Tabulating HOLC Area Description Sheet Data
In the 1930s, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) oversaw a massive federal program that graded thousands of urban neighborhoods. The precise aims of this infamous program are still disputed, but the grading criteria were almost certainly devised to convey the level of risk each area posed to property investors. The Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond has graciously digitized the maps and field notes produced by the HOLC and have made them freely available to the public. While these “redlining” maps have received considerable academic and media attention, the field notes used to assign risk grades—available for most cities in their “area description sheets”—remain virtually unusable for most multi-city analyses. Addressing this problem, I convert three of the most consequential variables from the description sheets for 129 cities into an accessible and analyzable tabular format. These include the average building age, Black population percentage, and “foreign-born” population percentage. In addition, I organize the description sheets into three semi-compatible tables, assisting future researchers incorporate other HOLC field note variables into their projects.