New Perspectives on New Deal Housing Policy: Explicating and Mapping HOLC Loans to African Americans

Abstract

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.