This study highlights the long-term impacts of discriminatory housing practices in Tacoma, Washington.In the New Deal Era, a US federal program called the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) was established to support the housing industry following the Great Depression. One component of the program was a ranking system, which rated neighborhoods on a A-D scale, indicating how risky it would be to offer a home loan in that area. Unfortunately, wealthy, white neighborhoods were always given high, low-risk grades while poorer neighborhoods of color, especially Black neighborhoods, were given low, high-risk grades.

The map above shows portions of three selected neighborhoods in Tacoma. Each census tract's letter grade is noted alongside bivariate color coding that relates modern home valuation alongside life expectancy. For the most part, higher grading by the HOLC in the past is connected to greater life expectancies and home values. Lower historical grading is strongly connected to lower home values, but more moderate life expectancies.

It should be noted there are some tracts with low grades in the North End but moderate to high home values and life expectancies. This is likely due to Tobler's First Law of Geography, where phenomena closer to one another are more related to those distance from one another.