One of my most exciting research projects this year was working on a research fellowship on behalf of the Indiana Humanities' Wilma Gibbs Moore Fellowship series. My project, "A Judgment Call: Indianapolis, Redlining, & Unjust Legacies," aimed to explore the data and reasoning that went into how neighborhoods/districts were evaluated, or redlined, for Indianapolis (well, for the 1937 city boundaries). My hope is that through this insight, housing and community advocates can draw some connections today to make the work more meaningful and certainly more equitable. I hope we can make more connections within these layers of disinvestment, enacted by numerous policies on the local, state, and federal levels - and how we can track these layers to many of the infrastructure, development, assessment, and resource issues we face today.
My research fellowship covered 5 areas:
An analysis of the Federal Housing Administration's Underwriters Manual - understanding evaluation metrics and standards, coded language, and breaking down assumptions about property values and residents
An understanding of the demographic data - using 1930 and 1940 census data along with demographic data in the Area Description Forms, considering high minority population districts and their histories over time
Visual analysis of Residential Architecture - building a dataset based on residential architectural photographs taken between 1930-1939 in areas evaluated to compare the A and B evaluations with C and D districts
An analysis of information provided in the Area Description Forms - transforming data in these forms to follow trends that may be missed on more casual readings of the forms
A historiography revision - looking to recent and overlooked research to better explain the nuances between which institutions participated in redlining and which institutions left relevant documentation behind