Discriminating Appraisals: Cartography, Computation, and Access to Federal Mortgage Insurance in the 1930s

Histories of the emergence of national standards for underwriting at the US Federal Housing Administration (FHA) during the 1930s focus on the discriminatory aspects of agency practices. Yet the officials who designed the FHA’s risk-rating system believed they were building a neutral tool to ensure quality control in lending. This article situates risk-rating within the history of real estate science and technology, and links the agency’s risk-mapping techniques to the era’s similarly aspirational social “science,” to reveal how discriminatory practices could be regarded as apolitical. Its account of the FHA’s risk-rating system in general and neighborhood risk-rating in particular provides a compelling addition to studies of statistics and social control. This article’s broader insights into maps’ uses for social data-processing argue for including cartography alongside other twentieth-century computational tools.