As I walked along the border of the 1938 Red Line Map, I collected soil samples from neighborhoods I explored. Soil is a way of representing the land – good soil yields a plentiful harvest. Perhaps it’s also a way of memorializing the lives of people who struggle to maintain a presence in this city in areas that were considered dangerous and abandoned by the city government officials that were supposed to maintain them. At the end of the day, redlining is about inequitable distribution of resources and intentional neglect of the neighborhoods based on racist notions of who is deserving and who is not. This is true even though people in those communities worked and paid taxes like everyone else. It’s about the way capitalism works and the way we chose to use the land – buy low, sell high.  Capitalism encourages artificial depression of housing prices and neighborhood valuation until profits can be made in the future.

History is replete with irony, as the most sought after areas in Brooklyn today were once redlined and considered undesirable.

Who gets to stay and who must leave? Why?