2022/12/08 by Arunav Gupta, Gupta, Arunav
Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Social Sciences · #Applications (stat.AP) #Computational Geometry (cs.CG) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Housing Market and Economics #Urbanization and City Planning
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2212.04117
openalex publication_date 2022/12/08 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
There has been a large body of work exploring the discriminatory nature of the home mortgage risk maps produced by the Home Owners' Loan Corporation in the late 1930s. However, little attention has been paid to the question of whether these maps are still descriptive of racial residential boundaries in their cities 80 years after their creation. To address this gap, Markov Chain Monte Carlo, previously unutilized in the relevant literature, is employed to randomly generate many plausible alternative mortgage security maps. Then, the racial evenness of the HOLC maps and the generated maps is compared using Shannon's entropy. These findings indicate that the HOLC maps are significantly descriptive of the precise racial residential boundaries prevalent across eleven US cities in 2010. The methodology used here is highly modular and reproducible, allowing for future work measuring different outcome statistics, locations, and time periods.