The Home Owners’ Loan Corporation City Survey Map and Neighborhood Change in Charlotte, North Carolina: 1940–1960

Abstract Viewing the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) City Survey map of Charlotte, North Carolina, as a proxy for Depression-era redlining practices, this article explores relationships between the map’s differently graded areas and demographic and housing change from 1940 through 1960. Archival research indicates that the HOLC map’s delineation of differently graded areas reflected an established pattern of redlining in the city, a pattern subsequently reinforced by the Federal Housing Administration’s (FHA) underwriting activities. Using an ordinary least squares (OLS) model and hotspot analysis, we find that areas given a D-grade became relatively more populated by African-American households and households paying higher rents for housing of decreased quality, and that there was more spatial clustering of these characteristics in D-graded areas over time. Using postwar FHA Charlotte housing market analyses, we interpret our findings as indicating that the neighborhood biases of lenders, as recorded by the HOLC maps, contributed to increasing differences between neighborhoods in this period, foreshadowing the relationships that other studies have detected between HOLC map boundaries and modern-day socioeconomic and environmental disparities.