Beyond Redlining: HOLC Spaces Development in Los Angeles County

CNK Director Paul Ong and researchers recently published a research project at the UCLA Ziman Real Estate, through the Rosalinde and Gilbert Research Program. The project explores the legacy of the Home Owners Loan Corporation’s (HOLC) redlining practices on urban development in the context of Los Angeles. The project draws upon multiple data sources to compare the development of graded and ungraded HOLC spaces, investigating whether these findings support the redlining-legacy-hypothesis.

Tremendous literature has documented that redlining, a practice of relating marginalized neighborhoods as risky for mortgage lending, contributed to today’s geography of inequality along class and racial lines.

“The results show that the ungraded places became racially and socioeconomically stratified even in the absence of redlining (HOLC grading). This indicates that there are fundamental societal processes that produce and reproduce spatialized inequality. Again, this is not to deny the redlining legacy. Instead, one plausible reinterpretation is that HOLC tends to perpetuate the pattern of inequality among older neighborhoods, thus significantly anchoring the geographic locations of marginalized and privileged communities and populations,” CNK team concludes.

Read the article here: Redlining and Beyond: Development Within and Outside HOLC Spaces in Los Angeles County