Designed to Fail: Redlining, Structural Disinvestment, and the Making of Black Urban Crime in Chicago and Newark

Abstract

This thesis argues that contemporary concentrations of crime in racially segregated urban neighborhoods are not products of cultural deficiency or individual pathology, but structurally produced outcomes of deliberate segregation-era policies. Drawing on the cases of Chicago, Illinois and Newark, New Jersey, the thesis traces how federal and local housing policies (including Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC) redlining maps, discriminatory mortgage underwriting, racially restrictive covenants, and urban renewal programs) systematically confined Black residents to disinvested neighborhoods. These policies did not merely reflect racial prejudice; they constructed durable spatial arrangements that concentrated poverty, restricted mobility, and generated the environmental conditions under which crime emerges and is subsequently over-policed. The thesis employs a mixed-method comparative design combining historical policy analysis, spatial mapping using digitized HOLC boundary data, and semi-structured interviews with community violence intervention practitioners. Chapter Three presents fourteen spatial maps and two gradient analyses across Chicago and Essex County, New Jersey, demonstrating that neighborhoods graded 'D' by HOLC appraisers in the 1930s exhibit measurably worse outcomes across every dimension in 2019 (including higher poverty rates, lower homeownership, shorter life expectancy, elevated violent crime, concentrated subsidized housing, food deserts, and higher proportions of Black residents) following a monotonic gradient from Grade A to Grade D that holds across both cities and every measured variable. Chapter Four draws on original interviews with staff at Chicago CRED and the Institute for Nonviolence Chicago to argue that community-based organizations represent the most effective and sustainable response to violence in these environments, possessing the place-based knowledge, social trust, and contextual expertise that law enforcement and centralized institutions have consistently failed to develop. The thesis concludes that crime in historically redlined neighborhoods is best understood as a policy-generated spatial outcome, and that the persistent underfunding of community-led violence prevention infrastructure constitutes not merely a programmatic oversight but a structural failure with measurable human and fiscal costs. Sustained, state-level investment in community organizations, not as supplements to law enforcement but as the primary architecture of public safety, is the most structurally responsive policy available to address violence whose roots lie in the built environment itself.