Tabulated HOLC Area Description Sheet Data
Item Information
- Title:
- Tabulated HOLC Area Description Sheet Data
- Description:
-
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 mortgage lenders and property investors. 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 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.
- Creator:
- Scott Markley
- Date:
-
January 12, 2022
- Format:
-
Data sets
- Genre:
-
Geospatial data
Polygon data
- Location:
- Boston Public Library
- Collection (local):
-
GIS Data Sets
- Subjects:
-
Discrimination in mortgage loans
Redlining
Discrimination in housing
1937–1940
- Places:
-
United States
- Permalink:
- https://ark-dc3dev.bpl.org/ark:/50959/dr26zk786
- Terms of Use:
-
Under copyright.
This work is licensed for use under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY).
