From the New York Times:
“You can kill a man with an apartment as with an ax.” The same could probably be said about a map: 1930s residential security maps (through redlining) cut off entire neighborhoods from investment, rigging the game against those neighborhoods’ mainly nonwhite residents.
The fact that life expectancy in Baltimore’s poorest ZIP codes is about 20 years shorter than in the richest ones, Ms. Theodore says, “is certainly not the result of ‘bad choices’ on the part of poorer residents, but is the direct result of earlier planning decisions. So, yes, space matters, and sometimes it is being used as a weapon.”
In Baltimore, “bad choices” don’t kill, maps do:
