In the late 1930s, the federal Home Owners' Loan Corporation graded every neighborhood
in Elmira for mortgage lending risk. The map it produced shaped which blocks got
investment — and which didn't — for the next eighty years.
What HOLC Was
The Home Owners' Loan Corporation was a New Deal agency created in 1933 to
refinance distressed mortgages. By the late 1930s it had surveyed hundreds
of American cities, producing detailed "Residential Security Maps" to guide
mortgage lending decisions.
Local real estate brokers, bankers, and city officials fed HOLC's appraisers
ground-level assessments of each neighborhood. Appraisers then assigned one
of four grades and wrote a standardized area description — a document that
recorded not just housing conditions but the racial and ethnic composition
of each block.
A — Best / "Green"
B — Still Desirable / "Blue"
C — Definitely Declining / "Yellow"
D — Hazardous / "Red"
The grades were not neutral assessments of housing quality.
The presence of Black residents, Jewish residents, or recent immigrants was
itself treated as a risk factor that could lower or destroy a neighborhood's
grade. Areas graded D — "redlined" — were considered poor candidates for
federally-backed mortgage lending, regardless of the condition of the
individual homes. Private lenders used the maps as guidance. FHA underwriting
guidelines explicitly discouraged loans in areas with "incompatible racial
groups."
Elmira's Map — 26 Zones
HOLC mapped 26 zones in the City of Elmira: one A, five B, ten C, and eight D,
plus separate Industrial and Commercial outlines. Click any zone to see its
grade, category, and the original area description written by HOLC appraisers.
The D zones are not randomly distributed. They cluster along the South Side
and the east bank of the Chemung River — the same geography that bore the
brunt of urban renewal and flood recovery demolitions three decades later.
The single A zone covers a small area in the northwest — near
Elmira College and the larger homes on the high ground above the river. The
five B zones ring the A zone and extend east and south into middle-class
residential neighborhoods.
The eight D zones concentrate in the South Side and along the
east bank near the Water Street corridor — historically Elmira's largest
African American neighborhood. By the 1960s, this is exactly the area that
would be targeted for "slum clearance" through the Urban Renewal Act and,
after the 1972 flood, by the UDC's redevelopment plan that razed the Water
Street commercial district rather than rebuilding it.
The mechanism is direct: D-graded neighborhoods were starved of mortgage
capital for decades. Homeowners couldn't refinance or get improvement loans.
Properties deteriorated. By the time urban renewal arrived, the case for
demolition was easy to make — the neighborhood looked exactly like what
decades of disinvestment had made it.
The C and D zones also overlap substantially with the areas where current
property assessments are lowest and the proportion of vacant and abandoned
parcels is highest. The Elmira
fiscal health page shows the blight proxy distribution; it lines up closely
with the 1940 hazardous zones.
The Legacy
Research consistently finds that formerly D-graded neighborhoods
have significantly lower homeownership rates, lower home values, higher
poverty rates, and worse health outcomes today — even after
controlling for other factors. A 2020 study of 108 U.S. urban areas
(Hoffman, Shandas & Pendleton, Climate 8(1):12) found that formerly
redlined neighborhoods are on average about 5°F hotter in summer — and as much
as 12°F in some cities — due to lower tree canopy and more impervious surfaces,
a legacy of the commercial and industrial development that replaced residential
demolitions. (The finding is national; Elmira was not individually among the
cities measured.)
For Elmira, the connection runs through several generations of policy
decisions that consistently concentrated investment away from the South Side:
the HOLC grades, FHA lending restrictions, urban renewal clearances, the
I-86 corridor that accelerated suburban departure, and the post-flood UDC
plan that chose a park over a rebuilt neighborhood. Each decision built on
the condition created by the last.
Elmira's frozen assessment roll —
discussed on the fiscal health page — means that properties in formerly
redlined areas, where values are lowest, are also the most likely to be
over-assessed relative to their actual market value. The 1940 map still
shapes who pays what.
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/.