Ep 15: The Legacy of Redlining with Jacob Faber

In the 1930s, in the midst of the Great Depression, the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) was created to protect households from foreclosure and in some cases repurchase homes they’d already lost. As a part of its efforts, HOLC created “residential security maps” to categorize neighborhoods by lending risk, with low-risk neighborhoods shaded in green and blue, and high-risk neighborhoods colored in yellow and red. These infamous maps are where we get the familiar term, “redlining,” and they helped institutionalize America’s racialized housing market. Jacob Faber, Associate Professor at New York University's Robert F. Wagner School of Public Service, joins us to discuss his fascinating new research into HOLC’s influence on racial segregation in the cities where it operated, and the persistence of its effects nearly 100 years after the agency was created.

Show notes:

• Faber, J. W. (2020). We built this: Consequences of new deal era intervention in America’s racial geography. American Sociological Review, 85(5), 739-775.
• Glotzer, P. (2020). How the suburbs were segregated: Developers and the business of exclusionary housing, 1890–1960. Columbia University Press.
• Redford, L. (2014). The Promise and Principles of Real Estate Development in an American Metropolis: Los Angeles 1903-1923. University of California, Los Angeles.
• Hoffman, J. S., Shandas, V., & Pendleton, N. (2020). The effects of historical housing policies on resident exposure to intra-urban heat: a study of 108 US urban areas. Climate, 8(1), 12.
• Slate, G. (2021). Freedom to Discriminate: How Realtors Conspired to Segregate Housing and Divide America. Heyday.
• Connolly, N. D. (2014). A world more concrete: real estate and the remaking of Jim Crow South Florida. University of Chicago Press.
• Hillier, A. E. (2003). Who received loans? Home Owners’ Loan Corporation lending and discrimination in Philadelphia in the 1930s. Journal of Planning history, 2(1), 3-24.
• Fishback, P. V., Rose, J., Snowden, K. A., & Storrs, T. (2021). New Evidence on Redlining by Federal Housing Programs in the 1930s (No. w29244). National Bureau of Economic Research.
• Aaronson, D., Faber, J., Hartley, D., Mazumder, B., & Sharkey, P. (2021). The long-run effects of the 1930s HOLC “redlining” maps on place-based measures of economic opportunity and socioeconomic success. Regional Science and Urban Economics, 86, 103622.
• Rothstein, R. (2017). The color of law: A forgotten history of how our government segregated America. Liveright Publishing.