In recent years, the story of residential segregation and discrimination — and especially the practice of redlining — has gained well-deserved prominence in U.S. housing discourse. Equally important, the federal government has been directly implicated in the development and institutionalization of redlining and similar practices. A key early player in this history is the Home Owners Loan Corporation, or HOLC, which commissioned the infamous “residential security” maps that separated residential neighborhoods into four categories, from green (best) to red (worst), based in no small part on racist assumptions about Black residents and homeowners — this is the origin of the word “redlining.” But while HOLC unquestionably has culpability in the racial disparities of the U.S. housing market, Todd Michney argues that the connection between HOLC and the institutionalization of redlining isn’t as direct or uncomplicated as is usually claimed. He shares the findings of historical research into the early days of HOLC’s housing market rescue efforts, and casts doubt on the commonly-told story about the origins of redlining.

Show notes:

• Michney, T. M., & Winling, L. (2020). New perspectives on new deal housing policy: Explicating and mapping HOLC loans to African Americans. Journal of Urban History, 46(1), 150-180.
• Winling, L. C., & Michney, T. M. (2021). The roots of redlining: academic, governmental, and professional networks in the making of the new deal lending regime. Journal of American History, 108(1), 42-69.
• Michney, T. M. (2021). How the City Survey’s Redlining Maps Were Made: A Closer Look at HOLC’s Mortgagee Rehabilitation Division. Journal of Planning History, 15385132211013361.
• Michney, T. M. (2017). Surrogate Suburbs: Black upward mobility and neighborhood change in Cleveland, 1900–1980. UNC Press Books.
• Surrogate Suburbs bus tour route!
• Jackson, K. T. (1987). Crabgrass Frontier: The suburbanization of the United States. Oxford University Press.
• Hillier, A. E. (2003). Who Received Loans? Home Owners’ Loan Corporation lending and discrimination in Philadelphia in the 1930s. Journal of Planning history, 2(1), 3-24.
• Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America.
• Glock, J. E. (2021). The Dead Pledge: The Origins of the Mortgage Market and Federal Bailouts, 1913–1939. Columbia University Press.