Join us for the first Open and Engaged Lecture of academic year 2026 -2027.
About the talk: We introduce a novel dataset describing neighborhood patterns of federally-insured mortgages from 1935 to 1975, the period in which the American homeownership society emerged alongside the exclusion of people and communities of color from mortgage finance through the process of "redlining." Specifically, we collected, digitized, and geocoded over 110,000 home loans insured by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) or the Veterans Administration (VA). We show both FHA and VA disproportionately insured loans in white, high income, and suburban neighborhoods, though the pattern reversed by 1970 after Civil Rights legislation prohibited explicit racial discrimination. We also describe a typology of Black neighborhoods where FHA/VA loans were made during the earlier period of exclusion.
Jacob W. Faber is an associate Professor of Sociology and Public Service at New York University, and co-founder of the Redlining Lab. Faber’s work focuses on spatial inequality. He leverages observational and experimental methods to study the mechanisms responsible for sorting individuals across space and how the distributions of people by race and class interact with political, social, and ecological systems to sustain economic disparities.