In the late 1930s, a federal agency graded every neighborhood in Elmira for
mortgage risk. Green meant safe to lend. Red meant don't. The map it drew shaped
which blocks got money, and which didn't, for the next eighty years.
What HOLC Was
The Home Owners' Loan Corporation, or HOLC, was a New Deal agency. Congress
created it in 1933 to rescue mortgages people could no longer pay. By the late
1930s it had surveyed hundreds of American cities. For each one it drew a
"Residential Security Map" telling lenders where it was safe to lend.
Local real estate brokers, bankers, and city officials told HOLC's appraisers
what they thought of each neighborhood. The appraiser then gave the area one of
four grades and filled out a standard form. The form asked about the condition
of the housing. It also asked who lived there, by race and by country of origin.
A — Best / "Green"
B — Still Desirable / "Blue"
C — Definitely Declining / "Yellow"
D — Hazardous / "Red"
The grades were not just about the houses.
If Black residents, Jewish residents, or recent immigrants lived on a block,
that counted against it. It could pull a neighborhood's grade down or wipe it
out. A D grade, the "red" in redlining, marked the whole area as a bad bet for
a federally backed mortgage. The condition of your own house did not enter into
it. Private lenders followed the maps. The FHA's rulebook for lenders told them
outright to avoid areas with "incompatible racial groups."
Elmira's Map — 26 Zones
HOLC drew 26 zones in the City of Elmira: one A, five B, ten C, and eight D.
It outlined industrial and commercial land separately. Click any zone for its
grade and for the original description the appraisers wrote.
The D zones are not scattered at random. They sit along the South Side and the
east bank of the Chemung River. That is the same ground that lost the most
buildings to urban renewal and flood cleanup thirty years later.
The one A zone sits in the northwest, near Elmira College and
the larger homes on the high ground above the river. The five B zones ring it
and run east and south through middle-class blocks.
The eight D zones sit in the South Side and along the east bank
near Water Street. That was Elmira's largest African American neighborhood. In
the 1960s the Urban Renewal Act aimed "slum clearance" at exactly this area.
After the 1972 flood, the state's Urban Development Corporation went further.
Its plan tore down the Water Street business district instead of rebuilding it.
The mechanism is simple. D-graded neighborhoods went decades without mortgage
money. Owners could not refinance, or borrow to fix a roof. Buildings ran down.
So when urban renewal arrived, the case for the bulldozer made itself. The
neighborhood looked exactly like what decades without lending had made it.
The C and D zones line up with today's map too. Assessments are lowest there.
Vacant and abandoned parcels are most common there. The Elmira fiscal health page maps that blight measure,
and it tracks the 1940 hazardous zones closely.
The Legacy
Study after study finds the same thing. Neighborhoods once graded D
still have fewer homeowners, lower home values, more poverty, and worse
health. That holds even when researchers account for other causes.
One 2020 study looked at 108 U.S. urban areas (Hoffman, Shandas & Pendleton,
Climate 8(1):12). Formerly redlined neighborhoods ran about 5°F hotter
in summer, and up to 12°F hotter in a few cities. The reason is physical: fewer
trees and more pavement, left behind when stores and factories replaced the
houses that came down. The study is national. Elmira was not one of the cities
it measured.
In Elmira the chain is easy to follow. Five rounds of decisions, over three
generations, all steered money away from the South Side: the HOLC grades, FHA
lending rules, urban renewal clearances, the I-86 corridor that sped up the move
to the suburbs, and the post-flood plan that chose a park over a rebuilt
neighborhood. Each one started from the damage the last one left.
The 1940 map still shapes who pays what. Elmira has not done a full citywide
reassessment since 1995, which the frozen roll page explains. Almost every home in the
city is now assessed for less than it would sell for. But the gap is not even.
Homes in the old C and D zones, where values are lowest, are assessed at a higher
share of what they are worth than the typical home. So their owners pay more than
their share of the city's tax levy.
Map data and area descriptions: Nelson, Robert K., LaDale Winling, Richard Marciano,
Nathan Connolly, et al., "Mapping Inequality," American Panorama, ed. Robert K. Nelson
and Edward L. Ayers, accessed 2026,
https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/.