Just over half of all demolitions in Wichita and Sedgwick County in the last decade were of single-family homes. Of those, nearly a quarter occurred in ZIP code 67214.
The area had the most single-family demolitions of any other ZIP code over the last decade. The population there is majority Black and majority Hispanic.
Parts of all six ZIP codes in Wichita’s urban core, including much of 67214, touch areas that were formerly redlined. “Redlining” refers to a practice adopted by the Homeowners Loan Corp., a government-sponsored corporation born out of the Great Depression. Almost a century ago, the practice was used to categorize neighborhoods according to how secure the area was for mortgaging.
Those areas graded as the least-desirable were shaded in red on the maps, leading to use of the term “redlined.”
“HOLC did not invent redlining, as life insurance companies previously discriminated in this way, nor did HOLC circulate its maps beyond a small group of government officials,” according to On The Line, a book by Trinity College professor Jack Dougherty, who works with students and community partners to analyze the relationship between schooling and housing in the city and suburbs of Hartford, Connecticut.
Though the corporation’s maps did not cause redlining, they reflect the racist and elitist perspectives of the federal officials who created them, the book says, and the vestiges of the maps and the perspectives they reflect remain today.
In 1937, 64% of the city of Wichita was redlined by those maps. That made it the third-most redlined city in the country.
Redlining contributed to generational wealth gaps that still plague Black Americans. Even today, in areas that were previously redlined, it can be a struggle for residents to secure loans, including for refinance or renovation.
Redlining is often misunderstood, and it’s not the only indicator of inequality. The maps were made in the 1930s and 1940s, and capture the houses built at that time. Naturally, some are in distress almost a century later, said Eric Seymour, a professor and researcher at Rutgers University who studies housing and neighborhood dynamics. Seymour was most recently a postdoctoral research associate at Brown University’s Population Studies and Training Center, where he worked on the spatial demography of urban population loss.
The median house size today is 2,300 square feet. The smaller houses built decades ago may not be what most families today desire.
“Redlining, broadly understood and not limited to the use of HOLC maps, is an important but partial part of the story, one that has shaped continuing processes of racialized disinvestment and marginalization,” Seymour said of the demolition trend in Wichita.
Places for People
The term “redlining” does appear in vision documents from 2021 outlining the Places for People plan, which drives the city of Wichita’s urban infill strategy. Maps outlining “formative neighborhoods” for reinvestment roughly track with historical redlining maps.
The plan was adopted into the Wichita-Sedgwick County comprehensive plan in 2019. Places for People includes starting a city land bank, devoting more resources to “ridding neighborhoods of dangerous and unsafe structures,” putting $5 million into an affordable housing trust fund and approving a pilot program for special assessments.
As a part of the fund, the city opened applications for up to $40,000 to use on rehabbing housing in northeast Wichita.
And redevelopment is happening.
