Justin Murphy

@citizenmurphy

In the late 1930s, the federal Home Owners' Loan Corp. (HOLC) had the powerful responsibility of grading neighborhoods across the country to decide whether home mortgage refinancing there would be insured by the government.

Now, HOLC's 1939 assessments of neighborhoods in and around Rochester have become available online, part of a massive digitization effort called "Mapping Inequality." by four universities.

The site includes neighborhood-level maps and assessments of more than 150 cities in total; documents that were not easily accessible until now.

The maps show how redlining worked in communities across the country, as neighborhoods with black or immigrant residents were systematically barred from loan insurance.

The neighborhoods that HOLC judged most severely in Rochester; remain at the epicenter of the city's 21st century crisis of concentrated poverty.

The districts immediately to the southwest and northeast of downtown Rochester — what is known today as the Crescent, where poverty and its ills are most concentrated — were labeled "hazardous," by the HOLC in 1939; blocking most federally-backed investment there.

►Whatever happened to ... the Pythodd Club?

Of Rochester's Corn Hill neighborhood, for example, it reported: "Ten years ago, this was a section of beautiful old homes. Some still remain — massive structures and still handsome."

Unfortunately for the mostly black residents of Corn Hill, HOLC had determined that much had changed over a decade.

"Negroes have come into the area and today it is the poorest section of the entire city," HOLC wrote in its description of the neighborhood. "Pride of ownership is lacking. ... The most that can be said for (the neighborhood) is that it is convenient."

When an assessment like that of the Corn Hill district comes from a federal lending agency — tasked with helping Depression-era homeowners refinance their mortgages — the prophesy tends to be self-fulfilling.

"If (the government) isn’t letting me buy, how am I ever going to get an asset? How am I ever going to build wealth?" asked Ruhi Maker, a housing attorney with Empire Justice Center. "These decisions made by the government to redline are still playing out."

Most of the rest of the city earned the marginally higher rating of "definitely declining." A swath containing much of the South Wedge and Highland Park neighborhoods, for instance, was criticized for its "relatively small and quite unattractive working-men's homes."

"Pride of ownership is relatively low," the assessors wrote. "In the future it will probably deteriorate from obsolescence more than anything else."

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Both HOLC and the Federal Housing Authority were created as part of the New Deal, part of a massive stimulus package to drag the United States from the depths of the Great Depression. HOLC refinanced loans directly, while the FHA continues to provide subsidized mortgage insurance.

Rochester was a mostly homogeneous place in 1940. Of its 325,000 residents, just 1 percent were black and 19 percent were foreign-born. The former were largely concentrated in the southwest, while the latter, particularly Italians and Poles, were in the northeast.

Over the two following decades, as black migration from the southern United States overtook European immigration as a major population driver, loan restrictions from HOLC and the FHA made it nearly impossible for redlined residents to buy a home and build equity.

"More than a half-century of research has shown housing to be for the twentieth century what slavery was to the antebellum period, namely the broad foundation of both American prosperity and racial inequality," the report's authors wrote. "These maps and their accompanying documentation helped set the rules for nearly a century of real estate practice."

At the same time, Rochester's white population moved en masse to the suburbs, where HOLC's assessors refinanced with a much freer hand.

In the area around Culver Road in Irondequoit, for instance, HOLC noted: "For some years it has been a fertile field with speculators who have erected a great number of small, inexpensive but attractive homes. ... There may be danger of eventual overbuilding."

Notations in other cities are even more explicitly racist. In Camden, New Jersey, for instance, HOLC wrote of one mostly-Polish neighborhood: "Negro district on edge of section, but splendid cooperation of all residents in this section will always prevent spread."

While redlining no longer exists in the same form, several recent studies have shown that discrimination in lending for housing remains.

In 2015, Five Star Bank came to a settlement with the state Attorney General over allegations of redlining, including drawing the borders of its "lending area" to exclude mostly-minority neighborhoods in Rochester. Also in 2015, a study by the Empire Justice Center showed that black people in every income category were significantly more likely to be denied a loan than white people.

JMURPHY7@Gannett.com