Scholarship on the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) has typically focused on this New Deal housing agency’s invention of redlining, with dire effects from this legacy of racial, ethnic, and class bias for the trajectories of urban, and especially African American neighborhoods. However, HOLC did not embark on its now infamous mapping project until after it had issued all its emergency refinancing loans to the nation’s struggling homeowners. We examine the racial logic of HOLC’s local operations and its lending record to black applicants during the agency’s initial 1933-1935 “rescue” phase, finding black access to its loans to have been far more extensive than anyone has assumed. Yet, even though HOLC did loan to African Americans, it did so in ways that reinforced racial segregation—and with the objective of replenishing the working capital of the overwhelmingly white-owned building and loans that held the mortgages on most black-owned homes.
In the years after World War II, the University of Chicago (U of C) enjoyed a position as a leader in higher education with the ability to help provide for national economic growth and global security through professional education and scientific research. It also faced a dramatically changing set of neighborhood conditions that threatened its leadership status. University administrators pursued an ambitious agenda of redevelopment and neighborhood management in South East Chicago in order to fight a wave of racial transition. In doing so, the university formed and led a coalition of top urban universities that shared real estate practices and helped create federal policy that made universities integral parts of urban renewal initiatives in the 1960s. This effort to create, manage, and redevelop housing, including student housing, provoked strident opposition from the student body and set the emerging New Left against the university in an early salvo of the student movement.
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