SU Library sponsors ‘Redlining Maps from the Home Owners Loan Corporation’

Syracuse University Library will present a faculty collaborative research colloquium, “1930s Redlining Maps from the Home Owners Loan Corporation,” in the Peter Graham Scholarly Commons in Bird Library on Tuesday, Nov. 2, from 3-5 p.m.

Speakers include Emanuel Carter, associate professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry; Kishi Animashaun Ducre, assistant professor in the African American Studies Department of SU’s College of Arts and Sciences; Mark Monmonier, Distinguished Professor of Geography at SU’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs; John Olson, Government Documents, Maps and GIS Librarian at SU Library; and Arthur Paris, associate professor in the Sociology Department in Arts and Sciences.

Established in 1932, the Home Owners Loan Corp. (HOLC) was a component of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board and was charged with looking at 239 cities to determine the levels of security for real estate investments in the neighborhoods of those cities, and to create “Residential Security Maps.” These maps, created between 1935 and 1940, showed real estate conditions in those cities. The data gathered in the associated surveys and reports contains a wealth of information about the population and the condition of the housing stock of those cities and their neighborhoods within each graded area on the maps. These maps were shared with only a small number of people outside of the HOLC and are only now being rediscovered.

For more information about the colloquium, contact Olson at 443-4818 or jaolson@syr.edu.