Episode 43: Reexamining Redlining with Todd Michney

Shane Phillips 0:04
Hello, this is the UCLA Housing Voice podcast, and I'm your host, Shane Phillips. This week's episode is with Professor Todd Michney, and we're discussing his recent publications which reexamine many assumptions and common narratives about the role of the federal government, and particularly the depression era Homeowners Loan Corporation, or HOLC in the development and proliferation of the practice of redlining. While HOLC and redlining are absolutely connected, that connection appears to be a lot less direct, and a lot more complicated than previously understood. Part of what makes this topic so interesting to me is that it raises some philosophical questions that I think apply to many domains of housing policy and urban planning. HOLC has culpability in the proliferation of redlining, but probably not as much as is commonly believed. And as Professor Michney's work reveals, there's very little evidence that HOLC treated black homeowners dramatically different from white homeowners, at least on average. So the questions arise - how do we think about an institution that did good as well as bad? What does it mean to revise our understanding of historical institutions acknowledging that they may not have been quite as bad as we thought but were still influenced by and helped to spread racist beliefs and practices? How do you tell a story like that without it being interpreted as an exoneration? And maybe asking whether an institution is good or bad isn't even the right question to be asking. I certainly do not know the answer to these questions but we had a really great discussion with these questions and tensions lying just below the surface. I think you'll enjoy it, and you'll get a nice history lesson along the way. The Housing Voice podcast is a production of the UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies, with production support from Claudia Bustamante, and Jason Sutedja. As always, feedback and show ideas can go to me at Shanephillips@ucla.edu. Now, let's get to our conversation with Professor Todd Michney. Todd M. Michney is an Associate Professor in the School of History and Sociology at Georgia Tech, and he's here to talk about the Homeowners Loan Corporation, and what we may have gotten wrong about its historical contributions to the practice of redlining and the segregation and racial disparities in homeownership and household wealth that have persisted into the present day. Todd, welcome to the Housing Voice podcast.

Todd Michney 2:33
Thanks Shane, it's my pleasure to be here.

Shane Phillips 2:35
And Mike Manville is my co-host today. Hey, Mike.

Michael Manville 2:38
Hey, guys, great to be here.

Shane Phillips 2:40
As always, we start off by asking our guests for a quick tour of their hometown or where they currently live, another place they've lived in to maybe. If you were taking us, I think, Todd, you said you're going to do Cleveland, Ohio, if you were if we were visiting you, why would you want to take us there?

Todd Michney 2:55
Well, I always appreciate the chance to introduce people to my hometown. And I actually have led some guided tours around the neighborhoods that I wrote about in my book 'surrogate suburbs'. Those are outlying areas of the city that were built up after 1900. And especially for African Americans, they serve the function of suburbs - for all intents and purposes until the bonafide suburbs became more accessible. So I love to show people around those areas and really just to raise the profile of a city, which I think has been kind of underappreciated.

Shane Phillips 3:26
Any specific recommendations?

Todd Michney 3:29
Well, some of the places on that tour that we took people would be places like the Core United Methodist Church which was a former Jewish synagogue built in the 1920s that later hosted the famous 'Ballot or the Bullet' speech by Malcolm X in 1964 I believe. There's just many, many wonderful surviving architectural gems. I've actually got a map I could share of the tour routes and some of the attractions if that'd be something you could use on a website or something like,

Shane Phillips 4:00
Yeah, we can throw it on the show notes, that sounds great. I was gonna say that people will have to, you know, hire you for a tour if they want the rest but maybe now they can just do a self-guided (tour). Okay, so the title of the article we're discussing here today is 'New perspectives on New Deal Housing Policy: Explicating and Mapping HOLC loans to African Americans', and this is by Todd and his co-author, LaDale Winling, and it's in the Journal of Urban History. He has two other articles that look at the origins of redlining and other New Deal lending policies as well as the development of the redlining maps themselves, and we're not really going to talk about those in detail today. But they do, you know, kind of inform and add context to this conversation so we may make reference to them, and we'll certainly include those in the show notes as well for any interested listeners. So let's talk first about what the Homeowners Loan Corporation existed to do. It was created through an Act of Congress in 1933 - several years into the Great Depression. Todd, what problems was HOLC created to address, and how did it actually go about trying to solve those problems?

Unknown Speaker 5:06
Sure. Well, as we know, we're in the middle of, or actually at the beginning of Great Depression; home prices were down about 33%, across the board from the peak around 1925, and as of January 1st 1934, 45%, of urban owner-occupied mortgage properties were in default. So the idea was to simultaneously bail out lenders and help borrowers to get on a more sustainable path toward paying their debt obligations. And we can talk in moredetails about what getting a mortgage looked like before the New Deal - it was quite onerous. But basically, they came up with an arrangement that was on a longer term at a lower interest rate that was self amortizing which means the principle was being paid down at the same time along with interest payments. This was something that reformers had been calling for for a long time, and many of those reformers coming straight out of the real estate and home finance industry, made their way into these government agencies and were advising that this course be followed. So what HOLC did was, it was created as a unit of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, which had been created a couple years earlier under Herbert Hoover. It (was) basically a like a federal reserve for Savings and Loans. There were other institutions invited to join, but it was overwhelmingly Savings and Loans. So if they need....

Shane Phillips 6:34
Savings and loans in this era, were sort of the main mortgage lenders, correct?

Unknown Speaker 6:39
Yes, along with individuals, in fact, something like 20-25% of all mortgage loans were extended by individuals who are looking for places to put their money but the largest was Savings and Loans, and they had a kind of unique way of financing that we could talk about if we really wanted to get into it. But in the 1920s, more financial institutions like commercial banks had started getting involved in residential mortgage lending; insurance companies started buying mortgages on a secondary market, buying the mortgages from the institutions that originated them. And when the Great Depression hit, all that just went, you know, drastically down. And there was widespread recognition that we need to fix this somehow. So what HOLC did was it offered lenders - who are known as mortgagees, (and) offered them bonds, which were basically the equivalent of US Treasury bonds, that would cover up to 80% of the value that HOLC appraised for the house. And these were not to exceed $14,000, which was about $310,000 in today's terms. So we're kind of aiming at the, what will we say maybe upper middle to the lower end of the housing market. And the appraisals, this was discovered by an economist Jonathan Rose, she's done a lot of amazing work on the HOLC; these appraisals and these amounts that were offered to lenders, and the appraisals themselves, were really on the high end in order to entice participation by the lenders. Because initially, you know, no one had tried this before, there are some disputes about whether they're issuing these kinds of bonds, whether it would even be illegal in some states. Also, by aiming at the high end, not only would it make lenders more willing to participate in the program, it made it less likely that borrowers would be able to reduce their principal payments. So you know, the idea of a write down - that we've seen in more recent mortgage crises, was kind of alleviated by setting these purposefully high. And a lot of these borrowers, like in more recent mortgage crises, did owe more than the actual appraised value. But most of these lenders were satisfied - only 18% of them refused to exchange these mortgages for these bonds that HOLC was offering.

Shane Phillips 9:00
This was a point of clarification I was interested in because I think my view of like, what problem HOLC was trying to solve is kind of colored by the more recent experience with the Great Recession and the housing crash then when it was certainly true that a lot of people - because they had lost their jobs, just couldn't afford to pay their mortgages anymore. But it seems like even more than that, in this more recent era, the problem was being underwater on your loan, and just like having a lot of you no reason to walk away, rather than try to pay that really large balance. It sounds like that wasn't necessarily the main problem in this time during the Great Depression. And it was more maybe just, you know, unemployment, lower incomes, and people just couldn't afford to pay their mortgages, whether they were above or below water, and you know, whether the principal exceeded the value or not.

Todd Michney 9:50
Right, right. I think that's a good question to ask. I think that the main thing was that people weren't in a position to pay, to continue paying. So they were, you know, thinking of walking away - I guess we could say they're underwater in that sense, and that would throw a large number of houses onto the market at the same time. You have to recall that this was a much more exploitative housing market coming in into the Great Depression, and so probably a lot of lenders had decided they'd made enough money off of these already, even if there were borrowers who owed more than 80% of the appraised value. Many of these lenders decided that they'd made enough money and they just wanted to clear their books. And especially with regard to African American borrowers, I would mention - they'll come up later. Then as now, African Americans were more vulnerable to exploitative arrangements, and most of the lenders agreed obviously to exchange for these bonds instead of trying to hold people to their obligations.

Shane Phillips 10:47
Got it. So to give our listeners the proper context for your article and your interpretation of this history, let's first have you tell us the story (that) someone is most likely to hear about HOLC - the Homeowners Loan Corporation, and redlining and HOLC's culpability in housing, market discrimination and the racially disparate outcomes that were sort of downstream of that discrimination. And again, just to be clear, for our listeners, the historical interpretation I'm asking Todd to share right now is one that he's disputing in some ways in his own research. But I want to make sure we start with an understanding of this kind of better-known narrative before we start chipping away at it.

Todd Michney 11:28
I do want to answer this question. I realized I didn't give you a complete answer to the previous one. Would you like me to elaborate?

Shane Phillips 11:34
Sure

Todd Michney 11:34
Here closer to it. So once HOLC was established, about 40% of all the borrowers that were in distress on their mortgages applied for aid, and that was 1.9 million American homeowners. And HOLC approved the application for and successfully refinanced the mortgages for about 1 million. But even with this aid, again this reminds us we are still in a Great Depression, 19% of these HOLC borrowers/mortgagers ultimately defaulted, and that meant that HOLC acquired 194,000 properties through foreclosure. And these were actually sold off, sometimes through what were called purchase money mortgages - these are basically seller-financed mortgages, kind of like a land contract, and non-delinquent HOLC borrowers paid down their obligation, which were 15 year loans at 5%, and so that this whole program wound down by 1951. That's 15 years after the initial loans were closed in 1936. So the likely story that many people have probably heard is that HOLC maps and their blatantly racist accompanying 'area descriptions', as they were called, were used to deny black homeowners access to mortgage financing, and were there by a means to disinvest in urban neighborhoods where black people lived. There's a widespread assumption that HOLC maps were shared widely with private industry, which then used these actual maps to deny people mortgages. And there's a further kind of leap from that to argue that these maps, these particular maps made by the Homeowners Loan Corporation, directly caused disparities that persist to this day whether we're talking about financial in the form of the racial wealth gap, educational, health in terms of pollution sites, green space, air quality (etc). So you know, there's a rather direct line being drawn between these maps and these negative outcomes.

Shane Phillips 13:37
So now to take a step back and start to explore why that story might be wrong, or at least missing some important facts not telling the whole story, could you explain for us the two phases of HOLC history as you've written about them in this article - the rescue phase and the consolidation phase. And we can get to why this is important in short order here, but I think we just first need to understand how HOLC's mandate or strategy changed over time.

Todd Michney 14:04
Absolutely, well, the first thing I would say is that HOLC could not have used these maps to deny its own mortgage refinancing loans because it had made essentially all of those loans - in fact, 97% of those loans, before it even began making these maps. Also, to the best of our knowledge, HOLC did not share these maps with private industry. In fact, we have evidence of them stating they were not sharing these maps with private industry as late as 1942. It did, however, share them with the Federal Housing Administration and other government housing-relatedd agency that did refuse to insure mortgages in all racially mixed areas and the overwhelming majority of black neighborhoods around the country. So basically what we're saying in our research here is that the means of transmitting the methodology of redlining was more indirect. And in fact, there were a number of means whereby HOLC did transmit this knowledge of the maps and the methodology and racist assumptions underlying them. So we can talk about that more in a little bit. But as for the rescue and consolidation phases, HOLC had these two distinct aspects to its operations that had a slight chronological overlap. So the first rescue phase ran from 1933 to 1936, and it refers to the issuance of its mortgages, its mortgage refinancing loans. The second consolidation phase, from 1936 to 1951, refers to the managing of its inventory - the homes that it acquired. So servicing, collecting loan payments, acquiring delinquent properties through foreclosure, and then renting, maintaining and selling those properties. So there is a slight overlap between the two phases, and I'll explain what that is. HOLC was accepting applications for its loans for 19 months - that was from June 1933, to November 1934, and from May to June 1935. So it had an initial period, and then Congress intervened and open it up for more applications - the ultimate deadline was June 1935 to put in an app(lication).

Shane Phillips 16:17
That's an amazingly short period of time for HOLC to have become such a big player in the mortgage market.

Todd Michney 16:23
Absolutely. And that helps explain why there was such a rush to get all these loans approved, and to demonstrate some political results, which we could also talk about, because that was, you know, one reason why there was no kind of effort to unite people on the basis of race. But we can talk more about the reasons that we see for black people getting HOLC loans. So that was the deadline for applications, June 1935, and all the loans were closed by June 1936. And they did not, HOLC did not start making these maps until the Mortgagee Rehabilitation Division was established in August 1935. So the first agents went into the field in the Fall of 1935 - the first maps start coming out in January/February 1936, and that was only for the first batch of cities. So you can imagine, that's where this percentage of 97% of the loans already being issued before the maps were even started and available, comes from.

Michael Manville 17:29
I just want to highlight some of what Todd just said, because I think it just right off the bat, is an important framing mechanism for this discussion and inject some nuance into what a lot of discussions of redlining amount to, in sort of you know, this sort of capital D housing discourse, or even, you know, in my experience as someone who teaches some urban planning courses, I think there's kind of two layers of discussion of redlining that occur. One of them, I think, is the sort of story that Todd just really nicely summarized, right, which is that there's a sense that when we see the redlining maps, today, the whole redlining maps, and then also look at present day outcomes, that there's a strong causal line being drawn, as opposed to perhaps a correlation. Because we see in area that were redlined. today they have worse health outcomes, worse economic outcomes,(and) that the map itself must have played a direct role in that. But I think it actually goes even further than that, which is to say that in a lot of discussions that use the term redlining, redlining has become something sort of divorced from any historical context at all; that the people use it to describe almost any policy that might have an adverse racially disparate impact on geographic investment. You know, it's very common; I was just talking to a reporter not long ago, and I forget exactly what she was describing, and she said, "well, you know, don't you think this is just redlining, too?" And I said, "how are you using that term?" And she just said, you know she was very candid, she said "very loosely". And I think that, you know, what's been lost a little bit is this idea that the drawing these maps, you know, redlining by both the the HOLC and the FHA and I think it's going to be worth hearing Todd, you know, draw that distinction a little bit more. It was an actual historical process where some things happened and some things didn't, and that we can draw some conclusions about what it caused and some conclusions about perhaps what, you know, I think Todd's research really does a great job of showing that the whole maps in many respects, reflected the the biases built into the private market at that time, you know, (and) in that respect, are a tremendous historical record of a system just where bias was just pervasive, but maybe let you know, say a little bit less about like what the HOLC actually caused, you know which is not to say that they didn't do anything bad at all, you know that that's not the point. But I do think this, this sort of top level of misunderstanding, about redlining because the term is so charged, is really worth clarifying all of this.

Todd Michney 20:15
I think you're absolutely right Micheal that people use "redlining" as a kind of shorthand for a variety of phenomena having to do with urban disinvestment. And on the one hand, that's not counterproductive, because it is a recognition that all these things tend to work together, that they were widespread, (and) that the government was involved. But you know, it depends if we want to try and be more specific, let's say we wanted to put together a legal case for reparations, that's when we need to be very, very specific about who did the redlining, you know, (and) what sorts of practices are we talking about. Because really, the HOLC maps are really just the best surviving example, in its entirety of these. Now, every bank would have had a map in its back room, showing where it would or would not lend mortgages, you know starting from this period and going into the 1960s, and maybe, you know, beyond 1960s when this was made technically illegal. It's just that it's very hard to get our hands on private bank records. Those may not have to be turned over, they're often thrown out. They just don't make their way into archives. So yes, I think there's a need for specificity when we need to be specific but also, it's good to recognize that there's compounding effects from these kinds of urban disinvestment. One final thing I would also mention is that HOLC itself didn't actually invent this technology - apparently, it was life insurance companies in the 1920s that were starting to make mortgage investments on properties that were located, perhaps across the country, and they're making them sight unseen. As we're saying earlier, the Savings and Loan industry found it pretty easy to keep track of its mortgages because those were made usually in the surrounding neighborhoods on a face-to-face basis. When your life insurance company lending properties, perhaps across the country, they were looking for ways to do that, from a distance. And that's where these practices and technology first originated and were carried into the government by people from private industry that had either pioneered or were familiar with these methods.

Shane Phillips 22:25
That's interesting. It's almost like we talk a lot now about algorithms and their role in perpetuating bias in the approval of mortgages and so forth. And, you know, these sort of like Fintech companies that are working on almost developing like another level of abstraction or separation from the actual neighborhood or the lender themselves. And so it's very interesting to think of like this progression, where this actually maybe started sort of with Savings and Loans, or even before that, maybe these individual lenders. And then Savings and Loans are kind of doing the whole neighborhood life, (and) insurance companies and others are doing entire country, and all the way up to the present day. I did want to kind of, this isn't in this paper but in your 'Roots of Redlining' paper, just thinking about the connection between the public sector and the private sector here. This really comes through in that 'Roots of Redlining' paper - how interwoven they are and how in many cases the folks in the public sector came directly from the private sector, from these Savings and Loans and other institutions. And I was just hoping you could kind of talk about that a little bit, and maybe what that what that meant, what that represented.

Todd Michney 23:37
Absolutely, well a lot of times the debate has come down to who's most culpable - is FHA more culpable than SHA? Is private industry more culpable than the government? And what LaDale Winling, and I discovered is that, you know, really, these are all kind of, there's a fluid movement of people from the private sector into government and back again. And when you really just see how thoroughly intertwined public and private were and how much communication there was between both HOLC, FHA, private industry organizations like the Society of Residential Appraisers, the American Institute of Real Estate Appraisers, the National Association of Real Estate Boards, the US Savings and Loan League. It presented a different perspective where you can't really so easily place blame - they're all thoroughly implicated in having participated in bringing this about. You think of someone like Frederick Babcock, who was the initial Head of Underwriting Operations at the Federal Housing Administration; he had worked in the life insurance industry prior to this and probably so had seen these kinds of maps. Corwin Fergus, who ran the City Survey Project and was Head of the Mortgagee Rehabilitation Division was a realtor and Savings and Loan liquidator in state of Ohio before he took this government position. Philip Kunisgrin was a mortgage banker who then designed the appraisal procedures for the Home Owners Loan Corporation, and then went back out and became a mortgage banker again afterwards. So it's like a moving target, you can't so easily place blame when people are moving in and out of public and private, and it's not really clear which is influencing the other. It seems as though private industry influenced government and then (the) government used its kind of nationwide reach to further ingrain these practices on an even more widespread basis.

Shane Phillips 25:37
Yeah, yeah, the idea that I mean, I think there's almost a sense that like the private sector, people who are associated with the private sector, are only associated with the private sector, and people who are associated with the public sector only associated with that. And of course, people are moving back and forth between those things, and that's not actually necessarily a bad thing - like we want people with experience to be kind of moving between and having that influence. But I think it's just a really important point to make, and just helps illustrate why it's so hard to assign blame, you know, to one sector or another. I think it's worth spending some time on where all this HOLC research is coming from, in part because it might help illustrate what was missed in earlier analyses and why. it's my understanding that studies from earlier years or earlier decades relied mainly on the discovery of these residential security maps a.k.a redlining maps that were commissioned by HOLC so in a sense, you're seeing the final product in those maps but not how they came about, or how they were used, and, as you've talked about, there was a presumption that because these maps existed, they must have been influencing lending decisions all across the country even in the private sector. Then in addition to those maps, there was a sort of main set of text records from the agency itself, which have also been a resource (that) researchers and historians have used. But you go one step further by reviewing what are known as the general correspondence records, and these give a more detailed and localized perspective on the decision-making inside individual HOLC offices in its early years. This is the kind of information that historians are trained to dig up and often gets overlooked by other kinds of social scientists. And I was hoping you could give us an overview of what these different sources are, and what they can tell us from the correspondence of these individual offices all the way through to these maps themselves. And I guess I'm sort of interested in this history in two ways. On one hand, what is the research value over all of these different sources? And on the other, what's the more recent history of how these sources have been used? And how has our understanding of HOLC's role in housing market discrimination been changed by this progressively deeper and more detailed historical analysis?

Todd Michney 28:00
Well, different sorts of records can tell us different things, and we're looking at different facets of a very, very large effort. HOLC could refinance the mortgage on a million properties; it had 11 regions, it had state offices, it had offices in every city, and, you know, we're talking about a workforce of tens of thousands at its peak. So historians have tried to get a handle on how to tell this story. The first actual treatment of the Home Owners Loan Corporation was by Cielo Harris with the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Shane Phillips 28:40
And how far back was that?

Todd Michney 28:42
I think it was 1951 - right around the time that it that it wound down its operations. And he was an economist by training, probably didn't look at any manuscript records of the corporation - which hadn't even entered the records of the National Archives at that point. They did have a sample of HOLC loans for three states that amounted to some 3000 different loans, and he had access to newspaper clippings and things like that. But he told a very top-down overview; there's no mention of African Americans at all in his book except to say that they had very low rates of property ownership so they weren't really an important constituency for the HOLC. So really, the big breakthrough came when Kenneth Jackson discovered the security maps and I had the pleasure to interview him and we narrowed down that this must have been in January 1977 because he told me he was in Washington DC, for President Jimmy Carter's inauguration. And at that time, historians were just allowed to wander the stacks at the National Archives, and he saw these ledgers up on a shelf and took them down and looked at them and they were the residential security maps. So that kind of got him thinking and worked its way into several articles published in 1980, and his book 'Crabgrass Frontier' which came out in 1985. And you know, there are hundreds of boxes of textual records that document various aspects of HOLC's operations at the National Archives which you can look through. And people have gone through various portions of those - one would be Amy Hillier who revisited this around 2001 and came to some conclusions that were at odds with Jackson. For one, she was the first to really prove that HOLC lent to African American borrowers. Some other people like Jim Greer, who is an independent researcher with the Federal Reserve, looked through the speeches, and the minutes of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board. So that told us some other things we hadn't known. But what I found and really used more extensively than anyone had, are the General Administrative Correspondence of the HOLC which was microfilmed; the records were microfilmed during World War II and then destroyed and exist on 486 reels of microfilm with no finding aid. They're organized by HOLC region by state. And they're interesting, I guess. Yeah, I mean, it's very daunting. It literally took me six years to find my way through these records and discern how they're organized and be able to start to anticipate where I might find records. So I initially use them for the article we're talking about today, and I was able to look through the Atlanta, Georgia Regional Office, which also administered Alabama, and I believe Mississippi, and I was able to get some sense of how administrators thought in racial terms and how they dealt with black borrowers. But when I really got excited was when I came across a folder, like film folder, that said "Mortgagee Rehabilitation Division" and they were clearly talking about making the security maps. So using that, I was able to anticipate where in the other reels I might find this, and I was able to find ultimately, about 1,000 pages of documentation that span the country so it wasn't localized just one area. It's not everything that was presumably there, and there may still be more material on those microfilm reels. But again, there's no finding aid, so you have to just flip through it, and see what you can find yourself. A couple of researchers had attempted to use this; the only one that really did so with any productive results was Ocean Howell who wrote on San Francisco, and Ocean Howell was actually the one to note this discrepancy of timing between the rescue phase and the consolidation phase. He also noted that Mexican Americans were evaluated very differently in different cities in California, and these were all by the same field agent - Theodore Bowden, who had been to San Francisco and Los Angeles and other cities on the West Coast. And in each city, there was a somewhat different assessment of Mexican Americans and their influence on property values as they understood it. So they're more or less racist toward Mexican Americans depending on whether we're talking San Francisco where they were relatively less so versus Los Angeles, where they're very much so. And so that raises questions in his mind as to like, why is the same guy evaluating these neighborhoods differently in different cities. And it turns out, they were, in many cases, following the assessments of local lenders, and real estate people especially in large cities where you really didn't have any other choice but to do that. So that's really kind of what brings us up to where we are today - mapping inequality, the digital history project that has scanned. Many but not most of the maps that were eventually made, or many of the maps that once existed, have made those shapefiles available so that people can do quantitative research. But again, I think, you know, really, you have to go down to the really granular archival level to get a real sense of how these decisions were being made, and to kind of avoid the pitfall of drawing these kinds of unsubstantiated assumptions about, you know, who was sharing the maps with whom, how they're using them. And that's really what I tried to do in my most recent article is to figure out how did holc actually use these maps

Shane Phillips 34:34
Yeah, that's incredible. Thank you for putting in that work. I'm not sure anyone else was going to do it.

Todd Michney 34:40
That's my job.

Shane Phillips 34:43
Go ahead, Mike.

Michael Manville 34:44
You know, related to that, that last point you made Todd and I think, you know, Professor Hillier, if I'm not mistaken was also one of the first people to raise the idea that maybe not that many people actually saw the maps once they were done. And that sounds like a question you can sort of shed some light on. I think the other comment I wanted to make or a point you made that I wanted to highlight - in reading your article, I was really struck by the extent to which in many of these cities HOLC was expecting a relatively small staff to really do an enormous task, you know. As you suggested just the idea that you could parachute into Los Angeles, and then, you know, assess the risk of lending in different neighborhoods, and I think as the correspondence you present shows, I mean they almost had no choice but to really depend on the appraisers who were working there already. And then, of course, that dependence is going to come with its own form of double-edged sword, right? These people know the neighborhoods, but they also have, as you suggest, like you know, real biases.

Todd Michney 35:55
Absolutely. So I think that's two questions. And so the first is about Amy Hillier's significance and how she qualified Kenneth Jackson's work. So as I mentioned earlier, one was to prove that African American borrowers were getting loans. She was actually able to go to some ledger books of Savings and Loans run by African Americans in Philadelphia and find HOLC loans on their books. And another was to question how widespread the distribution of these maps was because Kenneth Jackson had assumed, and he admitted if you read a footnote he couldn't prove this, but he believed that HOLC had directly shared these maps with FHA, which they did. I kind of put the closure on that; they shared one full set of all these maps with the Federal Housing Administration, and they were in constant contact during the process of making the maps. But he also assumed that these were distributed to private industry because it seems as though private industry was familiar with these four security grades that HOLC designated on the maps, and which FHA also designate on its own maps. So she questioned that for one thing, there's a document with the finding aid for the HOLC records in the National Archives that is a memo from circa 1942 where they say explicitly that these maps have not been shared with private interest despite many many requests from the public that is familiar with their existence. So basically, what's happening there is HOLC is going out in the field, and it's using private industry consultants to complete this project but then telling them we can't give you the final copies of these maps

Shane Phillips 37:42
Right.

Todd Michney 37:42
And people still were asking for that, and there were a couple of cases where they slipped out; my most humorous one that I uncovered was in Waco, Texas. A field agent had lent some local realtors a draft map, and that realtor traced the image to one of their own maps, and when the field agent came in, he saw a reproduction of the HOLC map on the wall. And he said, "what am I going to do? After all, I'm coming to these men (and they were almost universally men) and asking them, you know, to help us, I can't demand that he gives us that map". So but you know, the official line was that these maps are not to be shared but that doesn't mean that their existence wasn't known, and it really was a kind of shoestring operation for the first year of the project. There were 13 field agents - that was one for each region and two, in the two regions that made up the Northeast and mid-Atlantic. And they seem to have had junior field agents as well, and they had a Washington office staff. But you know, this was a very small effort to do what turns out to be a big data project; my colleague LaDale Winling, and his other co-authors have called this, in a different publication, a "big data project from the 1930s".

Michael Manville 39:00
Yeah, I mean, and I think just to add on to that, or to follow up, it seems to me that that that arrangement, you know, of a few field agents, and then some local people from industry would explain, or could help explain why so many people in private industry were familiar with the color coding even if HOLC did not subsequently share the maps because prominent members of that private community helped draw the maps.

Todd Michney 39:25
There's also the possibility that Amy Hillier raised in her dissertation where she said that the government could have said, we have these four ratings, these four grades, and here's the definition of each grade now, can you categorize your loans according to this. So you know, it's a big jump to assume that, you know, they were familiar with the actual maps or had seen them and then that they were given actual copies of the maps.

Michael Manville 39:49
Right.

Todd Michney 39:50
So that's why Amy Hillier is work is important. She started questioning whether there might be more nuance here, but I think her work often gets couched somewhat unfairly as attempting to absolve the HOLC; I'm not sure that's entirely fair but that's something I want to really avoid in my own... because politically, I think that's a non-starter. I think that it's obvious that all these government agencies were thoroughly implicated in these kinds of racist ways of thinking and spreading this methodology of redlining. Even if they weren't giving out the actual maps themselves, they were showing them in public on occasion as I'll get to in a minute, they were holding workshops where they trained people in the best practices and the most modern ways of thinking about real estate which included taking race into account.. so there are many, many other ways that HOLC and FHA were were culpable even if they weren't directly handing out copies of these things to private industry.

Michael Manville 40:48
Yeah, I mean, I think that's very well said, and it's an important point - you know, the task of the historian and then the social scientist is, you know, on some level, to really figure out with as much specificity as possible, you know, what actually happened. And that is a valuable thing to do that's why we're all in this business. But you know, it if it seems like what occurred was not by some people's lights as bad as they had previously believed, that is a far cry from saying it was good right? But you know, so there's real value in understanding exactly what happened but I think it would be a huge leap, and inappropriate to then therefore say, "well, you know, HOLC was fine or that this was a positive development in the history of the United States" which of course we know it was not

Shane Phillips 41:32
One thing I wanted to point out here, a great thing that you do in your paper, is to actually draw on the kind of public response of leading contemporary black newspapers and other organizations, and how they responded to the creation of the HOLC. And you note that, you know, starting in 1933 when it was created, the response was quite positive. These black-led organizations made explicit comparisons of HOLC to other federal programs and practices and so you know, this is probably partly about juxtaposing against much worse things. So even if this wasn't perfect, it was an improvement in some ways. And these organizations worked very hard to encourage black homeowners to take advantage of what HOLC was offering. Could you talk a bit about how black institutions and community leaders viewed this refinancing program at that time, at least during the rescue phase as it was getting started, and maybe why they had higher hopes for it despite such unfair and discriminatory treatment by other federal and local agencies?

Todd Michney 42:33
For me, this was one of the most striking findings in the article, especially because we hadn't tried so hard to hear African American voices assessing, you know, what was the significance of these programs and how they received, it helps that ProQuest digitized a large span of historic African American newspapers that we can now keyword search. So I've been able to put in HOLC, or homeowners loan as keyword searches and find mentions that would have really escaped an earlier generation of historians maybe even Amy Hillier, I think was using things like clippings files to get at this information. But I would describe the reception of African American organizations and newspaper journalists as ranging from a kind of wait-and-see to openly promoting this, with the idea that we need to take advantage of this because if we don't at least try, we'll have no one to blame but ourselves if we don't get anything. And it was noted from the very beginning, by some observers that "hey, they asked the race of the borrower, what's up with that?" There was some skepticism, especially in Republican-affiliated papers, because African Americans have historically voted Republican; some of them were skeptical, just of the intentions of the Democratic Party in promoting this program but there's this idea that we should at least try to apply and see what happens.

Shane Phillips 43:57
And I think an important question here is, you know, whether those positive impressions of HOLC were actually justified at least in the rescue phase. How did HOLC perform during those first few years with respect to racial equity? That's really the core of this paper and the question you're answering. So what did that look like?

Todd Michney 44:19
Well, there's different ways to get at this question. And the first one that we kind of looked at was, how did the distribution of loans HOLC loans look taking into account the kind of relative proportions of black homeownership and white homeownership. And historically, and this trend has remained very durable into the present day, African American homeownership rates are about one-half that of white American homeownership rates. And so even though homeownership rates have gone up over time, there's still a significant racial gap in terms of homeownership. So one thing to explain the smaller number of HOLC loans that went to African Americans is that there are fewer numbers of black homeowners. We went to look and see, first of all in the aggregate, how did that look, and we found out that African Americans got 95% of what we would expect based on their percentage of homeownership. So in other words, you'd have to look at the article to see the actual percentages, but they were only 5% off based on the percentage of Homeowners Loan Corporation loans that went to black people from the percentage of African American homeowners in the overall set of homeowners. And then if you...

Shane Phillips 45:33
These aren't the actual numbers in the paper, but this would be like if 20% of homes were owned by black households, 19% of mortgages would have gone to black homeowners so just 5% lower

Todd Michney 45:47
Right, and I think, you know, you're raising some important questions about why is there a lower black homeownership rate in the first place...

Shane Phillips 45:55
RIght

Todd Michney 45:57
You know, we can only look at this for 1940, which is already well into the program. So there's limitations on the conclusions we can draw but even more interesting when we looked on the local level, we were interested to look for individual cities to see how did the black access to Home owners Loan Corporation loans look, and we found a significant variation depending on the city on whether African Americans were able to get significant numbers of these loans or not. And we have a kind of map graph in the article that arrays cities by, I guess that's longitude, isn't it?

Shane Phillips 46:38
I'm not sure.

Todd Michney 46:39
From east to west, and so you can see an access ratio of 1 being equitable, which cities are above the line in which are below the line. So as we move from east to west, you can get a sense of what that axis looks like, and we also have the relative size of the black homeowning population in each of those cities as part of the graph so it's kind of a nifty visualization that I'm kind of proud of. But just to kind of give an overall sense, there are some outliers, for example, like Jersey City, New Jersey, and Omaha, Nebraska, you can also include St. Paul, Minnesota, or Boston, Massachusetts, where it looks like African Americans are getting pretty good access, actually getting more than twice of what we would expect, and in the case of Jersey City, three times what we would expect based on the percentage of the homeowner population. But these were very, very small populations of black homeowners and black people more generally in some of these places like St. Paul, and Omaha. So really where you want to look is in significant centers of black homeownership, in places where there were large numbers of African Americans and especially African American homeowners. So we can look to places like Washington DC, Philadelphia, Detroit, Houston, and Los Angeles, which all have equitable access ratio, in terms of of HOLC access, and to somewhat lesser extent, Atlanta and Birmingham also had favorable access along those lines. But then there were also some cities that had large black hole money populations that got less than equitable access. Those are places like Memphis, Chicago, Nashville, Jackson, and Richmond. And it seems to make no coincidence, the two worst places for HOLC access were Tulsa, and Oklahoma City. Although they're black home only populations were considerably smaller than those previous cities I mentioned. So you really do see a considerable variation, and we think this comes down to, you know, the demographic balance, the different mix of financial institutions; some of these cities had a substantial number of black owned financial institutions where African Americans were more likely to get fair financing. So there's a lot of different factors you would want to take into consideration if you are going to try and explain why do we see such different outcomes. And there are also some places where local HOLC staffers were noted to be racist so places like Cincinnati and Memphis; in Cincinnati, there was a case we mentioned in the article where they're actually flagging applications from African Americans and setting them to the side. And in Memphis, the local HOLC administrator made the statement that African Americans were not going to be considered for this program. So there is a possibility that individual racist administrators also had a role and how serious of consideration these applications got.

Shane Phillips 49:34
And I do think given that this sort of at some level, overturning or questioning, longer standing views on how HOLC lended and how discriminatory they were in their practices; it makes sense to interrogate the data a little bit here and ask some questions that people are likely to come up with. You know, the first would maybe be more of an accounting question; this data, as you said, is from 1940, but HOLC's rescue phase as you call it was from 1933 to 1936. So I'm just going to ask these questions one after another, and I'll let you answer at the end. But with that one, is it possible that by 1940, for example, maybe a larger share of white households had paid off their mortgages, or shifted them away from HOLC or otherwise got their loans off of hawks balance sheet for any number of reasons, you know, favorable treatment, because they were hired back faster into the Great Depression, and so forth. My second question would be more about need; as you say, the share of mortgages issued to black households by HOLC was roughly proportional to the share of homes owned by black households. But is it possible though, that black homeowners were hit harder by the Great Depression, and so if mortgages had been issued equitably, or according to need, black homeowners actually would have been over represented. And third, and this is somewhat related, is it possible that white homeowners were more likely to have their homes paid off even before the Great Depression so that they didn't need their homes refinanced even if their neighborhoods were hit, you know, no more or less hard by the economic crisis? So those are just some things that came to my mind that I was curious if you had a way of addressing or, you know, were things that you'd considered in this research.

Todd Michney 51:20
Absolutely, those are all extremely good and important questions to ask. And, again, we need to remember that this is a racially structured, unequal housing market where people don't always have you know, the same access, and black people don't have the same access that white borrowers have to get mortgages. So even if you're giving everybody, you know, an equitable shot, it's not accounting for the inequitable practices that put people where they find themselves in the first place. That's why we have black homeowners with half the homeownership rate of white homeowners. But to answer your first question, it's certainly true that white borrowers may have been more able to pay off their HOLC loans by 1940. I would note, however, that these loans were in very generous terms, really beyond anything that had been previously available. They were self-amortizing so you were paying down the principal, along with the interest, and you even were allowed to pay interest only for the first three years so that these didn't really start coming due. So maybe people would have seen this as not their first priority to pay off. There was no penalty for prepayment. In fact, the first mortgage or to pay off their HOLC loan was a black woman, Mrs. Suzie Mae Rakestraw of Macon, Georgia; the economy was still struggling so most white borrowers, as well as black borrowers might not have seen improved economic circumstances until World War II. So that's another reason why they might not have paid these off significantly sooner. And then for your second question, certainly black borrowers had a greater need, and we're likely overrepresented among mortgage properties in distress. And this was not just because of the greater economic need, because black people definitely had not equal access to jobs and didn't make as much money as a group. But also, they're more readily exploited by creditors, what we call predatory lending today so more of their loans would have been driven toward default by the exploitative terms that they had signed up for. So again, this brings us back to (teh fact that) we need to really understand HOLC as a giveaway to lenders - a bailout for lenders as much as it was a boon to borrowers. And then your third question, I guess I'll just say it's, it's also possible, but it's kind of a counterfactual so we can't really measure that. If more white people didn't even need to take advantage of HOLC, that certainly was the case but we don't really have a way to measure that, other than just to note that, you know, the white homeownership rate was twice that of the black rate.

Michael Manville 53:54
And I think the only thing I would add is to really highlight the point you made about the HOLC sort of really feeling an obligation to helping the lenders right? I think that the questions Shane raises are all, strike me as eminently plausible. But just if we assume for the sake of argument that none of them are correct, and this goes back to the point you made earlier, the fact that the HOLC had, in some ways, some racially progressive effects shouldn't lead us to then conclude that it was a racially progressive organization run by racial progressives, right? It may just have been that, in their cost-benefit, discharging their primary obligation to the lenders meant that they were going to help some African American homeowners.

Todd Michney 54:37
Yeah, I think all these three questions qualify the findings to the extent that really what we're looking at, even with all the caveats that we've included in the article, we're looking at kind of a best-case scenario. And it's still you know, it still is the case that African Americans didn't have an equal shot and that they didn't benefit from this program as much as white people we're in a position to.

Shane Phillips 55:01
One thing that this reminded me of as I was reading it was the debates and the research around voter ID laws which have been enacted in a lot of mostly Republican-led states as a way to frankly disenfranchise more left-leaning voters and has in turn disproportionately impacted non-white voters, including African Americans. And despite these laws creating additional barriers to voting, my understanding is that they haven't actually depressed voting all that much. And I bring this up because part of why they haven't depressed voting, or it seems to be the case as much as you'd expect, is because there's been this counter-mobilization on the part of left-leaning voters and democratic organizations and so forth. So you could look at this and say, you know, all the complaints about voter ID laws are bogus, you know, look at the voting rates. But my response would be that it's wrong for us to create barriers that disproportionately impact the rights and privileges of some groups on the basis of race or political views in this case, and that they shouldn't have to work harder just to take advantage of those rights and privileges even if they are ultimately able to successfully overcome those barriers. So, you know, similarly here, we would want to know whether HOLC loans were distributed proportionately because black homeowners were treated equally, or because they put in exceptional individual, and organizational effort to achieve those equal outcomes. And so I just want to kind of note that the fact that we see roughly equal proportions of HOLC loans, and you've already kind of made this point Todd but I just wanted to really underline it, that doesn't mean that there was fair treatment, and, you know, it might have required a lot of extra work on the part of African American homeowners and organizations to even get to that 95%, you know, almost parity level.

Todd Michney 56:54
Right, no it's a long running theme in the African American experience that African Americans have to work twice as hard or be twice as good to get the equal recognition if that. And that can be really exhausting; you have to constantly be organizing, and you can't, you know, put down your guard at any moment and just assume that things have been fixed because things can always get worse. You have to always fight for what you deserve, and so this is another case of that - like the voting ID laws example that you brought up.

Shane Phillips 57:28
As we get near the end here, I want to talk a little bit about motivations. There are a lot of possible explanations for why black homeowners received mortgages in rough proportion to their share of homeownership. And I was hoping you could just tell us, some of the ones you think are the most important or most revealing, or most plausible at both the national and the local level?

Todd Michney 57:50
Well, I think the biggest takeaway from our article is one that other scholars have also noted. And I think that we need to really flip our understanding of the HOLC and understand it as a bailout for lenders. There are economic historians who are coming around to this like Judge Glock just wrote a recent book that certified this interpretation, (and) Jonathan Rose that I've mentioned earlier is another economic historian. So that's really the big one, that this was a bailout for lenders that serve the purposes of economic recovery more broadly, and it did so in a way that did not challenge the color line. There were some other reasons we explored in the article that came up based on the evidence that were kind of interesting. I think we've already talked a bit about African Americans themselves on an individual level, and on an organizational level pushing for access is another important one. Another one is the political imperative to get the HOLC up and running, and to show results; there's evidence it was rushed that we presented the article, and that, you know, they weren't really always doing their due diligence in terms of checking the backgrounds of borrowers. They mainly just wanted to demonstrate some effect as quickly as possible. This was passed during the first 100 days of New Deal legislation, that famous period, when so many new laws went on the books.

Shane Phillips 59:15
And I think we kind of see that echoed a little bit with the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act following the Great Recession and the funding bills passed during the COVID pandemic as well, where it's just, you know, rather than be a little too, and actually, maybe as a lesson from the Great Recession that we took into COVID was like maybe we shouldn't be so careful about how we spend our money and like let's focus on the recovery first, and we'd rather overspend than underspend and draw out this recovery longer.

Todd Michney 59:45
Yeah, the Troubled Assets Program, I think maybe they could have, well, first of all, it could have been a lot bigger maybe more approaching more what HOLC was doing. But I think they could have done more to promote it because I've heard one criticism of the Obama Administration efforts as they didn't point enough to this.

Shane Phillips 1:00:02
Right, right. Specifically with homeowners, it was, you know, really emphasize the sort of bank bailout side of things but less so the homeowners. I've heard the same critique.

Todd Michney 1:00:12
And if you look at the files that I mentioned, of the whole HOLC general administrative correspondence, they have a whole publicity section where they were eager to promote the effects of this program. So they're very conscious of that; that was part of FDR's kind of political appeal and New Deal emphasis. And then one final one, I would mention that really took me by surprise, and probably applies more to the American South was, there is this kind of hint in some cases of white paternalism and either individual letters from employers wanting to stick up for their employees and see if they could help them gain access to this. And then these really strange sounding articles from the Macon Telegraph that gave the stories of three black borrowers who were helped by HOLC and it was in the trope of African Americans being not able to take care of themselves, needing assistance (and) protection from these predatory mortgage lenders. And in each case mentioned that we discussed in the article, it was a black borrower who was, you know, being taken advantage of it didn't totally understand the terms of the mortgage they'd signed on to so HOLC was coming in, and kind of helping them out which is really striking to me because this whole program is a taxpayer expense. And, you know, one critique would be that we don't want to spend too much money on this but especially in the South, I think those are powerful arguments; there are a lot of distinctions being made between, you know, black people who fit the kind of expectations of white southern employers and, you know, stayed in their place and behave responsibly. So it's still, again, it's racist in its own way. But it's possible that some of these black borrowers got consideration through the advocacy of powerful white financial interests and employers which is something I was completely not expecting when I started delving into this research.

Shane Phillips 1:02:05
Right, sort of the right outcome for the wrong reasons.

Todd Michney 1:02:08
Exactly.

Michael Manville 1:02:10
I had a quick question that I know in some ways to historian is probably well tread ground, but I think to our listenership is worth reiterating particularly as we get closer to the end of the program, and that is something you've mentioned a couple of times, which is this relationship between the HOLC and the FHA. You know going back as you mentioned, as far as Kenneth Jackson, there was this understanding that I think it's still a consensus that the FHA was, if you really wanted to draw some sort of straight line to bad outcomes, it would be easier to do with the FHA's redlining maps. But I think something that would help a lot of people, right, who aren't historians is to understand what was to our knowledge, the relationship between the HOLC and the FHA? And you know, in this particular question that I've always found very interesting, which is, you know, this issue of, we now have better access than ever thanks to the mapping inequality projects to the HOLC maps. But we were nearly able to see to the same extent the FHA maps that we have reason to believe were so much more impactful. And I wonder if you could just kind of, you know, dish on that a little bit to help our listeners out

Todd Michney 1:03:20
Absolutely. So, again, I don't want to fall into the kind of trap of saying which one was better or worse, because again, both did their part and did a key role in kind of normalizing these kinds of racist practices in the real estate and home finance industry. And I would know from the outset, that they're both kind of qualitatively different in that HOLC is a direct lending program where the federal government is actually buying up these mortgages at taxpayer expense. And, you know, owning those properties, whereas the FHA is more incentivizing builders and their financiers to build in certain locations versus others. HOLC had a kind of set lifetime of 15 years after which it was liquidated, shut down at FHA has continued all the way into our present, and has shifted its policies over the many decades it's been in existence. But there's a couple of things here, so these two government agencies have been portrayed as either collaborators like Kenneth Jackson's initial kind of assessment, to competitors which was more Amy Hillier's assessment, and they actually were somewhere in between. They did actually have productive lines of communication. I discovered, for my more recent article that just came out in the Journal of Planning History, that HOLC's Mortgagee Rehabilitation Division actually had offices in the same building as FHA for the first year of the project until it was later moved a mile across town into the whole headquarters in DC. So it would have been so easy to just go up a couple of floors, and I have records of Coron Fergus, the head of the City Survey Project saying, "hey, you could go and see if they have a map at FHA and see how it compares with ours", and spend a couple hours over lunch discussing that. So they had these, you know, easy lines of communication, and they had more formal connections. I mentioned earlier that one full set of these security maps was given over to FHA at the conclusion of the project. But there were also individual inquiries that were honored, for example, Ernest Fisher, at FHA, requested a copy of the FHA map for Atlanta, and that was handed over. And that was an exception to these no-sharing policies. They also, they met in other kinds of settings; there was something called the National Housing Committee that organized something called the 'National Appraisal Forum' in November 1937, and they would meet at a dining club in Washington DC once a week and compare notes on the housing market more generally. So these men all knew one another quite well, and exchanged information formally or informally. In that appraisal forum, they actually jointly plan that with private industry with the National Association of Real Estate Boards, with the American Institute of Real Estate Appraisers, with various different public and private housing agencies that came together and hosted a conference for over 1000 attendees. And at this conference, they had a display of maps and books, and among those was the Philadelphia security map, a redlining map. So this could be seen by up to 1000 of these conference goers; actually in one of the presentations on stage, Coren Fergus showed the Dayton, Ohio map and talked about the project. So, you know, there were all kinds of different ways in which these two government agencies collaborated, and had open lines of communication. So I think that's important to appreciate, even though they didn't make the same redlining maps; FHA turns out started making theirs about a year earlier, HOLC seemed to think that FHA methodology was less sound but it does seem that FHA was even more stringent in terms of the areas that it rated negatively. So you see differences, but you know, kind of just different flavors on a similar theme. And then to give you the most up to date information, there actually has been some recent discussion about what happened to the FHA's redlining maps. And in 1980, Lynn Soglin, conducted interviews for her PhD dissertation research with some former FHA officials and in Detroit, and they said that they had shredded the FHA's redlining maps on the orders of the Nixon administration around 1969. That was in response to a lawsuit from a fair housing group, and so that was kind of buried in a footnote of this 1980 dissertation and has just started getting a little more buzz among historian. Through Twitter, I've helped to kind of spread that but, you know, we still don't have confirmatory evidence, you know, for what was the fate of those maps. And there have been a few that slipped through the cracks. My collaborator, LaDale Winling, was just at the National Archives last fall, and found about four FHA redlining maps for Kenosha, Wisconsin among other places that had kind of been under our radar. So there are a couple examples of FHA maps that survived, but again, nothing approaching what we have for HOLC let alone private industry which presumably had thousands upon thousands of these of these sorts of maps,

Michael Manville 1:08:46
Right? I mean, the HOLC maps are this tremendous resource but it's important to remember we're sort of seeing the tip of an iceberg in some respects in terms of what people are actually operating on.

Shane Phillips 1:08:57
For our last question, here, there's so much nuance and complexity to this story. And I feel like we keep getting closer to, you know, the true or the full story, we'll probably never get there. But we're moving in that direction. And I'm just curious to hear what you think we should all take away from not just your research, but also this whole process of expanding and deepening our knowledge of what's gone on over these years and decades. And what directions you think this research could or should take in the future?

Todd Michney 1:09:31
I would say just that maybe we could be a little more aware of and appreciate the nuance and the important work that historians do that can only be accomplished through painstaking archival research. And we need to work together with social scientists and economists to arrive at the fullest picture. I think that oftentimes we're kind of portrayed as being antagonists, but I think that it's more looking through different sides of the telescope, you know, looking at the larger kind of top-down level versus the more granular level. And I've done my share of outreach too, and also debating with economists and sociologists on these topics. I also think it's important to understand how ordinary people feel viscerally when they see these maps and read these very descriptions and not disparage or dismiss or minimize their experience. So even if people, you know, may use redlining as a catch-all term, you know, when they see how government evaluators wrote about their neighborhood, where they live, and where they've experienced the denial of financing on houses, or businesses or other kinds of negative impacts, we can't just kind of tell them well, you know, you can't be too mad at the government because HOLC actually did lend to African American homeowners or whatever. I do think if we ever wanted to, say put together an airtight case for reparations, to really, truly address the situation, we would have to put together a legal case that was more or less airtight and get the story straight, and all of its complicated details. So I think that there's always a role for nuance and kind of moving the conversation forward. Even though it's often times difficult to grasp all the different nuances. It's very complicated understanding federal housing policy and mortgages and things of this sort. So I think there's a lot of work to be done where we can continue to learn especially how this played out on the local level.

Shane Phillips 1:11:27
I think that is a great message to close on. Todd Michney, thank you for coming on the housing voice podcast.

Todd Michney 1:11:33
Thank you, Shane. It's been my great pleasure. And also thank you, Michael, for all your questions as well.

Michael Manville 1:11:37
It was great to have you.

Shane Phillips 1:11:42
You can read more about Todd's research on our website lewis.ucla.edu. Show Notes and a transcript of the interview are there to the UCLA Lewis Center is on Facebook and Twitter. I'm on Twitter at ShaneDPhillips. And Mike is there at MichaelManville6. Thanks again for listening. We'll see you next time.