The neighbourhoods drawn in red

After the Great Depression, a U.S. federal agency, the Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC), graded neighbourhoods according to the "risk" they supposedly posed to lenders. Between 1935 and 1940, it drew maps of 239 cities. Four colours: green for the "best" neighbourhoods, blue, yellow, and red for those deemed "hazardous." That red is where the word redlining comes from.

These maps were anything but neutral. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, African Americans made up about 4% of the population of green and blue neighbourhoods combined, but about 40% of that of red neighbourhoods. Decades of hard-to-get credit left their mark: in 2020, African Americans still had the lowest homeownership rate of any group in the United States.

These maps are American, but Canada had its own tools. Near Grand Bend, Ontario, a restrictive covenant prohibited selling a cottage to anyone who was not "of the white or Caucasian race." In 1951, in Noble and Wolf v. Alley, the Supreme Court struck it down, mostly on technical legal grounds and because its racial terms were too vague. The decision nonetheless pushed provinces to ban such covenants.

A line on a map can decide who deserves to be invested in. Ubuntu invites us to reverse the reading: to measure a neighbourhood by the strength of its bonds rather than the colour it was given, and to reinvest first where investment was long refused.