Historic Redlining
This indicator reports the percentage of the population living in neighborhoods identified as “hazardous” by the federal government in a practice referred to as “redlining.” Individuals living in these redlined neighborhoods were unable to access low interest/low down payment mortgages underwritten by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). A series of maps prepared by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) between 1935 and 1940 provide the most comprehensive data on redlining practices in the US, with data available for over 200 cities and metro areas.
Source
Source Description
Meier, Helen C.S., and Mitchell, Bruce C. . Historic Redlining Scores for 2010 and 2020 US Census Tracts. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2021-10-15. https://doi.org/10.3886/E141121V2
Methodology
This dataset contains information information on historic redlining. This data was accessed from the University of Michigan OpenICPSR archives. The source information is as follows:
The Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) was a U.S. federal agency that graded mortgage investment risk of neighborhoods across the U.S. between 1935 and 1940. HOLC residential security maps standardized neighborhood risk appraisal methods that included race and ethnicity, pioneering the institutional logic of residential “redlining.” The Mapping Inequality Project digitized the HOLC mortgage security risk maps from the 1930s. We overlaid the HOLC maps with 2010 and 2020 census tracts for 142 cities across the U.S. using ArcGIS and determined the proportion of HOLC residential security grades contained within the boundaries. We assigned a numerical value to each HOLC risk category as follows: 1 for “A” grade, 2 for “B” grade, 3 for “C” grade, and 4 for “D” grade. We calculated a historic redlining score from the summed proportion of HOLC residential security grades multiplied by a weighting factor based on area within each census tract. A higher score means greater redlining of the census tract. Continuous historic redlining score, assessing the degree of “redlining,” as well as 4 equal interval divisions of redlining, can be linked to existing data sources by census tract identifier allowing for one form of structural racism in the housing market to be assessed with a variety of outcomes. The 2010 files are set to census 2010 tract boundaries. The 2020 files use the new census 2020 tract boundaries, reflecting the increase in the number of tracts from 12,888 in 2010, to 13,488 in 2020. Use the 2010 HRS with decennial census 2010 or ACS 2010-2019 data. As of publication (10/15/2020) decennial census 2020 data for the P1 (population) and H1 (housing) files are available from census.
Citation:Meier, Helen C.S., and Mitchell, Bruce C. . Historic Redlining Scores for 2010 and 2020 US Census Tracts. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2021-10-15. https://doi.org/10.3886/E141121V2
For more information, please visit OPENICPSR or Mapping Inequality.
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