Blocking Progress: Recovery of Rediscovered FHA Maps

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

The Federal Housing Administration (FHA) made maps for American cities from Real Property Inventories conducted by the Works Progress Administration from 1934 to the end of the decade. These maps aggregated data at the block level and seem to have played a role in the FHA’s mortgage insurance approval process. The most striking evidence is that many of the maps contain red lines dividing the cities by race. This project has collected high-quality scans of over 100 FHA block maps from the National Archives. While scholarly research has focused on the (in)famous HOLC maps over the past decade, the FHA maps have heretofore received little attention. Our digitization and analysis project aims to rectify this imbalance and gauge their relative importance through quantitative analysis. Through a combination of advanced image recognition techniques and human toil, we are recovering these information rich cartographic relics for use in urban research. More broadly, the maps illustrate the block by block effort made to divide and evaluate American cities by race during the height of the New Deal.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 137. New Data on the New Deal