Research library

What happened where you live

Harm was administered by address: a grade on a 1937 map, a clause in a deed, a block marked for clearance. These tools let you look it up for Philadelphia, a city with its own reparations task force and one of the deepest open-data catalogs in the country.

472
Philadelphia datasets catalogued, one page each with every resource link.
83
Flagged as high relevance to reparations research by keyword: deeds, assessments, evictions, policing, lead, schools, redlining.
329
Open a live map straight from the publisher's own endpoint.
Map of Philadelphia with the 1937 HOLC grades drawn as green, blue, yellow and red areas01

Look up an address

Type a street address or an owner's name. See the 1937 redlining grade, the assessment and deed history, and what public records show within a quarter mile.

Open the lookup 02

Dataset catalog

All 472 datasets, searchable and filtered by theme, relevance and whether a map is available. Each links to the source record and the publisher.

Browse the catalog 03

Redlining, then and now

What the Home Owners' Loan Corporation drew on Philadelphia in 1937, what it still predicts, and how to reproduce the analysis yourself.

Read the explainer 04

Philadelphia task force tracker

74 records on the Philadelphia Reparations Task Force: who sits on it, the legislation behind it, the reports it will cite, and the data it says it needs.

Open the tracker

The catalog by theme

A dataset can carry more than one theme, so the bars overlap. The darker segment is the share flagged as high relevance to reparations research. Tap a theme to open the catalog filtered to it.

Four questions the data can answer

Each path lists a handful of datasets in the order you would actually use them. Every link opens the dataset's page in this library, with a map where one exists.

Whose land is this?

Every parcel in Philadelphia has a recorded chain of owners. Start with the parcel, then the assessment history, then the deeds.

Where was harm drawn on a map?

Some of the most consequential decisions were literally boundaries. These layers show where they fell.

Where is displacement happening now?

Tax balances, vacancy, demolitions and code enforcement are the modern face of the same pressure.

What does the harm look like today?

Health, safety and schooling outcomes concentrate along the old lines. These are the datasets that show it.

Why this belongs on a site about micro reparations

The national argument about reparations can stay abstract forever. A deed cannot. When you know that the house you live in sat inside a red-graded area, or that the block was cleared for a university's expansion, or that the family who owned it lost it at a tax sale, the debt stops being a concept and becomes a specific thing with specific people on the other end of it.

That specificity is what makes micro reparations possible. It tells you whom to repair with, which neighborhood fund to stand behind, which displacement claim to support, and what to say when someone asks why. Philadelphia's own task force is doing this work at city scale; these tools let a person do it at the scale of one address.

A worked example

The Fels Institute's 2022 recompense report documents between 4,496 and more than 10,000 residents displaced from the Black Bottom in West Philadelphia between 1965 and 2000 by urban renewal that cleared the neighborhood for the University City Science Center. If you live, work or studied in University City, that is your address's history. The report proposes a specific program of repair. It is on the tracker.

Responsible use

  • Public records onlyName search covers property ownership fields and recorded deed transfers, the records relevant to family property history. It does not search police, court, voter, employee or complaint records for people's names.
  • Counts, not incidentsNeighborhood figures are counts within a quarter mile. The tools never show an individual incident tied to a person.
  • Don't publish peopleLooking up your own street is research. Posting a stranger's name and address is not. Keep what you find about others private.
  • Live data, your browserNothing is stored here. Records load from the City of Philadelphia's open data service and the publishers' own endpoints when you search.

Built from the OpenDataPhilly catalog (opendataphilly-jkan), Mapping Inequality at the University of Richmond, the City's open data service, and the U.S. Census Bureau. Relevance flags are keyword-based, not a judgment of any dataset. Catalog snapshot: November 8, 2026.