Tabulating Home Owners’ Loan Corporation area description sheet data

Abstract

In the late 1930s, an agency of the United States government called the “Home Owners’ Loan Corporation” (HOLC) graded thousands of urban neighborhoods on the perceived risk they posed to property owners. To make these determinations, HOLC field agents collected vast amounts of socioeconomic, demographic, and housing data about these places and presented their findings in an impressive set of maps. While these “redlining” maps have received considerable academic and media attention, the neighborhood-level race, housing, and socioeconomic data used to assign risk grades—available for most cities in their “area description” sheets—remain virtually unusable. Correcting this issue, I convert eight of the most consequential variables from 129 cities into an accessible and analyzable tabular format. These include the Black population percentage, “foreign-born” population percentage and group, family income, occupation class, average building age, home repair status, and mortgage availability. This data product will allow researchers to gain a more complete picture of the HOLC’s City Survey program, and it will provide a valuable new source of historical socio-demographic data at the neighborhood level.

Historical red-lining is associated with fossil fuel power plant siting and present-day inequalities in air pollutant emissions

“…City population size estimates for 1940 were obtained from the Mapping Inequality Project. Baseline socioeconomic and demographic characteristics of HOLC neighbourhoods were obtained from Markley, who extracted and digitized them from HOLC area description sheets 9 . These included the following variables: percent foreign born, percent Black, median household income (in dollars), median building age (in years) and three five-category ordinal variables: occupation, repair status of properties and mortgage availability.…”

“…richmond.edu/panorama/red-lining/), the US Census Bureau 2020 Census (https://data.census.gov/), US Energy Information Administration Form 860 (https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/eia860/) and Data Atlas (https://atlas.eia.gov/datasets/power-plants-1), US Environmental Protection Agency Emissions & Generation Resource Integrated Database (eGRID) (https://www.epa.gov/egrid), North American Land Data Assimilation System monthly primary forcing data (NLDAS_FORA0125_M) (https://daac.gsfc.nasa.gov/datasets/NLDAS_ FORA0125_M_002/summary?keywords=NLDAS_FORA0125_M_002) and ref. 9 .…”

“…The practice became known as 'red-lining' because of the red colour given to D-graded neighbourhoods with the highest perceived investment risk. The maps reflected prevailing racist beliefs in the market value of integrated neighbourhoods such that communities with Black, East Asian, Filipino and foreign-born residents received poorer grades, while A-grade neighbourhoods appear to have been almost exclusively made up of White, US-born residents 9 . Through their codification of racist ideologies about value in the residential housing market, the HOLC maps are thought to have deepened racial residential segregation already enforced via racially restrictive deed covenants, zoning, block busting and violence and contributed to the exclusion of the construction of the power plant dataset.…”

Racialized Hazardous Space: A Critical Race Urban-Environmental Sociology of Residential Security in the Depression Era

“…Likewise, the HOLC RSS primary data are available online for most surveyed U.S. cities in the "Mapping Inequality" archive (Nelson et al 2022). Markley (2023) has also released coded HOLC RSS data in tabular and spatial files for a subset of 129 U.S. cities. The variables released by Markley (2023) tap various components of the CRUES model of HOLC hazardous grade assignment, except for environmental hazards.…”

Redlining has led to increasing rates of nephrolithiasis in minoritized populations: a hypothesis

“…Neighborhoods were assigned grades in the 1930s by regarding the perceived risk related to mortgage lenders and property investors: A (''best''), B (''still desirable''), C (''declining''), and D (''hazardous'') [30]. Lower grades were associated with the presence of more minoritized people including Black, East Asian, Filipino, and foreign-born residents.…”