![]() ![]() Two-thirds of people living in poverty live in western Duluth. More than three-quarters of the city’s Native and Black populations live on the west side. The disparities that exist today between the east and west sides of Duluth are clear reflections of those past policies, Wilson added.Īlmost two-thirds of Duluth homes built more than 75 years ago are in western Duluth. “And then that legacy is those neighborhoods were not invested in for decades.” ![]() ![]() Many of Duluth’s western neighborhoods were infamously “redlined,” either coded red for “hazardous” or yellow for “definitely declining.” They included descriptions such as “ occupied by many nationalities of the low income class, including negroes,“ and “ foreign industrial workers occupy the area, Italians predominating.”Įven people who were able to buy homes, Wilson said, couldn’t get loans to help maintain them. “They looked at neighborhoods through a very racist perspective,” said Duluth city planner Kathy Wilson, who’s researched redlining in Duluth. color-coded in red the neighborhoods that were considered the highest risk for lenders. The maps drawn by the federal Home Owners’ Loan Corp. That segregation was further cemented in the 1930s when the federal government evaluated the perceived lending risk in neighborhoods in more than 200 cities, including Duluth. Steel built to house employees, so many instead settled in neighborhoods farther west. They weren’t allowed to live in Morgan Park, the company town U.S. Louis River, and recruited African Americans from the South to work there. Racial segregation began to take root in the early 1900s when U.S. “So you get this wealthy, residential, eastern end of town, and the poor, blue-collar, industrial, lower-income folks on the west part of town,” said Dierckins, who wrote about the east-west divide in his book, “Duluth: An Urban Biography.” ![]() The city’s wealthier residents began migrating east, away from the pollution, where they built large homes and imposing mansions overlooking Lake Superior. Those early factories were powered by coal-fired generators that belched clouds of black smoke into the air. Those jobs lured low-income, immigrant laborers, who lived in nearby neighborhoods so they could walk to their jobs, said regional historian Tony Dierckins. The roots of Duluth’s east-west divide can be traced to the city’s industrial boom in the late 1800s, when lumber mills, grain elevators and factories sprouted up along the St. ![]()
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