Redlining in St. Louis was a decades-long system of denying mortgages, home improvement loans, and insurance to residents of specific neighborhoods, chosen largely on the basis of race. It operated through three overlapping mechanisms: a 1916 city segregation ordinance, federal “residential security” maps drawn in the late 1930s that shaded Black neighborhoods red, and private deed covenants that barred sales to non-white buyers. The laws are gone and the covenants are unenforceable, but the geography they created, most visibly the Delmar Boulevard divide, still shapes where wealth sits in the city.
How It Started: The 1916 Segregation Ordinance
St. Louis voters approved a ballot measure in 1916 by a three-to-one margin that prohibited anyone from moving onto a block where more than 75 percent of residents belonged to another race. On paper it ran both ways. In practice it was designed to keep Black residents out of white neighborhoods.
The ordinance did not last long. In 1917, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a nearly identical Louisville law in Buchanan v. Warley, ruling that such ordinances violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s property rights protections. St. Louis’s version fell with it. But the decision only killed the explicit municipal tool. Segregation moved into private contracts and, soon after, into federal lending policy, where it would prove far more durable.
The HOLC Maps That Named Redlining
The Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, created by Congress in 1933, launched a mapping program in the late 1930s that gave the practice its name. HOLC assessors visited more than 200 cities, St. Louis among them, and graded neighborhoods for lending risk. A was green (“best”). B was blue (“still desirable”). C was yellow (“declining”). D was red (“hazardous”). The red ink is where “redlining” comes from.
Building age and infrastructure mattered to the graders, but so did the racial and ethnic makeup of the people living there. Predominantly Black neighborhoods in St. Louis were almost always rated C or D no matter the actual condition of the homes or the creditworthiness of the residents. The Ville and much of North St. Louis received the lowest grades, which cut their residents off from conventional mortgages and home improvement loans.
Those maps became a standardized manual for federal agencies and private banks alike. A D rating told lenders to stay out. Homeowners inside the red lines could not refinance, could not get purchase loans, and could not borrow to maintain their properties. The neighborhoods deteriorated, and the deterioration was then cited as proof that the original grade had been right. The system manufactured the conditions it claimed to measure.
The FHA Underwriting Manual
The Federal Housing Administration took the same logic and spread it across the postwar housing boom. The FHA’s 1938 Underwriting Manual instructed appraisers to look for “incompatible racial and social groups” near a property. It stated that “if a neighborhood is to retain stability, it is necessary that properties shall continue to be occupied by the same social and racial classes,” and warned that any change in racial composition “generally contributes to instability and a decline in values.”
This was official federal guidance, not a rogue practice. It routed FHA-backed mortgage money toward new, racially homogeneous subdivisions in St. Louis County and away from the city neighborhoods where Black families lived. White suburban buyers built equity with federally insured loans. Black city residents were denied access to the same credit. The underwriting manual stayed in use for decades, and the wealth gap it opened compounded every year it was in force.
Racial Covenants and Shelley v. Kraemer
When the 1916 ordinance fell, St. Louis developers and neighborhood associations turned to private contracts. Racial restrictive covenants were clauses written directly into property deeds that barred the sale or rental of a home to members of specific racial groups. They were recorded with the recorder of deeds and attached to the property permanently, binding every future owner.
A covenant signed on February 16, 1911 covering properties on Labadie Avenue between Taylor and Cora was typical. It ran for fifty years and barred “any person not of the Caucasian race” from living there. Developers wrote the same kind of restrictions into new subdivisions across the city and its growing suburbs through the first half of the twentieth century. Neighborhood associations watched for violations, and Missouri courts routinely issued injunctions to void sales that crossed racial lines.
That changed because of a house on Labadie Avenue. On August 11, 1945, J.D. and Ethel Lee Shelley bought a home on the street without knowing about the 1911 covenant. The neighboring Kraemers sued in Missouri state court to enforce it. The Missouri Supreme Court sided with the Kraemers, and the case reached the U.S. Supreme Court.
In 1948, a unanimous Court held that the covenants themselves were private agreements and did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment. But a state court order enforcing one was state action, and state action denying equal protection was unconstitutional. You could write anything you wanted into a deed. No judge could sign an order making it stick if the restriction was based on race.1Justia. Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1 (1948) The Shelleys kept their home. The covenant language stayed on thousands of St. Louis deeds, but courts could no longer enforce it.
Mill Creek Valley and Urban Renewal
Dismantling one tool of segregation did not stop the damage. In 1954, Mayor Raymond Tucker announced plans to demolish buildings across 454 acres in Mill Creek Valley, a neighborhood west of downtown. When the clearance began in February 1959, it displaced more than 20,000 residents. Ninety-five percent were Black.
Mill Creek Valley had suffered decades of disinvestment driven by redlining. Banks would not lend. Owners could not maintain buildings without credit. The resulting deterioration was then used to justify demolition as “slum clearance.” Displaced families had few places to go. Covenant language still sat on deeds in surrounding neighborhoods, private discrimination was still common, and many of those families ended up funneled into other crowded Black neighborhoods or into public housing projects like Pruitt-Igoe. The cleared land sat largely vacant for years and was eventually used for institutional expansion and highways rather than replacement housing.
Why the Delmar Divide Still Exists
The roughly ten-mile stretch of Delmar Boulevard still marks one of the starkest racial and economic divides in the country. The mechanism connecting that line to policies written eighty years ago is straightforward.
Homeownership is the primary wealth-building tool for most American families. Families denied mortgages in the 1940s and 1950s could not build equity. They could not pass equity to their children. Their children started from zero in neighborhoods where property values had been suppressed by decades of disinvestment. Families in green-rated suburbs, meanwhile, accumulated equity in homes that appreciated steadily with federally backed loans. Two or three generations of that gap produce the block-by-block inequality visible in St. Louis today. Neighborhoods rated D on the HOLC maps still show dramatically lower property values, lower homeownership rates, and lower household incomes than neighborhoods that received A or B grades during the same period.
What the Law Prohibits Today
Three federal statutes govern lending and housing discrimination now.
The Fair Housing Act of 1968 makes it illegal to refuse to sell or rent a home because of race, color, religion, sex, familial status, or national origin.2Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 42 USC 3604 – Discrimination in the Sale or Rental of Housing and Other Prohibited Practices A separate provision makes it unlawful for any lender to discriminate on those same grounds when making loans to purchase, improve, or maintain a home.3Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 42 USC 3605 – Discrimination in Residential Real Estate-Related Transactions The same statute outlaws steering (agents directing buyers toward or away from neighborhoods by race) and blockbusting (pressuring owners to sell cheaply by stoking fears about racial change). Civil penalties for violations now run up to $26,262 for a first offense and higher for repeat violators, and there is no cap on punitive damages when a case is filed in federal court.4eCFR. 24 CFR 180.671 – Assessing Civil Penalties for Fair Housing Act Violations
The Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 declares that banks have a “continuing and affirmative obligation” to meet the credit needs of the communities they are chartered in, including low- and moderate-income neighborhoods.5Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 12 USC 2901 – Congressional Findings and Statement of Purpose Federal regulators grade banks on CRA compliance and weigh those grades when a bank wants to merge, acquire a competitor, or open new branches. A poor rating can block growth plans.6Federal Reserve Board. Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) The CRA applies only to depository institutions. It does not cover independent mortgage companies, credit unions, or online lenders, which now originate a large share of home loans. In a city still carrying the geography redlining created, that gap matters.
The Equal Credit Opportunity Act extends anti-discrimination protection to all credit transactions, not just housing. It bars lenders from discriminating based on race, color, religion, national origin, sex, marital status, age, receipt of public assistance, or exercise of consumer protection rights.7Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 15 USC 1691 – Scope of Prohibition It covers credit cards, auto loans, and personal loans alongside mortgages. Modern lending discrimination tends to be subtler than drawing red lines: higher interest rates offered to equally qualified borrowers, loan officers who discourage applications from certain zip codes, algorithms that use proxies for race without naming it.
If You Believe You’ve Been Discriminated Against
You have two federal paths, and you can use both.
You can file a complaint with the Department of Housing and Urban Development within one year of the last discriminatory act. HUD assigns an investigator, notifies the party you are accusing, gathers evidence, and issues a written finding. If HUD finds reasonable cause, it files a formal charge, and both sides decide whether the case goes to federal court or to a HUD administrative law judge.8HUD. Learn About FHEOs Process to Report and Investigate Housing Discrimination
If the discrimination involves a mortgage lender, bank, or other financial company, you can also file with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The CFPB forwards your complaint to the company, which generally has 15 days to respond and up to 60 days to provide a final answer.9Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Submit a Complaint Filing with either agency does not stop you from filing a private lawsuit, which you have two years from the discriminatory act to bring.
Removing Covenant Language From a St. Louis Deed
Thousands of properties in St. Louis still carry racially restrictive language in their deeds. No homeowner is legally bound by that language. It has been unenforceable since 1948. Many owners want it struck from the record anyway.
The process depends on state law. Some states let homeowners file a simple form or affidavit with the recorder of deeds to remove discriminatory language. In states without a streamlined process, removal may require a court order. To check whether your deed contains covenant language, search the chain of title at your county recorder’s office; many jurisdictions now offer online access. A real estate attorney familiar with local records can guide the removal process.10Fannie Mae. Restrictive Covenants