The Desirability of Lower Manhattan
Visualizing the HOLC Neighborhood Assessment Maps Nine Decades Later
One of my main fascinations about New York City is its cultural hotspots and diverse neighborhoods. There seems to be a neighborhood that matches almost every cultural identity, from Little Italy in Lower Manhattan to Koreatown in Midtown. From my personal experience living in Chinatown the past couple of months, I’ve noticed the strong relationships between neighbors, street vendors, and the long-standing buildings that house the community members.
These cultural pockets could be attributed to a variety of reasons, but one point that I was always interested in came from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal Era. From the early to late 1930s, the FDR administration produced a number of economic programs to help combat the effects of the Great Depression. It was also during this time where race relations and segregation were very prevalent throughout cities across the nation. From this came the Home Owner’s Loan Corporation Neighborhood Assessment Maps, where federal agents assigned different neighborhoods a grade to determine their mortgage security.
While some saw the HOLC grading systems as a way to mitigate the growing number of immigrants and African Americans moving into cities, the federal government intended for it to be a way to restructure the mortgage lending market into a more holistic process. Despite their intentions, their ranking process displayed some racial and class biases that raised concerns in the past and even today. In the following sections, we take a look at how the HOLC’s neighborhood grades hold value in 2021, and whether or not the idea of “desirability” has changed over the past decades.
How the Neighborhoods were Ranked
In the mid-1930s, the federal government conducted a City Survey Program to collect data from over 200 US cities. The HOLC then used 4 different grading classifications ranging from A to D to rank different communities’ desirability, using matching colors to visually show the rankings on a map.
The figure below shows examples of how rankings were used in cities along with their descriptions. As we can see, areas labeled as A and colored green were considered “best” for living environments, while areas labeled as D and colored red were deemed “hazardous” by the federal government to be considered for the mortgage loans.
Along with these map rankings were also area descriptions of each neighborhood. The example below shows a neighborhood in Denver, Colorado, where federal agents used terms like “favorable” and “detrimental” influences, and “infiltration” to determine what characteristics of the neighborhood makes it desirable, along with if it was “at risk” of having more diverse populations. The choice of words the HOLC uses to describe these neighborhoods play an important role in how the areas were ranked and even more so, how they look today. Let’s take a deeper look at these grades and descriptions by seeing how neighborhoods in Lower Manhattan in the 1930s were viewed by the federal government.
HOLC Rankings in Lower Manhattan
The map above shows the different 1938 HOLC grades for each neighborhood as well as the corresponding 2020 neighborhoods. We can see that the neighborhoods of Battery Park City, the Financial District, and Tribeca, are some of the few areas that don’t have HOLC classifications because the neighborhoods were not yet established at the time. Additionally, we see how present-day neighborhoods were classified by the federal government in 1938. While there are no “A” areas in this region, the next highest-graded area is B1, which is present-day Greenwich Village, with C1 neighboring it, or present day West Village. The majority of Lower Manhattan is classified as a “D” area, including the area of Chinatown surrounding Canal Street.
The following scanned images are the original corresponding descriptions for these three different areas. Notice the words they use to classify each area, especially the clarifying remarks that provide further detail on the types of families that the buildings in these neighborhoods house.
Area C1, present-day West Village, had mostly Italian immigrants inhabiting the neighborhood. The description notes that it had a steady increase in improvements and developments over the years, where some houses were actually originally speakeasies. The future desirability of the area had predictions of increasing, reflective of how West Village is like today.
In B1, present-day Greenwich Village, the only classified “B” area in the region, the neighborhood was home to white collar, upper middle class workers and families, with virtually no immigrant or African American residents and almost no detrimental influences as well. The future desirability of the neighborhood had predictions of staying static for the forthcoming years.
The rest of Lower Manhattan is seen to be classified as “D” areas. D1, present-day Chinatown, had an influx of varying European immigrants and relief families, where the occupations ranged from low-income laborers to white-collar workers. Additionally, the clarifying remarks note that the neighborhood was vulnerable to foreclosures and actually intended for slum clearance. The desirability of the neighborhood was predicted to stay stagnant.
After reading the classifications of these neighborhoods, I wondered how the HOLC neighborhood assessments lived up to today. Would some of these neighborhoods still be considered undesirable? For the purposes of this article, I paid attention to the property values and racial and ethnic makeups of the neighborhoods to see how the HOLC descriptions compare to neighborhood statuses today.
Assessing Present-day Neighborhood Desirability
To see how the value of these neighborhoods compared to the 1938 HOLC assessments, I looked at the rolling sales of properties from the past year. From the map above, we see how the areas of Chinatown and part of Lower East Side have some of the highest property values in Lower Manhattan. While West Village and Greenwich Village have areas of very high property values as well, there is more of a mix of lower to mid properties.
In addition to the values of these properties, we can also see HOLC-graded desirability by the racial and ethnic makeups of these neighborhoods. The map below shows the white population majority living in West Village, Greenwich Village, and East Village. On the contrary, Chinatown and Lower East Side have more of a mix of POC populations, where a majority of Asian and Hispanic/Latinx residents reside.
Conclusions
Based on these maps, we can see how current neighborhood statuses compare to the 1938 HOLC rankings. In 1938, the HOLC paid careful attention to the ethnic makeup of neighborhoods, job statuses, as well as the environment of the buildings, and the setting they were in to determine their desirability for mortgage loan assessments.
By looking at data from this past year, we can gauge how the HOLC would rank these same neighborhoods today. While Chinatown still has a more diverse racial and ethnic population majority, it also has very high property values. This is surprising, especially compared to the low clarifying remarks and desirability the HOLC labeled it as in the 1930s. On the other hand, while the neighborhoods of Greenwich and West Village have a white population majority, the combined property values are lower than Chinatown’s. This is also surprising considering the high trends of desirability the HOLC granted them in the 1930s.
While there are other factors that haven’t been considered in this assessment, we can see how the idea of “desirability” has changed throughout the past decades. The New Deal Era was still very much guided under racial prejudices that drove how the federal government saw and classified neighborhoods. Although racial biases may still be present today, systems have been placed to welcome more integration and diverse neighborhoods. Additionally, preferences have changed where some residents actually like living in more diverse neighborhoods.
Methodology
All three maps were created on QGIS with base maps courtesy of Positron and Mapping Inequality, University of Richmond. All maps were also post-processed in Google Slides.
The first map was created by overlaying 2020 Neighborhood Tabulation Areas (NTAs) to create borders for 2020 Manhattan neighborhoods by filtering the file to only include NTAs in Manhattan. I downloaded HOLC Manhattan data as a shapefile from Mapping Inequality, University of Richmond and I used categorized symbology to classify each HOLC graded area.
The second map was created by also overlaying 2020 Neighborhood Tabulation Areas (NTAs) to create borders for the 2020 Manhattan neighborhoods by filtering the file to only include NTAs in Manhattan. I then downloaded the NYC PLUTO map shapefile and filtered it to only include data from Manhattan. After, I downloaded 2020–2021 Manhattan Rolling Sales data, converted the file to a csv file, then joined the file to the PLUTO shapefile via lot value to see each tax lot with the rolling sales property values.
The third map was created by also overlaying 2020 Neighborhood Tabulation Areas (NTAs) to create borders for the 2020 Manhattan neighborhoods by filtering the file to only include NTAs in Manhattan. I then downloaded ACS race and ethnicity data from IPUMS NGHIS along with the census block group shapefiles. I joined the two files together via GISJOIN changed the symbology to “categorical” to see which race and ethnicity group was the majority in each census block group.
Data sources:
2020 Neighborhood Tabulation Areas (NTAs)