Week 2 Blog - Redlining the City of Columbia: a look at HOLC grading, African-American, Native American, and White populations in the City of Columbia.

  have the HOLC Grade Layer as solid colors across Columbia, SC. I originally added American Indian/Native Alaskan from the 2010 Census demographic onto the map as a dotted layer. While it did show a pattern with Native populations being in the lower HOLC graded neighborhoods or areas, I was unsure if there was enough of a population in Columbia to truly make an argument.

On the second map I made I used the African-American population layer from the 2010 Census information. That layer showed a clear pattern between the HOLC grade and the concentration of African-American populations in the Columbia area.

I also decided to add in a layer for the White populations listed in the 2010 Census records as a comparison and to get an idea of what populations were in the Grade A HOLC areas of Columbia. From these maps I created you can investigate what populations are currently in the HOLC graded areas and what that says about this grading system. 

I feel like the residential areas within Columbia have exponentially expanded since this map was made, there are tons and tons of houses on the outskirts and places like Mungo are building more everyday. I would be curious to know what such new areas and neighborhoods would be graded on, since there are no historical populations in the area and new people move into those developments everyday. 

Some questions I have based off making these maps are: 

Why are the areas that have majority African-American and where most of the Native dots are concentrated considered on the lower end of the HOLC grading scale? Yet most if not all of the higher graded areas consist of majority white populations? I would be curious if the same grading scale applied to businesses in those areas? And how many of the businesses in the lower graded areas were owned by minorities, such as African Americans and Native populations?