Abstract
<jats:p>This research brief operationalizes the Spatial Echo—the proposition that the 1930s Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC) security maps did not merely record inequality but specified a durable spatial architecture that facially neutral institutions continue to execute through school finance. Using a Critical Geography of Race framework and a verified district panel for eight HOLC-mapped Michigan metropolitan counties, redlining exposure is measured directly through geographic overlay rather than proxied. Three findings emerge. First, historic redlining exposure is associated with lower tax-base capacity per pupil. Second, interdistrict student-aid transfers move substantial resources from the most redlined urban cores—Detroit, Flint, Pontiac, and Lansing—to insulated, never-redlined suburbs. Third, when fiscal distress is measured as the verified history of state intervention rather than a single year's balance, redlining exposure strongly predicts which districts required deficit elimination plans, emergency management, consent agreements, or dissolution. Together the results support reading the HOLC grading as design rather than residue: the original classification remains legible in contemporary school-district fiscal outcomes nearly a century later. The brief argues that remedies indexed to municipal boundaries or current balances will miss this pattern, and that interrupting the Echo requires mechanisms indexed to historical exposure and the documented history of intervention.</jats:p>