The HOLC and Residential Security Maps

The Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) was a New Deal agency that helped more than a million struggling homeowners with their financing between 1933 and 1936. It also sought to improve the way in which real estate was appraised and to standardize the process for granting mortgage loans. To do this, the HOLC created 239 “residential security maps” that documented the mortgage lending risk assigned to different American cities and neighborhoods within those cities. HOLC maps were accompanied by area descriptions that predicted neighborhood trends and paid particular attention to the racial and ethnic, or immigrant, composition. Because of the way in which the HOLC assigned risk to racial and ethnic neighborhoods, nearly all the financing went to white homeowners.

The term redlining comes from the red lines on HOLC residential security maps that identified mostly-Black neighborhoods as “hazardous.” In practice, redlining was a form of racial discrimination, where banks and insurance companies refused or limited loans, mortgages, and/or insurance coverage within redlined communities, regardless of the residents’ qualifications or creditworthiness.

Take Notes

Analyze the map and read the Area Description document to answer the questions that follow.