During the late 1930s, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) developed a series of area descriptions with color-coded maps of cities that summarized mortgage lending risk. We analyze the maps to explain the oft-noted fact that black neighborhoods overwhelmingly received the lowest rating. Our results suggest that racial bias in the construction of the HOLC maps can explain at most 4 to 20 percent of the observed concentration of black households in the lowest-rated zones. We also provide evidence that the Federal Housing Administration had its own mapping strategies when evaluating mortgages and relied relatively little on the HOLC maps.

The American Civil War fractured communities in border states where families who would eventually support the Union or the Confederacy lived together prior to the conflict. We study the subsequent migration choices of Civil War veterans and their families using a unique longitudinal dataset covering enlistees from the border state of Kentucky. Nearly half of surviving Kentucky veterans moved to a new county between 1860 and 1880. We find strong evidence of sorting along ideological dimensions for veterans from both sides of the conflict. However, we find limited evidence of a positive economic return to these relocation decisions.