The Grand Rapids Redlining Map, and Why It's on a Shirt
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Most people in Grand Rapids have never seen the map that helped decide their city's future. In the late 1930s, the federal Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC) sent surveyors to grade neighborhoods across the country for mortgage risk. In practice, the grade that mattered most was race. Blocks on the southeast side, where most of the city's Black residents lived, were colored red and marked "hazardous," a label that told banks not to lend there.
That color coding did exactly what it was designed to do. It steered home loans, insurance, and investment toward white neighborhoods and away from Black ones. Homeownership is how most American families build wealth and pass it to the next generation, so cutting a community off from mortgages cut it off from that ladder. Decades later, the lines drawn on that map still track with gaps in home values, investment, and opportunity across Grand Rapids.
The REDLINE Collection puts the actual Grand Rapids HOLC map on a shirt so the history stays in view instead of buried in an archive. It is not decoration. It is a document, worn on purpose, that starts the conversation most of us were never invited into at school.
We commit 10% of every REDLINE sale to equitable housing programs in Michigan, because the harm was about housing, so the response should be too.