House of Cards: Digitizing the rise of the American homeownership society

Katherine Thomas, NYU
Thomas Storrs, University of Virginia
Wenfei Xu, Cornell University
Jacob W. Faber, New York University (NYU)

The Reconstruction Finance Corporation Mortgage Company (RFCMC) bought and sold about 150,000 FHA-insured and VA-guaranteed mortgages between 1935 and 1947. The FHA insured mortgages on new and existing homes with the twin goals of reducing construction unemployment and reforming the mortgage market. The VA guaranteed mortgages as a benefit for returning veterans after WWII. Both programs played a racially disparate role in the rise of American homeownership and still exist today. A record of each loan remains on an index card. We digitized these documents. The process included novel OCR and machine learning methods that synthesize efforts between computers and humans. The resulting dataset offers extraordinary breadth and granularity in the federal government’s selective credit programs and is orders of magnitude larger than any other extant set of borrower and lender information on these programs from this era. This presentation will detail why the RFCMC existed, how we digitized the index cards, some preliminary results, and plans for future uses.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 137. New Data on the New Deal