House of Cards: Linking FHA and VA Borrowers to Full Count Census Records

• In Event: 40252 - Mechanisms of Segregation

Abstract

The Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and Veterans’ Administration (VA) mortgage programs played a key role in enabling the majority of Americans to become homeowners by the mid-20th century. While scholars have long argued that these programs’ beneficiaries were disproportionately white, evidence of the identities of these early borrowers is both scant and disaggregated. We fill this void by linking records from the Reconstruction Finance Corporation Mortgage Company (RFCMC) identifying 120,000 FHA-insured and VA-guaranteed loans from 1935 to 1947 to the 1940 and 1950 full-count Censuses. The unbalanced nature of the RFCMC set allows us to concentrate on particular geographies, programs, and periods. We find that the FHA and VA insured few Black borrowers. Additionally, we provide preliminary results showing that foreign-born Americans received FHA-insured and VA-guaranteed mortgages roughly in proportion with their population. Our results shed new light on the federal government’s role in racially discriminatory mortgage practices.

Authors

• Katherine A. Thomas, New York University

• Wenfei Xu, Columbia University

• Thomas Storrs, University of Virginia

• Jacob William Faber, New York University