Beyond the Red Lines: New Directions in the Study of Housing Policy and Racial Inequality

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

A wealth of recent research from across the social sciences has explored the long-term consequences of New Deal housing policies (e.g., redlining) on contemporary racial and spatial inequalities. This panel brings together scholars conducting innovative research with heretofore unstudied data to challenge existing theories about the impacts of these policies and move the field forward. Specifically, these papers present novel analyses of the infamous Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) residential security maps as well as evidence encouraging researchers to shift focus away from HOLC and towards the much larger–and likely more discriminatory–homeownership programs of the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and Veterans’ Administration (VA). Together, this panel offers a more holistic and nuanced picture of how unprecedented federal interventions into the housing market created a segregated and stratified homeownership society.

Policy Area

• Housing, Community Development, and Urban Policy

Secondary Policy Area

• Social Equity and Race

Chair

• Jacob William William Faber, New York University

Discussant

• Michael C Lens, University of California - Los Angeles

Organizer

• Jacob William William Faber, New York University

Individual Presentations

• The racial differentiation of space, and the spatial differentiation of carbon intensity of physical well-being - Presenting Author: Patrick Trent Greiner, University of Washington

• The Intergenerational Effects of WW2 G.I. Bill Eligibility on White-Black Homeownership, Wealth, and Inheritance Disparities - Presenting Author: Raheem Hanifa, Princeton University

• Towards A Better Measurement of Redlining: Digitizing the Federal Housing Administration’s Real Property Survey Maps - Presenting Author: Wenfei Xu, University of California, Santa Barbara

• The Geography of Exclusion: Explaining state-level racial disparities in FHA and VA lending - Presenting Author: Katherine Anne Thomas, New York University