Class Year

2026

Department

Political Science

Advisor

Allison Harris

Abstract

This paper investigates the legacy of historical redlining on contemporary access to mortgage credit across three distinct urban policy environments: Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Manhattan. I find that while historical redlining is associated with a statistically significant negative effect on mortgage approval rates, the magnitude of this direct effect is relatively small. In comparison, applicant race, particularly for Black applicants, is a stronger predictor of mortgage approval rates across cities and models. This study utilizes 1930s Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) residential security maps and Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) data from 2007 to 2017, and uses ordinary least squares (OLS) regressions to estimate the persistence of historical redlining intensity on modern mortgage approval outcomes.

A cross-city case study of housing interventions in three cities following the passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968 reveals that even more intensive, large-scale redistributive efforts, such as those implemented in Manhattan, fail to meaningfully mitigate borrower-level disparities compared with the more fragmented interventions in Baltimore and Philadelphia. These findings suggest that the legacy of redlining persists largely through structural disadvantages in wealth and intergenerational mobility rather than direct effects. The paper concludes that, because municipal governments are constrained by inter-city economic competition and therefore prioritize place-based growth, addressing the structural foundations of credit inequality calls for more robust, national-level policy interventions aimed at financial equity.

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