ABSTRACT
Colloquial and scholarly accounts suggest that street gangs in the United States are an epiphenomenon of deindustrialization and restructuring in the 1970s. By taking a critical, historical approach to gangs in Los Angeles, we argue that the neighborhood aspects of gang formation have their origins much earlier, in local, state-level, and federal policy surrounding housing in particular. Through case studies in South Central Los Angeles and LA’s San Fernando Valley, we examine how the categorization of neighborhoods by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) in the late 1930s gave rise to the formation of disenfranchised urban spaces that would become ripe for gang formation. Using HOLC maps, documentation from Housing Authority slum clearance and public housing projects, and more recent gang injunction maps, we analyze the geographic durability of neighborhood stigma. Residential patterns in the first half of the 20th century helped to create the ghettoization in which gangs became entrenched, demonstrating how inequality is embedded in cartographic practice. Because segregation and entrenched poverty are key legacies of public-private decisions surrounding bank lending and real estate policy, the development of gang neighborhoods must be reexamined as a key outcome of the housing-related cartographic practices beginning in New Deal America.
