► CANCELED: Social Sciences History Seminar

Title: Which Lenders Offered Mortgage Loans to Blacks, Immigrants, and Native White During the Great Depression?

Abstract: The combination of the Great Depression and New Deal mortgage programs transformed the pre-1930 residential mortgage market into the modern American home lending industry. In this paper we provide a comprehensive picture of the role that race and ethnicity played in mortgage lending during those formative years. In doing so we expand upon the results of six major monographs sponsored by the NBER between 1935 and 1960 that documented the emergence of a postwar American residential mortgage system (Snowden 2014). Notably lacking in this earlier work was examination of how race and ethnicity influenced the behavior of lenders and the impacts of federal policy. In this paper we address this neglect by drawing out narrative and quantitative evidence from multiple sources to describe how home mortgage lending was influenced by race and ethnicity in the 1930s.