Examining The Boundaries of Map-Based Research

Since both of my projects this summer are centered around mapping, this assignment was pretty easy to complete.

On  the HFA side, here are two of my maps showing the different themes of active/future campaigns within the different HFA member groups based on city and the number of tenant unions being supported by each groups. One obvious boundary within these representations is that while this aims to illustrate the land and housing movement, it can only depict a small subset of a much larger movement (since not every organization concerned with this work is an HFA member).

While I’ve spent more of my time working with the HFA data, I’d certainly agree that my Baltimore maps are far more visually compelling and informative than those created from the member census. City government officials have long defended prioritizing the development of large-scale commercial projects for their potential to breathe life back into Baltimore’s economy, but this particular map calls into question whether this energy might be better spent elsewhere.

  

The heatmap portion pulls from a live dataset of the city’s vacant buildings provided by the Housing Authority of Baltimore City via Open Baltimore, populated by nearly 2,000 buildings with 2018 eviction notice dates. As predicted, I found that a majority of the vacancies were clustered in East and West Baltimore, home to the city’s poorest neighborhoods.

 

This deterioration is by design, with roots stretching back to redlining policies instituted over a century ago (ever ahead of the curve, Baltimore became the first city to practice racial zoning in 1910) that segregated black residents into lower grade, “undesirable” neighborhoods.

 

Due to continued disinvestment, these zones continue to predict various economic, academic, and health outcomes decades later, with neighborhoods once placed in the lower grades experiencing lower rates of homeownership and college participation and higher poverty and mortality rates. In another version of my map, which layers the redlining zones from the 1937 Home Owners’ Loan Corporation map, one can see that the places with the most vacancies line up perfectly with the red and yellow (higher risk) zones.

While half of this particular map tells the story of where the city’s investment is most needed, the other half, which displays the past 3 years’ worth of commercial, residential, and mixed use development projects (via the Econview Project Data), shows where it’s actually been going. Aside from the fact that a majority of these points are collected around the Inner Harbor rather than the surrounding former redlined neighborhoods, very few of these projects have been dedicated towards housing, let alone affordable units that could help address the trends in East/West Baltimore.

On both ends of my work, that human element has still yet to be fully realized. I have the data, but I don’t have the voices which gives life to this issue. A dot on a map can’t illustrate the work groups have put into supporting their tenant unions, or the circumstances that motivated people to organize for development without displacement. A heatmap can’t give voice to the pain felt by those who have been evicted from the only homes they’ve ever known, just like brightly-colored shapes fail to encapsulate how decades of disinvestment have left those living within these red and yellow boundaries at a severe disadvantage and how they’re rebuilding without the help of those elected to supposedly bring about this change. The current iterations of my maps flatten experiences which are inherently complex.

That being said, I am taking steps to make these maps more representative of the populations they illustrate. On the HFA side, I will be able to more easily reach this goal once 1) the Renter Power assembly’s documentation team finishes typing up all of the notes written by each group on the physical map, 2) we’re able to set up our crowdsourced campaign map with different types of audio/visual media, and 3) (a more long-term goal similar to the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project’s “Narratives of Displacement” oral history map) once we conduct brief interviews with organizers in HFA’s member groups and other relevant parties. On the other end of my research, I’m looking to collect all of my research on Baltimore into an ArcGIS Story Map that is better equipped to help others make sense of the hard data, the historical context, and modern efforts to resist as a cohesive unit. As part of this, I’m looking to interview a member of the Baltimore Housing Roundtable that I met at the HFA assembly to speak towards the opportunities for community-based development that they’ve set in motion over the past few years (especially important since much of the data I’ve collected measures the city government’s negligence rather than efforts to rebuild), but I’d also love to speak with more people within East and West Baltimore who have long felt the legacy of redlining and are working to reverse their effects.