Home Owners' Loan Corporation
HOLC
A New Deal-era federal agency that produced the original color-coded redlining maps still used today to study how discriminatory housing policy shaped industrial siting.
Related terms
Redlining A historical, federally sanctioned practice (begun by HOLC in the 1930s) of denying mortgages and investment to neighborhoods marked 'hazardous'—usually based on race. Today's most polluted zip codes correlate strongly with the old redlined maps. Industrial Siting The decision-making process that determines where new factories, refineries, landfills, or hazardous facilities get built. Historically these decisions concentrated polluters in low-income and minority neighborhoods.