Redlining, a discriminatory lending practice that historically targeted Black Americans and other disadvantaged racial groups, has been illegal for decades. But research in the years since has found it’s still linked to environmental inequities and health disparities in impacted neighborhoods to this day.
UC Berkeley researchers looked into another facet of these impacts, finding that redlined neighborhoods see less biodiversity than wealthier ‘greenlined’ neighborhoods. In San Francisco and San Diego, for example, the report found greenlined neighborhoods had five to 10 times more species present than redlined neighborhoods.
CapRadio spoke with the report’s lead researcher Cesar Estien about what it means for a neighborhood to be ‘greenlined’ and how redlining created an environment where fewer species could flourish.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Interview Highlights
Going into this research, what did you already know about redlining’s impacts on neighborhoods today?
A lot of the literature and empirical work that has looked at redlining has focused on human health and environmental equality. So a lot of work on preterm births, asthma, COVID exposure, cancer risks, cardiovascular health — all of that is worse in these redlined neighborhoods.
And then for environmental quality, things like more oil and gas well sites, hotter areas, less green space, less canopy cover, more air pollution, more noise, in these redlined neighborhoods.
When I started the project, not a lot of work had been published around [its link to biodiversity]. There was just this theoretical linkage that my advisor and colleagues had proposed … that because of all these disturbances and environmental hazards, you would maybe expect less species richness.
When I was getting close to submitting it, a paper had come out of Los Angeles [showing] that in L.A., redlined neighborhoods have less birds and also less forest dependent birds. It was a really interesting case study of just Los Angeles and this one tax of birds. But we may expect … that different types of wildlife may be affected differently.
So it was really great to build off of that and not only look at different types of wildlife but also look at different types of city. If it’s true in Los Angeles, is it also true in Oakland? And is that true in San Francisco? Which all have very different types of built environments.
In the report, redlined neighborhoods are described as having much less biodiversity than ‘greenlined’ neighborhoods. What is ‘greenlining’?
We use the term ‘greenlining’ as the opposite of redlining. We think about redlining [as] a discriminatory practice that really concentrated or really removed a lot of resources from certain neighborhoods. And so the opposite of that is … greenlining, so the neighborhoods that were more favorable to the Federal Housing [Administration], local lenders, which are primarily white, wealthy neighborhoods. They got to have a lot of access to credit, to loans, and build up wealth accumulation and other investments that just increased neighborhood quality.
Instead of depriving neighborhood resources, we see the exact opposite. We see neighborhood resources being poured into these neighborhoods. So they have other things like better education, better health care, things like that.
Did your own experiences influence your approach?
Yeah, I think in a retroactive way, a little bit. Growing up, we didn't grow up in the wealthiest neighborhood and I went to school where I was definitely one of the less rich kids. And so I remember as a kid, going from my house, my neighborhood, to my friends’ neighborhoods and friends’ houses, which were bigger, a lot more trees. After learning [about] the connections between historical policies and contemporary policies and where trees are, or even a connection between trees and wealth and cities, it all makes sense in hindsight, connecting those dots.
My identity and those experiences definitely inform a lot of my approaches or the questions I ask. That’s a huge thing I center: Inequity in society and these differences in access to biodiversity and who gets to experience biodiversity, who gets to experience better environments, better quality neighborhoods.
What did you learn about the redlined neighborhoods in the cities you focused on in this research?
The data source that I use for this paper is iNaturalist, and that’s inherently driven by the people. People are deciding to download the app and deciding that they want to take a picture of this butterfly here or this bird here and report it. Because iNaturalist is a free platform, where someone is not necessarily told where to sample or how to sample, you have these biases for individuals. Maybe they really like a certain bird so they’re only sampling when they see that bird … so we want to control for all of that.
So after controlling for all of that, we find that there’s less species and that these areas have altered wildlife communities. In San Francisco, for example, in a redlined neighborhood you may only come across a pigeon or more of these urban type birds … whereas if you go maybe to the West Side, you see a lot more birds that are dependent on forests or more coastal birds, maybe more shoreline birds.
And something I find more interesting is we use that bias in the data to talk about, how are people encountering biodiversity? We look at the observations … to infer that people in these greenlined neighborhoods are encountering more species with less observations.
The way I like to visualize that is if I were to go on a 15 minute walk in my neighborhood [in Oakland], how many animals would I see compared to a 15 minute walk along the ports of Emeryville, compared to a 15-minute walk in the hills?
Did any of that surprise you?
I think, unfortunately, these results aren’t surprising, right? Because of what other literature has shown where these redlined neighborhoods have less vegetation, they have less canopy cover, they just have less potential habitat for wildlife.
What might solutions to this issue look like in redlined neighborhoods?
The most obvious and catch-all solution is always investment and more natural spaces for these areas that have been deprived of them. But I think the key is [doing that] with social safety nets in place.
A lot of times when we hear about gentrification or green gentrification … we’re thinking about a new green space that has been invested in, in a neighborhood that hasn’t had one. And then it causes a bunch of prices to rise, causes housing values to jump, and then the folks that live there can’t afford it and have to move. They don’t get to experience the green space that was built for the neighborhood in the first place.
Merging social justice with environmental justice is the key. So not just, okay, there's less species here, we should build green spaces, put more trees, find out ways to foster biodiversity but not really think about the social implications in terms of how that could lead to the displacement of folks. You circle back to the issue that was happening in the first place, where people are still being left out in terms of equitable access to nature and biodiversity.
Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly identified where Cesar Estien grew up. It has been corrected.
