Flint's Redlining Map, Explained
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Flint was a company town at the height of the auto industry, and its neighborhoods filled with autoworkers who came north for the jobs. But not everyone who built those cars was allowed to build wealth from them. In the 1930s, federal "residential security" maps graded Flint block by block, and the north-side areas where many Black families lived were marked "hazardous" and shaded red.
The grade was not a neutral risk score. It was a signal to lenders, and it pulled mortgages and investment away from those neighborhoods for decades. When a community cannot get loans, it cannot build equity, repair homes, or attract the businesses that follow rooftops. The disinvestment compounded, concentrating in the very neighborhoods the map had circled, long before the phrase "the water crisis" ever entered the national vocabulary.
The REDLINE Collection prints Flint's real HOLC map on apparel so that history has a face and a place. It turns an archived government document into something you can wear, point to, and explain, which is how a hard history becomes a conversation instead of a footnote.
We commit 10% of every REDLINE sale to equitable housing programs in Michigan. Wear the map. Remember why the lines were drawn.