Urban population characteristics and their correlation with historic discriminatory housing practices

Abstract

Racial discrimination by housing and lending institutions occurs worldwide. In the United States, it was legal and widely practiced well into the 1960s and has persisted in varying forms since. The Home Owner's Loan Corporation (HOLC) was one of many institutions engaging in racially discriminatory practices and created neighborhood appraisal maps in the 1930s based in part on race, ethnicity, and economic class of a neighborhood's residents. Using these HOLC neighborhood boundaries, we compared 12 present day population characteristics including health, employment, education, and income measures in each of the four HOLC neighborhood ratings across 14 U.S. cities. We used population-weighted logistic regression for paired data comparison and unsupervised learning techniques to uncover the consistency between HOLC evaluations and today's socio-economic and health outcomes. While existing literature focuses on case studies of particular cities and outcomes, we took a broad view and found consistent relationships over our study's cities and variables with few exceptions. Though there are many factors that contribute to continued inequality in a particular area, this study demonstrates that socio-economic and health inequality measured across numerous indicators continues to align with historic discriminatory housing boundaries.