Date of Graduation

Spring 5-23-2022

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science in Applied Economics (MSAE)

College/School

College of Arts and Sciences

Department/Program

Economics

First Advisor

Jesse Anttila-Hughes

Abstract

Racial segregation, which happened more than one hundred years ago in the U.S., is a fundamental cause of economic inequality for people living in historically segregated neighborhoods today. Redlining was one form of federal policy that forced to separate communities by race even more after the Great Depression. The Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) maps are widely used in economic research papers as one of the most comprehensive sources of data available to measure the effect of residential segregation. In this paper, using the Historical Redline Score (HRS) method, the author measured the association between modern-day population distribution, rent prices, and housing values in historically segregated neighborhoods. The key contributions of this paper that the author collected and used in the research were previously unavailable for public Census 2020 data combined with continuous historical redline scores across and within multiple geographic regions with a specific focus on California (CA). The key findings of the analysis proved the persisting segregation in historically redlined communities, showing a higher percentage of Black vs. Whites in the historically redlined neighborhoods’ population, lower value of housing, and rent prices on national, state (CA), and city (San Francisco) levels.

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