History and Policies of the Home Owners' Loan Corporation. C. Lowell Harriss

Homer Hoyt

doi:10.1086/257305

Abstract P873: Structural Racism in Columbus, Ohio Associated With Stroke Prevalence

Stroke ◽

10.1161/str.52.suppl_1.p873 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 52 (Suppl_1) ◽

Author(s):

Jeffrey J Wing ◽

Emily E Lynch ◽

Sarah E Laurent ◽

Bruce C Mitchell ◽

Jason Richardson ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Census Tract ◽

Sociodemographic Factors ◽

Structural Racism ◽

Stroke Outcomes ◽

Census Tracts ◽

Census Tract Level ◽

Stroke Prevalence ◽

Level Information ◽

Fundamental Cause ◽

Loan Corporation

Introduction: Racial disparities exist in stroke and stroke outcomes. However, the fundamental cause for these disparities are not biological differences, but structural racism. Using the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) ‘redlining’ scores, as indicator of structural lending practices from middle of the last century, we hypothesize that census tracts with high historic redlining are associated with higher stroke prevalence. Methods: Weighted historic redlining scores (HRS) were calculated using the proportion of 1930s HOLC residential security grades contained within 2010 census tract boundaries of Columbus, Ohio. Stroke prevalence (adults >=18) was obtained at the census tract-level from the CDC’s 500 Cities Project. Sociodemographic factors, as measured by census tract level information (American Community Survey 2014-2018), were considered mediators in the causal association between historic redlining (measured in 1936) and stroke prevalence (measured in 2017) and were not controlled for in regression analysis. The functional form of the association was non-linear, so stroke prevalence within quartiles of the HRS were compared using linear regression instead of a continuous score. Results: Higher HRS, representing greater redlining, were associated with greater prevalence of stroke when comparing the highest to the lowest quartile of HRS (Figure). Census tracts in the highest quartile of HRS had 1.48% higher stroke prevalence compared to those in the lowest quartile (95% CI: 0.23-2.74). No other interquartile differences were observed. Conclusions: Historic redlining practices are a form of structural racism that established geographic systems of disadvantage and consequently, poor health outcomes. Our findings demonstrate disparate stroke prevalence by degree of historic redlining in census tracts across Columbus, Ohio. While ecologic, this study demonstrates the need to acknowledge that racism, not race, drive stroke disparities.

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The Value of Exclusion: Chasing Scarcity through Social Exclusion in Early Twentieth Century Atlanta

Human Geography ◽

10.1177/194277861600900105 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 9 (1) ◽

pp. 46-67

Author(s):

Jason Rhodes

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Social Exclusion ◽

City Planning ◽

Property Values ◽

Rational Approach ◽

Residential Home ◽

American City ◽

Suburban History ◽

Loan Corporation ◽

The Impact

In recent decades, a powerful narrative has taken shape which explores the impact of federal housing policies in shaping the highly racialized geography of poverty and privilege which forms the landscape of today's American city. Called the “New Suburban History,” it documents the racial discrimination written into the subsidized home loan policies of the federal government after WWII, based upon the assumption that property values depended upon the maintenance of neighborhood homogeneity on the basis of race and class. The discussion launched by the New Suburban History has focused almost exclusively on the effects of such policies: by lavishing neighborhoods comprised exclusively of white homeowners with federal subsidies, while targeting the neighborhoods of non-whites and renters for red-lining, these programs, it is argued, became self-fulfilling prophecies of neighborhood growth and decline. Neglected in this discussion, however, is a rigorous examination of the roots of the assumption that the value of the single-family residential home depended upon practices of social exclusion designed to “protect” it from physical proximity to non-whites and renters. The guiding assumption, occasionally made explicit, is that racism precluded a more rational approach to the assessment of property values. This paper argues that there was nothing irrational about the regulations developed to protect urban property values in the first decades of the twentieth century. These regulations explicitly sought to boost and maintain real estate values by means of artificial limitations placed on the supply of urban land, an approach which ensured that segments of the population would benefit from the scarcity-induced rise in prices, while others faced exclusion in the process of effecting it. The development of these regulations, and the crisis narratives employed to justify them, is traced here from the municipal zoning framework developed at the National Conference on City Planning to its implementation in New York City in 1916 and Atlanta in 1922. The paper concludes with an analysis of the 1938 Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) “residential security map” of Atlanta, which assigned grades to the city's neighborhoods on the basis of their place in the 1922 zoning scheme, which essentially knew two categories, “exclusive” and “excluded.” Against the standard narrative, which holds that racism distorted conceptions of property values in the twentieth century American city, what is argued here is that the institution of value, and the social categories of privilege and exclusion which it requires, has fundamentally shaped our categories of race.

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

Journal of Urban History ◽

10.1177/0096144218819429 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 46 (1) ◽

pp. 150-180 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Todd M. Michney ◽

LaDale Winling

Keyword(s):

African American ◽

African Americans ◽

Housing Policy ◽

New Deal ◽

Racial Segregation ◽

Working Capital ◽

Class Bias ◽

Loan Corporation ◽

Racial Ethnic

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.

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