injury and Violence Prevention Program. “However, when we look at all violent injuries, a different picture emerges. In our study, about 70% of those injured were women and girls. This shows the need for prevention strategies that build community resilience to protect women and girls, especially in neighborhoods with higher risk and fewer resources.”

The researchers also found that formerly redlined neighborhoods in Richmond made up 86% of the violence hotspots identified in the study. Those neighborhoods include modern-day public housing communities as well as historic communities. One formerly redlined neighborhood, Carytown, currently has low rates of violent injuries among youth. Many regions of the city, especially south of the James River, were never graded by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation.

Identifying neighborhoods where youth are sustaining violent injuries is an important part of violence prevention, Thomson said.

“The link between historic neighborhood redlining and current violence risk might seem expected, but it is important to test this expectation with data,” he said. “Data-driven evidence helps separate fact from assumption and gives policymakers reliable information to guide solutions.”

To combat violence against youth in Richmond, the researchers advocate for violence prevention strategies that go beyond traditional measures, and seek to undo the harm caused by centuries of oppression and discrimination.

“Policies that may might be unjust, or even discriminatory, have a very far reach into the future in terms of their impact,” West said. “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.”