March 2023

Missing Pieces in the Puzzle: Leveraging Untapped Archival Data to Connect New Deal Housing Policies to Racial and Spatial Inequality

Jacob Faber, Kate Thomas, Thomas Storrs, and I received a $199,681 Russell Sage Foundation grant to look beyond redlining at how FHA and VA mortgage activity shaped contemporary racial inequality in housing, wealth, and neighborhood attainment.

Jacob Faber (NYU), Kate Thomas, Thomas Storrs, and I were awarded $199,681 from the Russell Sage Foundation in March 2023 for "Missing Pieces in the Puzzle: Leveraging Untapped Archival Data to Connect New Deal Housing Policies to Racial and Spatial Inequality." Most of the current scholarship on New Deal-era housing focuses on the HOLC's redlining maps and their long-run link to segregation and housing disparities. We want to broaden the lens to the FHA and Veterans Administration — programs that were doing enormous mortgage volume alongside HOLC but whose records are less well studied. Using archival materials from the National Archives, including Reconstruction Finance Corporation Mortgage Company loan records and Paid Loan Case Files, we're rebuilding the empirical record so we can trace how these federal programs shaped contemporary racial inequality across neighborhood attainment, wealth building, and housing opportunity.