# Mortgage denials: report

Chapter 5.3 of ZIP Code Destiny, by Vishal Singh (NYU Stern). Generated from the chapter's data files; the reading version is at https://vishalsingh.org/zipcode/mortgage-denials. Table n of this report is figure n of the chapter.

## Identification

- Title: Mortgage denials
- Label: The application and the answer
- Chapter: 5.3 (Part V, Home, work and money; An American life)
- Question: How do mortgage denial rates differ by tract deprivation, applicant race and the historical redlining grade?
- Dek: Lenders denied 13.8% of the home-purchase applications they decided in 2024 in the most deprived tenth of census tracts and 7.8% in the least deprived tenth.
- Grain: neighborhoods
- Status: published
- Published: 2026-10-09
- Updated: not revised
- Data sources:
  - HMDA mortgage lending. Home Mortgage Disclosure Act Loan/Application Register, 2024, first-lien site-built one-to-four-unit principal-residence applications aggregated to 2020 tracts by loan purpose and applicant group; cells under 10 applications withheld; years: 2024; weights: none (counts of decided applications, pooled over tracts)
  - Area Deprivation Index. Area Deprivation Index 2023, national rank by tract; years: 2023 release (version 4.0.1; built on ACS 2019-2023); weights: none (tenths hold near-equal numbers of tracts)
  - Mapping Inequality (HOLC maps). Mapping Inequality HOLC residential security maps, 1935 to 1940, graded polygons overlaid on 2020 tracts; years: 1930s-1940s maps (2023 digitization); weights: decided applications
  - Published estimates from cited studies. One comparison quoted from the abstract of Hanson, Hawley, Martin and Liu (2016); years: as reported in each study; weights: as reported in the paper
- Canonical URL: https://vishalsingh.org/zipcode/mortgage-denials
- Report: https://vishalsingh.org/zipcode/mortgage-denials/report
- Markdown: https://vishalsingh.org/zipcode/mortgage-denials/report.md
- BibTeX key: singh2026mortgagedenials

```bibtex
@misc{singh2026mortgagedenials,
  author = {Singh, Vishal},
  title = {Mortgage denials},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://vishalsingh.org/zipcode/mortgage-denials},
  note = {In ZIP Code Destiny. Published 9 October 2026.}
}
```

## Principal estimates

The facts the dek and the opening prose cite, in order of appearance.

| Estimand | Population | Period | Value | Interval | n | Weights | Source | Fact id |
| --- | --- | --- | ---: | --- | ---: | --- | --- | --- |
| denied applications divided by applications that were originated or denied, summed over the tracts (a pooled rate), county-cluster bootstrap interval | home-purchase applications decided in 2024 in the most deprived tenth of tracts by Area Deprivation Index national rank (tenths hold equal numbers of tracts) | applications decided in 2024 | 13.8% | 95% CI 13.3% to 14.3% | 7,591 tracts | none (counts of decided applications, pooled over tracts) | HMDA mortgage lending | rate_d10 |
| denied applications divided by applications that were originated or denied, summed over the tracts (a pooled rate), county-cluster bootstrap interval | home-purchase applications decided in 2024 in the least deprived tenth of tracts by Area Deprivation Index national rank (tenths hold equal numbers of tracts) | applications decided in 2024 | 7.8% | 95% CI 7.2% to 8.4% | 7,584 tracts | none (counts of decided applications, pooled over tracts) | HMDA mortgage lending | rate_d1 |
| count of tracts where the cells for non-Hispanic Black and non-Hispanic white applicants are both published | tracts of the 50 states and DC | 2024 | 5,657 |   |   | none (full count) | HMDA mortgage lending | n_shared_black |
| tracts where the cells for non-Hispanic Black and non-Hispanic white applicants are both published, divided by tracts with a published all-applicant cell | home-purchase applications that a covered lender originated or denied in 2024, first-lien loans on site-built homes with up to four units that applicants intend as a principal residence, in tracts of the 50 states and DC with a published cell | applications decided in 2024 | 7.4% |   | 76,072 tracts | none (each tract counts once) | HMDA mortgage lending | share_shared_black |
| denied applications divided by applications that were originated or denied, summed over the tracts (a pooled rate), county-cluster bootstrap interval | non-Hispanic Black applicants whose home-purchase application was decided in 2024, in the tracts where the cells for non-Hispanic Black and non-Hispanic white applicants are both published | applications decided in 2024 | 16.2% | 95% CI 15.7% to 16.8% | 5,657 tracts | none (counts of decided applications, pooled over tracts) | HMDA mortgage lending | same_black |
| denied applications divided by applications that were originated or denied, summed over the tracts (a pooled rate), county-cluster bootstrap interval | non-Hispanic white applicants whose home-purchase application was decided in 2024, in the tracts where the cells for non-Hispanic Black and non-Hispanic white applicants are both published | applications decided in 2024 | 6.2% | 95% CI 6.0% to 6.5% | 5,657 tracts | none (counts of decided applications, pooled over tracts) | HMDA mortgage lending | same_white_vs_black |

## Findings

Lenders denied 13.8% (95% CI 13.3% to 14.3%) of the home-purchase applications that they decided in 2024 in the most deprived tenth of census tracts and 7.8% (95% CI 7.2% to 8.4%) in the least deprived tenth. In the 5,657 tracts that have published rates for both groups, which are 7.4% of all tracts, the denial rate was 16.2% (95% CI 15.7% to 16.8%) for non-Hispanic Black applicants and 6.2% (95% CI 6.0% to 6.5%) for non-Hispanic white applicants.

The data are tract totals from the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, which requires lenders above size thresholds to report every application and what became of it. A denial rate is a share of applications that reached a decision. It leaves out people who never applied, applications that were withdrawn, and everything a lender weighs about the applicant: credit history, debts, savings and the size of the loan against the value of the home. The chapter describes where and for whom applications ended in a denial. It does not measure whether a lender weighed an applicant's race in a decision, and the gaps below are not estimates of discrimination.

The chapter cuts the data three ways: tracts ranked by deprivation, applicant groups within tracts, and the grades that the Home Owners' Loan Corporation gave neighborhoods in the 1930s. Chapter 5.2, Home value, income and redlining (https://vishalsingh.org/zipcode/home-value-income-and-redlining) compares those grades with life expectancy and home values, and Chapter 5.1, Work, wages and access to jobs (https://vishalsingh.org/zipcode/work-wages-and-access-to-jobs) covers the earnings that stand behind an application.

### What a denial rate counts

The file holds first-lien loans on site-built homes with up to four units that applicants intend as a principal residence, reported for 2024 by lenders above the HMDA reporting thresholds. It splits each tract by loan purpose. Home-purchase applications were denied 9.0% of the time, refinance applications 20.7% and cash-out refinance applications 35.8% (Table 1). The chapter uses home-purchase applications throughout. The rates differ by purpose, so a mix of purposes would let the mix of loans move a place's rate. Only the home-purchase file has enough applications by group. In it, 8,232 tracts have a published rate for non-Hispanic Black applicants, against 1,155 for refinance loans and 2,938 for cash-out loans.

Table 1. Decided home-purchase applications were denied 9.0% of the time, against 20.7% for refinance and 35.8% for cash-out refinance loans

The rate is denied applications divided by decided applications, those that the lender originated or denied. Applications that the applicant withdrew or left incomplete, loans approved but not accepted, and loans bought from another lender are outside it. A borrower who was discouraged before applying, or steered to a different loan, never enters it. Every rate here is pooled, with denied and decided counts summed over tracts. Pooled over 76,072 tracts in every state and DC, lenders denied 278,451 of the 3,097,390 home-purchase applications that they decided in 2024, a rate of 9.0% (95% CI 8.7% to 9.3%). The median tract decides only 31 applications, so a single tract's rate is noisy. Intervals are 95% intervals from a bootstrap that resamples whole counties.

When the file was staged, any cell with fewer than 10 applications, whatever their outcome and purchased loans included, was suppressed. That is a rule of this book and not an HMDA flag. A suppressed cell is missing, never zero, and leaves both the denied and the decided counts. On that rule 5,999 tracts have no all-applicant home-purchase cell, each holding at most 9 applications. A cell for one group is withheld more often, because the group itself needs 10 applications in the tract. Each group's rate therefore comes from its own set of tracts.

The floor counts applications of every outcome, so a published cell can rest on few decided applications. Of the 76,072 tracts, 4,865 decided fewer than 10. Leaving out tracts below 30 decided applications lowers the overall rate from 9.0% to 8.5% (95% CI 8.2% to 8.8%).

Puerto Rico's 637 tracts with a published cell are set aside. Of those with a deprivation rank, 69% sit where the most deprived tenth of the other tracts begins, and the pooled rate there is 19.1% (95% CI 18.3% to 20.0%) on 11,409 decided applications. Including them would move the most deprived tenth from 13.8% to 14.1% and the overall rate by 0.04 points.

HMDA records an applicant's ethnicity and race as the applicant reports them, with fallback rules when the applicant does not answer. The tract file keeps four groups: applicants who are white and not Hispanic or Latino, Black or African American and not Hispanic or Latino, Hispanic or Latino of any race, and Asian and not Hispanic or Latino. The chapter calls them non-Hispanic white, non-Hispanic Black, Hispanic and non-Hispanic Asian applicants. Applicants who are American Indian or Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, of two or more races, joint, or of unavailable race count in the all-applicant rate only. The four groups therefore do not add up to it. Loan type (conventional, FHA, VA or USDA) is not in the tract file.

### Denial rates rise with deprivation after the third tenth

The 75,978 tracts that have a deprivation rank are ranked by the Area Deprivation Index national rank and cut into tenths with near-equal numbers of tracts (tracts tied on the rank stay in one tenth). The 94 tracts with no rank are left out of this and the next two sections. The denial rate is 7.8% (95% CI 7.2% to 8.4%) in the least deprived tenth, 7.7% in the second and 7.6% in the third. The differences among those three tenths are within sampling error.

After the third tenth the rate rises at every step, to 13.8% (95% CI 13.3% to 14.3%) in the most deprived tenth (Table 2). That is 6.0 (95% CI 5.2 to 6.8) points above the least deprived tenth and 6.2 (95% CI 5.6 to 6.8) above the third. The last step, from the ninth tenth to the tenth, is the largest.

The rank is built partly from income and housing costs, so the curve mixes where an applicant lives with how much money applicants there have. The file reports both: the median applicant income and the median loan amount of each tract. Averaged over the tracts of a tenth and weighted by decided applications, they are $64 thousand (95% CI $63 thousand to $65 thousand) and $162 thousand (95% CI $158 thousand to $167 thousand) in the most deprived tenth, against $279 thousand (95% CI $266 thousand to $292 thousand) and $827 thousand (95% CI $774 thousand to $879 thousand) in the least deprived. The least deprived tenth holds the largest loans. The tract file does not say whether loan size, income or credit history sits behind a denial, so the curve describes where applications are denied and not why.

Table 2. The denial rate was 7.8% in the least deprived tenth of tracts and 13.8% in the most deprived, and it is level across the three least deprived tenths

Single tracts scatter around the tenth means. One denial moves the rate of a tract that decides few applications by several points, and the dots in the figure come only from tracts that decided at least 30.

### Black and Hispanic applicants are denied more often than white applicants

Over the tracts where each group's cell is published, non-Hispanic white applicants were denied 6.5% (95% CI 6.3% to 6.6%) of the time, non-Hispanic Asian applicants 8.9% (95% CI 8.4% to 9.4%), Hispanic applicants 13.1% (95% CI 12.4% to 13.9%) and non-Hispanic Black applicants 17.0% (95% CI 16.4% to 17.7%). Each rate rests on a different set of tracts, so that comparison mixes places with groups. Within tenths of tract deprivation, the Black and Hispanic rates are above the white rate in every tenth drawn, and so is the Asian rate in the first eight (Table 3).

The white curve is U-shaped. It is 6.7% (95% CI 6.0% to 7.5%) in the least deprived tenth, 5.4% in the third and 10.4% in the most deprived.

The other three groups rise with deprivation. The Black rate goes from 14.6% in the third tenth to 20.3% in the most deprived, and the Hispanic rate from 11.8% to 14.2%. The Asian rate goes from 7.8% in the least deprived tenth to 12.9% in the eighth.

Table 3. In every tenth of tracts with enough applications, Black and Hispanic applicants were denied more often than white applicants

A point is drawn when it rests on at least 100 tracts. That drops the Black rate in the least deprived tenth and the Asian rate in the ninth and tenth, where few tracts have 10 or more applications from the group.

### The gap within a tract shows no trend with deprivation or applicant income

Comparing groups across tracts mixes who lives where with how applications fare. A narrower comparison keeps only tracts where both groups have a published cell and sets each group's pooled rate in those tracts side by side. In the 5,657 tracts that hold both Black and white cells, Black applicants were denied 16.2% (95% CI 15.7% to 16.8%) of the time and white applicants 6.2% (95% CI 6.0% to 6.5%) (Table 4). The gap is 10.0 (95% CI 9.5 to 10.4) points, or 2.6 (95% CI 2.5 to 2.7) times the white rate.

Hispanic applicants were denied 12.8% (95% CI 12.2% to 13.5%) of the time against 6.5% (95% CI 6.2% to 6.8%) for white applicants in the same 10,189 tracts, a gap of 6.4 (95% CI 5.9 to 6.9) points or 2.0 (95% CI 1.9 to 2.1) times. For Asian applicants the rates were 8.9% (95% CI 8.5% to 9.4%) and 5.7% (95% CI 5.4% to 6.0%) in 5,490 tracts, a gap of 3.2 (95% CI 2.8 to 3.6) points or 1.6 (95% CI 1.5 to 1.7) times. The Black gap is larger than the Hispanic gap, which is larger than the Asian gap.

Over each group's own tracts the Black gap is 10.5 (95% CI 9.9 to 11.2) points, so holding the tract fixed changes little. The tracts that hold both cells are a small and selected set, and 27% of their Black cells rest on fewer than 10 decided applications. Requiring at least 10 decided applications from both groups leaves the Black gap at 10.0 (95% CI 9.5 to 10.6) points. Requiring at least 30 leaves it at 10.8 (95% CI 10.1 to 11.6) points.

Table 4. In the tracts that hold both groups, Black applicants were denied 16.2% of the time and white applicants 6.2%

The gap shows no trend with the deprivation of the tract or with the typical applicant income in it. Across tenths of the deprivation index, the same-tract gap between Black and white applicants runs from 8.6 to 10.4 points, and its interval is above zero in every tenth. Its slope is 0.00 (95% CI −0.22 to 0.21) points per tenth. Single tenths differ from one another, so the claim is about the trend and not about every tenth. The ratio of the Black rate to the white rate is lower in the most deprived tenth, 2.0 (95% CI 1.8 to 2.3), than in the fifth tenth, 2.8 (95% CI 2.6 to 3.0). The white rate is higher in the most deprived tenth, so the same gap in points is a smaller multiple.

Fifths of tracts by the median income reported on their applications run from $74 thousand or less to $125 thousand or more. Across them the gap runs from 9.1 to 10.3 points, with a slope of −0.06 (95% CI −0.33 to 0.20) points per fifth (Table 5).

Table 5. The same-tract gap between Black and white applicants stays between 8.6 and 10.4 percentage points across tenths of tract deprivation

A tract holds the neighborhood fixed and leaves the applicant free to differ. Applicants in one tract can differ in credit history, debt relative to income, the down payment, the loan type and the lender they chose, and none of these is in the tract file. A study of Boston lenders, published in 1996, added fields for credit history, debt burdens and loan-to-value ratios to the application records. With those fields, the difference in denial rates between minority and white applicants narrowed and did not disappear.[1] The tract file cannot repeat that exercise. Its gaps can be larger or smaller than the gaps among applicants with the same finances, and the data do not say which.

> Causal evidence: Whether loan officers respond differently to names that signal race (Matched-pair email correspondence experiment)
>
> Hanson, Hawley, Martin and Liu test the step that comes before an application.[2] They emailed licensed mortgage loan originators with a first inquiry about a loan. The inquiries varied the sender's name, chosen to signal a Black or a white sender, and the credit score the sender reported. Because the researchers set the name and the reported score in each inquiry, a difference in how originators replied can be attributed to them. Originators answered inquiries with Black-signaling names less often, and they gave those senders less loan information and sent fewer follow-up messages. The authors compare the size of the name effect on response with the effect of a credit score 71 points lower.
>
> The experiment measures replies to inquiries and ends before any application, so it observes no denial. Its estimates are for the originators and inquiries in the sample.

A person whose inquiry goes unanswered, or is answered with less information, may never apply, and does not appear in a denial rate. That is one way the applications in this chapter differ from the people who looked for a loan.

### Grades drawn in the 1930s and denial rates in 2024

Between 1935 and 1940 the Home Owners' Loan Corporation graded neighborhoods in the cities it surveyed from A, labeled best, to D, labeled hazardous.[3] Chapter 5.2, Home value, income and redlining (https://vishalsingh.org/zipcode/home-value-income-and-redlining) describes the maps and sets the grades beside life expectancy and home values. Here each grade is matched to 2020 tracts. A tract takes the grade that covers most of its area when graded polygons cover at least 50% of it. That gives 10,967 graded tracts in the country, of which 8,748 have a published home-purchase cell and a deprivation rank, in 221 city and state pairs. They are the cities that HOLC surveyed and not a sample of the country.

Graded tracts hold 7.3% of the decided applications in this chapter. Their pooled denial rate is 10.3% (95% CI 9.5% to 11.1%), against 8.9% (95% CI 8.6% to 9.2%) in all other tracts with a deprivation rank. Among graded tracts, denial rates rise from 7.9% (95% CI 7.0% to 9.0%) in grade A tracts to 9.4% in B and 10.9% in C, and differ little between C and D, which has 11.3% (95% CI 10.2% to 12.5%).

The gap between D and A is 3.4 (95% CI 2.1 to 4.7) points (Table 6), and the step from C to D is 0.4 (95% CI −0.6 to 1.5). Comparing tracts within the same city leaves the gap at 3.5 (95% CI 2.1 to 4.8). Requiring graded polygons to cover at least 90% of a tract leaves it at 2.8 (95% CI 1.0 to 4.6).

Comparing tracts of the same city and the same tenth of the deprivation index removes the gap. That comparison gives each of 1,008 city and tenth cells its own baseline. Grade D tracts differ from grade A tracts by 0.0 (95% CI −1.1 to 1.1) points in that comparison, and grade B and C tracts by −0.2 (95% CI −0.9 to 0.5) and −0.4 (95% CI −1.3 to 0.6), all with intervals around zero. In 2024 the differences across grades line up with the deprivation of the tracts today. The comparison does not say whether the maps had a part in how those tracts came to be deprived, and the boundary study in Chapter 5.2, Home value, income and redlining (https://vishalsingh.org/zipcode/home-value-income-and-redlining) addresses that question for housing outcomes.

Whether the grade gradient differs by applicant group cannot be told from these data. Grade D minus grade A is 1.4 (95% CI 0.2 to 2.8) points for white applicants, 0.1 (95% CI −5.5 to 6.0) for Black applicants and −1.3 (95% CI −7.7 to 4.4) for Hispanic applicants, each over the tracts where the group's cell is published. The Black and Hispanic intervals hold zero and also the all-applicant gap, and the white gap minus the Black gap is 1.3 (95% CI −5.0 to 7.4) points. Grade A tracts have few cells for these groups.

The mix of applicants also changes with the grade. Published Black and Hispanic cells account for 7.8% (95% CI 5.0% to 11.0%) of decided applications in grade A tracts and 15.0% (95% CI 11.2% to 18.9%) in grade D tracts. Those shares are lower bounds, because withheld cells are not counted. Both groups have higher denial rates, so part of the all-applicant gradient reflects who applies in each kind of tract.

Table 6. Denial rates rise from 7.9% in grade A tracts to 11.3% in grade D tracts, and no grade differs detectably from grade A among tracts of the same city and the same tenth of the deprivation index

The Cook County map shows the same data at tract scale (Table 7). Of its 1,331 tracts, 914 decided at least 20 home-purchase applications and are shaded, and 417 are gray, each with its reason in the tooltip. The Chicago map graded 759 of the county's tracts, all of them in the city, and the ungraded tracts include parts of the county that the map did not reach.

Among the shaded tracts, 53.0% of those in the top fifth of denial rates and 57.7% of those in the bottom fifth were graded, a difference of −4.7 (95% CI −14.8 to 5.6) points. That compares graded with ungraded tracts, which is not the comparison of grade D with grade A. The interval is too wide for these data to say whether a tract's place in the graded part of the county goes with a higher or a lower denial rate.

Within the graded part, the pooled rate is 5.4% (95% CI 2.5% to 8.9%) in grade A tracts, which rest on 11 tracts. It is 12.3% (95% CI 10.1% to 14.8%) in B, 11.0% (95% CI 10.0% to 12.0%) in C and 9.8% (95% CI 8.4% to 11.3%) in D, against 11.4% (95% CI 10.8% to 12.1%) in tracts with no grade.

Table 7. In Cook County, 53.0% of the tracts in the top fifth of denial rates and 57.7% of those in the bottom fifth lie in the part of the county that the 1930s map graded, a difference these data cannot tell from zero

### The denial rate rises with deprivation under all four rankings

The comparison uses the 71,169 tracts that have a published home-purchase cell and all four rankings, cut into tenths under each ranking (Table 8). Ranked by the Area Deprivation Index on that sample, the denial rate among decided applications runs from 7.8% (95% CI 7.2% to 8.5%) in the least deprived tenth to 13.7% (95% CI 13.3% to 14.3%) in the most deprived, and the rank correlation between tenth and rate is +0.95. Under the standardized index it runs from 7.0% (95% CI 6.6% to 7.4%) to 14.8% (95% CI 14.1% to 15.5%) with a rank correlation of +1.00, under median household income from 7.0% (95% CI 6.6% to 7.4%) to 13.8% (95% CI 13.2% to 14.5%) and under the bachelor's degree share from 6.8% (95% CI 6.4% to 7.4%) to 13.2% (95% CI 12.8% to 13.8%). All four rankings put the higher rate at the more deprived end with a steady rise, so none of the three alternatives counts as a change under the rule in Chapter 9.1, How far one ranking goes (https://vishalsingh.org/zipcode/how-far-one-ranking-goes).

Table 8. The mortgage denial rate is steadily worse toward the more deprived end under the ADI and under each of the three other rankings

### What these data cannot show

Applications are not the population. A denial rate is a share of the applications that reached a decision, and who applies differs across tracts and groups. People who expect a denial, who are steered to another loan or who cannot get an answer to an inquiry do not appear, and withdrawn applications leave the rate. The file covers one year and the lenders above the reporting thresholds.

The tract totals hold no credit score, debt-to-income ratio, loan-to-value ratio, loan type or lender for any applicant. A gap between groups, even inside one tract, is therefore not evidence of discrimination by itself and not a measure of how much treatment differs. The application-level HMDA records carry some of those fields and up to four denial reasons for each denied application. Lenders report those reasons themselves, they are not audited, and the tract aggregate does not keep them.

The groups are reported groups. The ethnicity and race in HMDA come from the applicant where the applicant answers and from fallback rules where not, and the four groups leave out other and unreported applicants. A group's cell exists only in tracts with 10 or more of its applications, so group comparisons cover the tracts with more applicants of that group and not a random sample of tracts.

The intervals resample counties. Applications at one lender share its rules and cross county lines, so the intervals do not capture correlation within a lender and may be narrower than the uncertainty. The tenths and grades describe tracts and the applications reported in them. They are not the experience of one borrower, and a pattern across places need not hold for the people inside them (ecological inference). The deprivation index understates deprivation in high-cost cities and is built partly from income and housing costs, which are also what a lender weighs.

The grades followed the housing, incomes and populations of the 1930s, so a tract's grade stands for a mix of what the neighborhood was and what happened after. The adjusted contrast compares tracts of the same city and the same tenth of the index and cannot say whether the maps shaped today's deprivation. A city that HOLC did not survey is absent from the comparison, which does not mean it had no redlining. Tooltip intervals on the Cook County map treat applications as independent and are narrower than a bootstrap over tracts would give.

## Tables

### Table 1. Decided home-purchase applications were denied 9.0% of the time, against 20.7% for refinance and 35.8% for cash-out refinance loans

Denied share of decided applications, tracts of the 50 states and DC with a published cell, 2024, by loan purpose

| Loan purpose | Tracts with a published cell | Decided applications | Denial rate (%) | Lower limit of the 95% interval (%) | Upper limit of the 95% interval (%) | Tracts with a published rate for Black applicants |
| --- | ---: | ---: | ---: | ---: | ---: | ---: |
| Home purchase | 76,072 | 3,097,390 | 9.0 | 8.7 | 9.3 | 8,232 |
| Refinance | 36,779 | 440,105 | 20.7 | 20.2 | 21.2 | 1,155 |
| Cash-out refinance | 46,525 | 616,812 | 35.8 | 35.3 | 36.4 | 2,938 |

Note: Each row counts tracts whose all-applicant cell for the purpose has 10 or more applications, a withholding rule of this book's staging step that counts applications of every action taken. Cells under that floor are missing, never zero, and leave both the denied and the decided counts. Tracts differ across rows because the floor binds more often for refinance and cash-out loans.

Note: The file covers first-lien loans on site-built homes with up to four units that applicants intend as a principal residence, from lenders above the HMDA reporting thresholds. Loan type (conventional, FHA, VA or USDA) is not in the tract file. Puerto Rico is left out.

Source: HMDA Loan/Application Register, 2024, tract totals of decided applications; Area Deprivation Index, 2023; full counts, pooled rates

Data: https://vishalsingh.org/zipcode/report/mortgage-denials/figures/denial_by_loan_purpose.json

### Table 2. The denial rate was 7.8% in the least deprived tenth of tracts and 13.8% in the most deprived, and it is level across the three least deprived tenths

Denied share of decided home-purchase applications, 2024, against the tract's Area Deprivation Index national rank: sampled tracts with at least 30 decided applications as dots and pooled rates for tenths of tracts as the line

No inline rows: the values of Table 2 are in https://vishalsingh.org/zipcode/data/mortgage-denials/denial_vs_deprivation_tracts.json.

Note: Dots are drawn from the tracts that decided at least 30 applications, with a fixed seed (stated in the methods note). The pooled rates use every tract with a published cell and a rank, 75,978 tracts, in tenths that hold near-equal numbers of tracts. A tract with no rank is left out (94 tracts).

Note: Across all the ranked tracts the pooled denial rate is 9.0%.

Note: The Area Deprivation Index is a national percentile, 1 least and 100 most deprived, and it understates deprivation in high-cost cities. Rates are not adjusted for the applicant's credit, debts, loan size or loan type, which the tract file does not hold.

Source: HMDA Loan/Application Register, 2024, tract totals of decided applications; Area Deprivation Index, 2023; full counts, pooled rates

Data: https://vishalsingh.org/zipcode/report/mortgage-denials/figures/denial_vs_deprivation.json

### Table 3. In every tenth of tracts with enough applications, Black and Hispanic applicants were denied more often than white applicants

Denied share of decided home-purchase applications, 2024, by applicant group and tenth of tracts on the Area Deprivation Index (1 = least deprived), points on at least 100 tracts

| conf_high | conf_low | estimate | series | tenth | tracts |
| ---: | ---: | ---: | --- | ---: | ---: |
| 7.47 | 6.01 | 6.72 | Non-Hispanic white | 1 | 4805 |
| 5.85 | 5.24 | 5.53 | Non-Hispanic white | 2 | 5356 |
| 5.65 | 5.17 | 5.41 | Non-Hispanic white | 3 | 5868 |
| 5.79 | 5.34 | 5.56 | Non-Hispanic white | 4 | 6305 |
| 5.86 | 5.42 | 5.64 | Non-Hispanic white | 5 | 6150 |
| 6.51 | 6.03 | 6.28 | Non-Hispanic white | 6 | 6079 |
| 6.90 | 6.49 | 6.69 | Non-Hispanic white | 7 | 6079 |
| 7.50 | 7.08 | 7.29 | Non-Hispanic white | 8 | 5995 |
| 8.55 | 8.08 | 8.31 | Non-Hispanic white | 9 | 5763 |
| 10.77 | 10.10 | 10.43 | Non-Hispanic white | 10 | 4227 |
| 16.80 | 13.85 | 15.46 | Non-Hispanic Black | 2 | 439 |
| 15.56 | 13.77 | 14.64 | Non-Hispanic Black | 3 | 633 |
| 16.86 | 14.74 | 15.80 | Non-Hispanic Black | 4 | 910 |
| 17.34 | 15.54 | 16.45 | Non-Hispanic Black | 5 | 1022 |
| 18.32 | 15.95 | 17.18 | Non-Hispanic Black | 6 | 1099 |
| 18.03 | 15.91 | 16.97 | Non-Hispanic Black | 7 | 1075 |
| 18.60 | 16.31 | 17.44 | Non-Hispanic Black | 8 | 973 |
| 19.54 | 17.20 | 18.38 | Non-Hispanic Black | 9 | 902 |
| 21.58 | 19.02 | 20.30 | Non-Hispanic Black | 10 | 1081 |
| 14.04 | 10.71 | 12.35 | Hispanic (any race) | 1 | 389 |
| 13.35 | 10.85 | 12.01 | Hispanic (any race) | 2 | 1376 |
| 12.59 | 11.07 | 11.85 | Hispanic (any race) | 3 | 1847 |
| 13.28 | 11.39 | 12.31 | Hispanic (any race) | 4 | 2307 |
| 14.32 | 12.51 | 13.46 | Hispanic (any race) | 5 | 2242 |
| 14.49 | 12.39 | 13.43 | Hispanic (any race) | 6 | 2143 |
| 14.89 | 12.78 | 13.83 | Hispanic (any race) | 7 | 1874 |
| 15.46 | 13.05 | 14.21 | Hispanic (any race) | 8 | 1536 |
| 15.24 | 12.83 | 14 | Hispanic (any race) | 9 | 1285 |
| 15.74 | 12.86 | 14.18 | Hispanic (any race) | 10 | 1045 |
| 8.74 | 7.25 | 7.84 | Non-Hispanic Asian | 1 | 2241 |
| 9.19 | 7.98 | 8.51 | Non-Hispanic Asian | 2 | 1661 |
| 9.69 | 8.02 | 8.85 | Non-Hispanic Asian | 3 | 1243 |
| 10.36 | 8.83 | 9.55 | Non-Hispanic Asian | 4 | 938 |
| 11.42 | 9.05 | 10.17 | Non-Hispanic Asian | 5 | 626 |
| 11.64 | 9.10 | 10.40 | Non-Hispanic Asian | 6 | 394 |
| 14.02 | 10.09 | 11.92 | Non-Hispanic Asian | 7 | 237 |
| 14.47 | 11.01 | 12.85 | Non-Hispanic Asian | 8 | 103 |

Note: Groups are the applicant's reported ethnicity and race as HMDA derives them: non-Hispanic white, non-Hispanic Black, Hispanic of any race and non-Hispanic Asian. Other and unreported applicants count in the all-applicant rate only, so the four groups do not add to it.

Note: A group's cell is published only in tracts with 10 or more of its applications, so each line covers a different set of tracts, and the sets for Black, Hispanic and Asian applicants are smaller than the set for white applicants. A point is drawn when it rests on at least 100 tracts; the Black line starts at the second tenth and the Asian line stops at the eighth.

Source: HMDA Loan/Application Register, 2024, tract totals of decided applications; Area Deprivation Index, 2023; full counts, pooled rates

Data: https://vishalsingh.org/zipcode/report/mortgage-denials/figures/denial_by_group_and_deprivation.json

### Table 4. In the tracts that hold both groups, Black applicants were denied 16.2% of the time and white applicants 6.2%

Denied share of decided home-purchase applications, 2024, for each applicant group and for non-Hispanic white applicants in the same tracts, tracts where both cells are published

| group | hi | lo | rate | tracts | white | white_hi | white_lo |
| --- | ---: | ---: | ---: | ---: | ---: | ---: | ---: |
| Non-Hispanic Black applicants | 16.77 | 15.67 | 16.20 | 5657 | 6.23 | 6.50 | 5.96 |
| Hispanic (any race) applicants | 13.53 | 12.17 | 12.83 | 10189 | 6.47 | 6.77 | 6.19 |
| Non-Hispanic Asian applicants | 9.37 | 8.50 | 8.91 | 5490 | 5.70 | 5.99 | 5.42 |

Note: The same tract holds the neighborhood fixed, not the applicant. The tract file has no credit score, debt-to-income ratio, loan-to-value ratio, loan type or lender for each applicant, so a gap here is not evidence of discrimination by itself and the data cannot say how much of it these items account for.

Note: The tracts that hold both cells are 7.4% of all tracts for Black applicants. The tracts differ by row (5,657 for Black applicants, 10,189 for Hispanic applicants and 5,490 for Asian applicants), because a cell exists only where a group has 10 or more applications. Over each group's own tracts the Black gap is 10.5 points.

Source: HMDA Loan/Application Register, 2024, tract totals of decided applications; Area Deprivation Index, 2023; full counts, pooled rates

Data: https://vishalsingh.org/zipcode/report/mortgage-denials/figures/same_tract_gaps.json

### Table 5. The same-tract gap between Black and white applicants stays between 8.6 and 10.4 percentage points across tenths of tract deprivation

Black minus white denied share of decided home-purchase applications, 2024, in tracts where both cells are published, by tenth of tracts on the deprivation index and by fifth of tracts on median applicant income

#### Table 5.1. By tract deprivation

The Black minus white gap is positive in every tenth of tract deprivation

Percentage points of denial rate, Black minus white applicants in the same tracts, by tenth of tracts on the Area Deprivation Index (1 = least deprived)

| conf_high | conf_low | gap | tenth | tracts |
| ---: | ---: | ---: | ---: | ---: |
| 13.59 | 7.64 | 10.31 | 1 | 77 |
| 11.12 | 7.84 | 9.57 | 2 | 335 |
| 9.56 | 7.69 | 8.61 | 3 | 514 |
| 10.79 | 8.83 | 9.81 | 4 | 725 |
| 11.14 | 9.46 | 10.33 | 5 | 809 |
| 11.61 | 9.34 | 10.45 | 6 | 849 |
| 10.36 | 8.55 | 9.44 | 7 | 776 |
| 10.85 | 8.70 | 9.72 | 8 | 628 |
| 11.39 | 9.06 | 10.19 | 9 | 547 |
| 10.72 | 7.92 | 9.32 | 10 | 395 |

#### Table 5.2. By tract applicant income

The Black minus white gap is positive in every fifth of tracts by median applicant income

Percentage points of denial rate, Black minus white applicants in the same tracts, by fifth of tracts on the median income reported by applicants (1 = lowest)

| conf_high | conf_low | fifth | gap | tracts |
| ---: | ---: | ---: | ---: | ---: |
| 10.06 | 8.46 | 1 | 9.23 | 1124 |
| 11.06 | 9.51 | 2 | 10.30 | 1149 |
| 11.11 | 9.30 | 3 | 10.15 | 1103 |
| 10.68 | 9.19 | 4 | 9.96 | 1146 |
| 9.99 | 8.13 | 5 | 9.12 | 1135 |

Note: The tenths hold near-equal numbers of the tracts with a rank (tracts tied on the rank stay together); the fifths hold near-equal numbers of the 5,657 tracts that hold both cells and a median applicant income, so a fifth groups tracts by the typical income of their applicants and not applicants by their own income. The median income is the median of the incomes reported on the tract's applications.

Note: The ratio of the Black to the white rate is 2.8 in the fifth tenth and 2.0 in the most deprived tenth.

Source: HMDA Loan/Application Register, 2024, tract totals of decided applications; Area Deprivation Index, 2023; full counts, pooled rates

Data: https://vishalsingh.org/zipcode/report/mortgage-denials/figures/gap_by_deprivation_and_income.json

### Table 6. Denial rates rise from 7.9% in grade A tracts to 11.3% in grade D tracts, and no grade differs detectably from grade A among tracts of the same city and the same tenth of the deprivation index

Denied share of decided home-purchase applications, 2024, in tracts graded on the 1930s HOLC maps: by grade, as a difference from grade A under three adjustments, and by applicant group

#### Table 6.1. By grade

The denial rate rises from grade A to grade C and differs little between grades C and D

Denied share of decided home-purchase applications, 2024, pooled over tracts of each HOLC grade

| conf_high | conf_low | estimate | grade | label | tracts |
| ---: | ---: | ---: | --- | --- | ---: |
| 8.96 | 6.98 | 7.91 | A | Grade A | 650 |
| 10.27 | 8.47 | 9.37 | B | Grade B | 2003 |
| 11.81 | 10.01 | 10.91 | C | Grade C | 4008 |
| 12.50 | 10.21 | 11.32 | D | Grade D | 2087 |

#### Table 6.2. Within city and deprivation

Within a city and a tenth of the deprivation index, no grade differs detectably from grade A

Denial rate of tracts of each grade minus that of grade A tracts, percentage points, from weighted regressions with errors clustered by county

| comparison | conf_high | conf_low | estimate | specification | tracts |
| --- | ---: | ---: | ---: | --- | ---: |
| Grade B against grade A | 2.41 | 0.520 | 1.47 | No adjustment | 8748 |
| Grade C against grade A | 4.10 | 1.91 | 3.01 | No adjustment | 8748 |
| Grade D against grade A | 4.74 | 2.09 | 3.42 | No adjustment | 8748 |
| Grade B against grade A | 2.59 | 1.01 | 1.80 | Same city | 8748 |
| Grade C against grade A | 3.97 | 1.99 | 2.98 | Same city | 8748 |
| Grade D against grade A | 4.83 | 2.15 | 3.49 | Same city | 8748 |
| Grade B against grade A | 0.480 | −0.910 | −0.210 | Same city and tenth of the deprivation index | 8748 |
| Grade C against grade A | 0.620 | −1.35 | −0.360 | Same city and tenth of the deprivation index | 8748 |
| Grade D against grade A | 1.08 | −1.06 | 0.010 | Same city and tenth of the deprivation index | 8748 |

#### Table 6.3. By applicant group

The grade D minus grade A difference is 1.4 points for white applicants, and the intervals for Black and Hispanic applicants are too wide to say whether it differs

Denied share of decided home-purchase applications, 2024, by applicant group and HOLC grade of the tract, points on at least 30 tracts

| conf_high | conf_low | estimate | grade | group | label | tracts |
| ---: | ---: | ---: | --- | --- | --- | ---: |
| 5.94 | 4.54 | 5.17 | A | Non-Hispanic white | Grade A | 517 |
| 6.39 | 5.12 | 5.71 | B | Non-Hispanic white | Grade B | 1250 |
| 6.79 | 5.66 | 6.18 | C | Non-Hispanic white | Grade C | 1912 |
| 7.91 | 5.47 | 6.52 | D | Non-Hispanic white | Grade D | 848 |
| 25.15 | 15.20 | 20.41 | A | Non-Hispanic Black | Grade A | 63 |
| 20.99 | 15.16 | 17.88 | B | Non-Hispanic Black | Grade B | 301 |
| 21.40 | 17.73 | 19.60 | C | Non-Hispanic Black | Grade C | 494 |
| 23.35 | 17.39 | 20.49 | D | Non-Hispanic Black | Grade D | 252 |
| 23.31 | 11.30 | 16.97 | A | Hispanic (any race) | Grade A | 60 |
| 16.20 | 12.54 | 14.17 | B | Hispanic (any race) | Grade B | 322 |
| 15.70 | 13.78 | 14.90 | C | Hispanic (any race) | Grade C | 792 |
| 17.20 | 14.08 | 15.72 | D | Hispanic (any race) | Grade D | 331 |
| 9.94 | 4.33 | 6.80 | A | Non-Hispanic Asian | Grade A | 37 |
| 12.50 | 7.66 | 10.10 | B | Non-Hispanic Asian | Grade B | 159 |
| 14.48 | 9.04 | 11.98 | C | Non-Hispanic Asian | Grade C | 313 |
| 14.19 | 8.04 | 11.17 | D | Non-Hispanic Asian | Grade D | 168 |

Note: A tract takes a grade when graded polygons cover at least 50% of its area, and the grade that covers the most of it. The tracts are the 8,748 graded tracts with a published cell and a deprivation rank, in 221 city and state pairs. With a stricter rule, graded polygons covering at least 90% of a tract, the gap between grades D and A is 2.8 points. The comparison is descriptive: the grades followed the housing, incomes and populations of the 1930s, and the HOLC cities are not a national sample.

Note: The adjusted differences come from weighted regressions of the tract denial rate on grade, weighted by decided applications, with errors clustered by county, on the 8,748 graded tracts. The third adjustment gives each of 1,008 city and tenth cells its own baseline, so a grade is compared with another grade only inside a cell that holds tracts of both.

Source: HMDA Loan/Application Register, 2024, tract totals of decided applications; Mapping Inequality HOLC maps (1935-1940) overlaid on 2020 tracts; Area Deprivation Index, 2023; full counts, pooled rates

Data: https://vishalsingh.org/zipcode/report/mortgage-denials/figures/denial_by_holc_grade.json

### Table 7. In Cook County, 53.0% of the tracts in the top fifth of denial rates and 57.7% of those in the bottom fifth lie in the part of the county that the 1930s map graded, a difference these data cannot tell from zero

Denied share of decided home-purchase applications, 2024, in Cook County tracts with at least 20 decided applications, and the HOLC grade covering most of each tract

No inline rows: the values of Table 7 are in https://vishalsingh.org/zipcode/data/mortgage-denials/cook_denial_map.json.

Views: Denial rate (every row); 1930s HOLC grade (every row).

Note: 914 of the 1,331 tracts have a rate and 417 do not, because the tract has fewer than 20 decided applications, fewer than 10 applications in all (withheld), or no row in the file. 759 tracts have a grade, all of them in Chicago. The rate in the tooltip carries a 95% interval from the Wilson formula, which treats applications as independent, so it is narrower than a bootstrap over tracts would give.

Note: The share graded in the top fifth minus the share in the bottom fifth is −4.7 percentage points, with an interval from a bootstrap over tracts that includes zero. Pooled over the shaded tracts, the denial rate is 5.4% in grade A tracts, 12.3% in B, 11.0% in C, 9.8% in D and 11.4% in tracts with no grade, with intervals from a bootstrap over tracts.

Source: HMDA Loan/Application Register, 2024, tract totals of decided applications; Mapping Inequality HOLC maps (1935-1940) overlaid on 2020 tracts; full counts, pooled rates

Data: https://vishalsingh.org/zipcode/report/mortgage-denials/figures/cook_denial_map.json

### Table 8. The mortgage denial rate is steadily worse toward the more deprived end under the ADI and under each of the three other rankings

Denied share of decided applications (%) by tenth of tracts ranked four ways, over the 71,169 tracts that have all four rankings

| bin | conf_high | conf_low | estimate | n_units | ranking |
| ---: | ---: | ---: | ---: | ---: | --- |
| 1 | 8.47 | 7.17 | 7.83 | 7,181 | Area Deprivation Index |
| 2 | 8.24 | 7.25 | 7.75 | 7,109 | Area Deprivation Index |
| 3 | 7.97 | 7.22 | 7.60 | 7,041 | Area Deprivation Index |
| 4 | 8.73 | 7.92 | 8.32 | 7,292 | Area Deprivation Index |
| 5 | 9.03 | 8.13 | 8.57 | 7,035 | Area Deprivation Index |
| 6 | 9.62 | 8.69 | 9.15 | 7,149 | Area Deprivation Index |
| 7 | 10.02 | 9.14 | 9.57 | 7,164 | Area Deprivation Index |
| 8 | 10.47 | 9.59 | 10.01 | 6,993 | Area Deprivation Index |
| 9 | 11.31 | 10.49 | 10.88 | 7,045 | Area Deprivation Index |
| 10 | 14.26 | 13.29 | 13.75 | 7,160 | Area Deprivation Index |
| 1 | 7.41 | 6.62 | 7.01 | 7,116 | Standardized index |
| 2 | 7.34 | 6.76 | 7.04 | 7,117 | Standardized index |
| 3 | 7.98 | 7.39 | 7.67 | 7,117 | Standardized index |
| 4 | 8.57 | 7.89 | 8.23 | 7,117 | Standardized index |
| 5 | 9.08 | 8.39 | 8.73 | 7,117 | Standardized index |
| 6 | 9.53 | 8.87 | 9.19 | 7,117 | Standardized index |
| 7 | 10.73 | 9.86 | 10.28 | 7,117 | Standardized index |
| 8 | 11.42 | 10.54 | 10.98 | 7,117 | Standardized index |
| 9 | 12.50 | 11.60 | 12.03 | 7,117 | Standardized index |
| 10 | 15.45 | 14.15 | 14.78 | 7,117 | Standardized index |
| 1 | 7.39 | 6.64 | 7.01 | 7,116 | Median household income |
| 2 | 7.62 | 7.02 | 7.33 | 7,118 | Median household income |
| 3 | 8.12 | 7.49 | 7.80 | 7,116 | Median household income |
| 4 | 8.71 | 8.06 | 8.38 | 7,117 | Median household income |
| 5 | 9.35 | 8.59 | 8.96 | 7,117 | Median household income |
| 6 | 9.68 | 8.92 | 9.29 | 7,117 | Median household income |
| 7 | 10.35 | 9.57 | 9.95 | 7,116 | Median household income |
| 8 | 11.18 | 10.29 | 10.73 | 7,121 | Median household income |
| 9 | 12.29 | 11.23 | 11.74 | 7,114 | Median household income |
| 10 | 14.48 | 13.23 | 13.80 | 7,117 | Median household income |
| 1 | 7.36 | 6.41 | 6.84 | 7,116 | Bachelor's degree share |
| 2 | 7.57 | 6.83 | 7.18 | 7,116 | Bachelor's degree share |
| 3 | 8.05 | 7.31 | 7.68 | 7,118 | Bachelor's degree share |
| 4 | 8.53 | 7.88 | 8.20 | 7,114 | Bachelor's degree share |
| 5 | 9.13 | 8.45 | 8.78 | 7,122 | Bachelor's degree share |
| 6 | 9.67 | 8.84 | 9.24 | 7,115 | Bachelor's degree share |
| 7 | 10.31 | 9.52 | 9.90 | 7,123 | Bachelor's degree share |
| 8 | 11.10 | 10.37 | 10.73 | 7,103 | Bachelor's degree share |
| 9 | 11.84 | 11.07 | 11.44 | 7,123 | Bachelor's degree share |
| 10 | 13.75 | 12.75 | 13.23 | 7,119 | Bachelor's degree share |

Note: Least and most deprived tenth: ADI 7.8% and 13.7%, rank correlation +0.95; standardized index 7.0% and 14.8%, +1.00; median household income 7.0% and 13.8%, +1.00; bachelor's degree share 6.8% and 13.2%, +1.00.

Note: The standardized index applies the ADI's coefficients to its measures after standardizing each one, so home value and income carry less weight than in the ADI. Income and degree share are single census measures, each ranked from the highest value to the lowest.

Source: HMDA Loan/Application Register, 2024, tract totals of decided applications; Area Deprivation Index, 2023; full counts, pooled rates; ADI 2023 and ACS 2019-2023 tract tables (B19013, B15003 and the 15 rebuilt ADI measures)

Data: https://vishalsingh.org/zipcode/report/mortgage-denials/figures/alt_rankings.json

## All estimates

Every fact in facts.json (138), sorted by id.

| Fact id | Value | Unit | Estimand | Population | Period | Interval | n | Weights | Source | Note |
| --- | ---: | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | ---: | --- | --- | --- |
| alt_adi_least | 7.8% | Denied share of decided applications (%) | pooled denial rate (denied applications divided by applications originated or denied, summed over the tracts); 95% intervals from a bootstrap over counties | the least deprived tenth of tracts ranked by Area Deprivation Index, among the tracts with all four rankings | applications decided in 2024 | 95% CI 7.2% to 8.5% | 7,181 tracts | none (counts of decided applications, pooled over tracts) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| alt_adi_most | 13.7% | Denied share of decided applications (%) | pooled denial rate (denied applications divided by applications originated or denied, summed over the tracts); 95% intervals from a bootstrap over counties | the most deprived tenth of tracts ranked by Area Deprivation Index, among the tracts with all four rankings | applications decided in 2024 | 95% CI 13.3% to 14.3% | 7,160 tracts | none (counts of decided applications, pooled over tracts) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| alt_adi_rho | +0.95 | rank correlation | Spearman rank correlation between bin order and bin mean, each bin counted once | the bins of tracts ranked by Area Deprivation Index | applications decided in 2024 |   |   | each bin counted once | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| alt_degree_least | 6.8% | Denied share of decided applications (%) | pooled denial rate (denied applications divided by applications originated or denied, summed over the tracts); 95% intervals from a bootstrap over counties | the least deprived tenth of tracts ranked by Bachelor's degree share, among the tracts with all four rankings | applications decided in 2024 | 95% CI 6.4% to 7.4% | 7,116 tracts | none (counts of decided applications, pooled over tracts) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| alt_degree_most | 13.2% | Denied share of decided applications (%) | pooled denial rate (denied applications divided by applications originated or denied, summed over the tracts); 95% intervals from a bootstrap over counties | the most deprived tenth of tracts ranked by Bachelor's degree share, among the tracts with all four rankings | applications decided in 2024 | 95% CI 12.8% to 13.8% | 7,119 tracts | none (counts of decided applications, pooled over tracts) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| alt_degree_rho | +1.00 | rank correlation | Spearman rank correlation between bin order and bin mean, each bin counted once | the bins of tracts ranked by Bachelor's degree share | applications decided in 2024 |   |   | each bin counted once | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| alt_income_least | 7.0% | Denied share of decided applications (%) | pooled denial rate (denied applications divided by applications originated or denied, summed over the tracts); 95% intervals from a bootstrap over counties | the least deprived tenth of tracts ranked by Median household income, among the tracts with all four rankings | applications decided in 2024 | 95% CI 6.6% to 7.4% | 7,116 tracts | none (counts of decided applications, pooled over tracts) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| alt_income_most | 13.8% | Denied share of decided applications (%) | pooled denial rate (denied applications divided by applications originated or denied, summed over the tracts); 95% intervals from a bootstrap over counties | the most deprived tenth of tracts ranked by Median household income, among the tracts with all four rankings | applications decided in 2024 | 95% CI 13.2% to 14.5% | 7,117 tracts | none (counts of decided applications, pooled over tracts) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| alt_income_rho | +1.00 | rank correlation | Spearman rank correlation between bin order and bin mean, each bin counted once | the bins of tracts ranked by Median household income | applications decided in 2024 |   |   | each bin counted once | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| alt_n_places | 71,169 | tracts | count of tracts in the common sample of the ranking comparison | tracts with the outcome and all four rankings | applications decided in 2024 |   |   | none (full count) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| alt_rho_cut | 0.9 | absolute rank correlation | threshold between a steady and an uneven gradient | the rule for changed gradients (docs/RANKING_SWITCH_RULE.md) | applications decided in 2024 |   |   | none (a fixed rule) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| alt_rho_margin | 0.1 | absolute rank correlation | smallest move in the rank correlation that counts as a change of shape | the rule for changed gradients (docs/RANKING_SWITCH_RULE.md) | applications decided in 2024 |   |   | none (a fixed rule) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| alt_std_least | 7.0% | Denied share of decided applications (%) | pooled denial rate (denied applications divided by applications originated or denied, summed over the tracts); 95% intervals from a bootstrap over counties | the least deprived tenth of tracts ranked by Standardized index, among the tracts with all four rankings | applications decided in 2024 | 95% CI 6.6% to 7.4% | 7,116 tracts | none (counts of decided applications, pooled over tracts) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| alt_std_most | 14.8% | Denied share of decided applications (%) | pooled denial rate (denied applications divided by applications originated or denied, summed over the tracts); 95% intervals from a bootstrap over counties | the most deprived tenth of tracts ranked by Standardized index, among the tracts with all four rankings | applications decided in 2024 | 95% CI 14.1% to 15.5% | 7,117 tracts | none (counts of decided applications, pooled over tracts) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| alt_std_rho | +1.00 | rank correlation | Spearman rank correlation between bin order and bin mean, each bin counted once | the bins of tracts ranked by Standardized index | applications decided in 2024 |   |   | each bin counted once | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| cloud_floor | 30 | decided applications | the number of decided applications a tract needs to be a dot in the scatter (a rule of this chapter) | a tract in the scatter of tract rates | 2024 |   |   | none (definition) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| cook_bottom_graded | 57.7% | percent of tracts that are graded | share of the tracts that have a HOLC grade | Cook County tracts in the bottom fifth of shaded tracts by denial rate | applications decided in 2024 |   | 182 tracts | none (each tract counts once) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| cook_floor | 20 | decided applications | the number of decided applications a tract needs to be shaded (a rule of this chapter) | a Cook County tract on the map | applications decided in 2024 |   |   | none (definition) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| cook_graded_diff | −4.7 | percentage points of tracts graded | share graded in the top fifth minus the share graded in the bottom fifth, bootstrap over tracts | Cook County tracts in the top fifth minus the bottom fifth of shaded tracts by denial rate | applications decided in 2024 | 95% CI −14.8 to 5.6 | 365 tracts | none (each tract counts once) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| cook_n_graded | 759 | tracts | count of Cook County tracts with a grade (all in Chicago) | Cook County tracts covered at least half by graded HOLC polygons | HOLC maps drawn 1935 to 1940 |   |   | none (full count) | Mapping Inequality (HOLC maps) |   |
| cook_n_gray | 417 | tracts | count of tracts drawn as no data on the denial-rate view | Cook County tracts without a shaded denial rate | applications decided in 2024 |   |   | none (full count) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| cook_n_shaded | 914 | tracts | count of tracts shaded on the map | Cook County tracts with at least 20 decided home-purchase applications | applications decided in 2024 |   |   | none (full count) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| cook_n_tracts | 1,331 | tracts | count of tracts on the Cook County map | census tracts of Cook County, Illinois | 2020 tracts |   |   | none (full count) | Census TIGER/Line tracts |   |
| cook_rate_a | 5.4% | percent of decided applications denied | denied applications divided by applications that were originated or denied, summed over the tracts (a pooled rate), tract-cluster bootstrap interval | home-purchase applications decided in 2024 in shaded Cook County tracts graded A on the 1930s Chicago map | applications decided in 2024 | 95% CI 2.5% to 8.9% | 11 tracts | none (counts of decided applications, pooled over tracts) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| cook_rate_b | 12.3% | percent of decided applications denied | denied applications divided by applications that were originated or denied, summed over the tracts (a pooled rate), tract-cluster bootstrap interval | home-purchase applications decided in 2024 in shaded Cook County tracts graded B on the 1930s Chicago map | applications decided in 2024 | 95% CI 10.1% to 14.8% | 61 tracts | none (counts of decided applications, pooled over tracts) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| cook_rate_c | 11.0% | percent of decided applications denied | denied applications divided by applications that were originated or denied, summed over the tracts (a pooled rate), tract-cluster bootstrap interval | home-purchase applications decided in 2024 in shaded Cook County tracts graded C on the 1930s Chicago map | applications decided in 2024 | 95% CI 10.0% to 12.0% | 256 tracts | none (counts of decided applications, pooled over tracts) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| cook_rate_d | 9.8% | percent of decided applications denied | denied applications divided by applications that were originated or denied, summed over the tracts (a pooled rate), tract-cluster bootstrap interval | home-purchase applications decided in 2024 in shaded Cook County tracts graded D on the 1930s Chicago map | applications decided in 2024 | 95% CI 8.4% to 11.3% | 107 tracts | none (counts of decided applications, pooled over tracts) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| cook_rate_none | 11.4% | percent of decided applications denied | denied applications divided by applications that were originated or denied, summed over the tracts (a pooled rate), tract-cluster bootstrap interval | home-purchase applications decided in 2024 in shaded Cook County tracts with no grade (outside the area the Chicago map graded, or covered less than halfway) | applications decided in 2024 | 95% CI 10.8% to 12.1% | 479 tracts | none (counts of decided applications, pooled over tracts) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| cook_top_graded | 53.0% | percent of tracts that are graded | share of the tracts that have a HOLC grade | Cook County tracts in the top fifth of shaded tracts by denial rate | applications decided in 2024 |   | 183 tracts | none (each tract counts once) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| cook_tracts_a | 11 | tracts | count of tracts | shaded Cook County tracts graded A on the 1930s Chicago map | applications decided in 2024 |   |   | none (full count) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| gap_asian | 3.2 | percentage points of denial rate | pooled denial rate of the group minus that of non-Hispanic white applicants over the same tracts, county-cluster bootstrap interval | non-Hispanic Asian applicants minus non-Hispanic white applicants, applicants whose home-purchase application was decided in 2024, in the tracts where the cells for non-Hispanic Asian and non-Hispanic white applicants are both published | applications decided in 2024 | 95% CI 2.8 to 3.6 | 5,490 tracts | none (counts of decided applications, pooled over tracts) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| gap_black | 10.0 | percentage points of denial rate | pooled denial rate of the group minus that of non-Hispanic white applicants over the same tracts, county-cluster bootstrap interval | non-Hispanic Black applicants minus non-Hispanic white applicants, applicants whose home-purchase application was decided in 2024, in the tracts where the cells for non-Hispanic Black and non-Hispanic white applicants are both published | applications decided in 2024 | 95% CI 9.5 to 10.4 | 5,657 tracts | none (counts of decided applications, pooled over tracts) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| gap_black_ge10 | 10.0 | percentage points of denial rate | pooled denial rate of Black applicants minus that of white applicants over the same tracts, county-cluster bootstrap interval | non-Hispanic Black minus non-Hispanic white applicants decided in 2024, in tracts where both groups have at least 10 decided applications | applications decided in 2024 | 95% CI 9.5 to 10.6 | 3,848 tracts | none (counts of decided applications, pooled over tracts) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| gap_black_ge30 | 10.8 | percentage points of denial rate | pooled denial rate of Black applicants minus that of white applicants over the same tracts, county-cluster bootstrap interval | non-Hispanic Black minus non-Hispanic white applicants decided in 2024, in tracts where both groups have at least 30 decided applications | applications decided in 2024 | 95% CI 10.1 to 11.6 | 521 tracts | none (counts of decided applications, pooled over tracts) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| gap_black_own | 10.5 | percentage points of denial rate | pooled denial rate of non-Hispanic Black applicants minus that of non-Hispanic white applicants, each over its own tracts, county-cluster bootstrap interval | non-Hispanic Black applicants minus non-Hispanic white applicants whose home-purchase application was decided in 2024, each group over the tracts where its own cell is published | applications decided in 2024 | 95% CI 9.9 to 11.2 | 8,232 tracts | none (counts of decided applications, pooled over tracts) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| gap_d10_d1 | 6.0 | percentage points of denial rate | pooled denial rate of the most deprived tenth minus that of the comparison tenth, county-cluster bootstrap interval | home-purchase applications decided in 2024 in the most deprived tenth of tracts minus those in the least deprived tenth | applications decided in 2024 | 95% CI 5.2 to 6.8 | 3,027 counties | none (counts of decided applications, pooled over tracts) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| gap_d10_d3 | 6.2 | percentage points of denial rate | pooled denial rate of the most deprived tenth minus that of the comparison tenth, county-cluster bootstrap interval | home-purchase applications decided in 2024 in the most deprived tenth of tracts minus those in the third least deprived tenth | applications decided in 2024 | 95% CI 5.6 to 6.8 | 3,027 counties | none (counts of decided applications, pooled over tracts) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| gap_dec_max | 10.4 | percentage points of denial rate | largest over the ten tenths of the same-tract gap in pooled denial rates | non-Hispanic Black minus non-Hispanic white applicants decided in 2024, in the tracts of one tenth where both cells are published | applications decided in 2024 |   | 10 tenths of tracts | none (counts of decided applications, pooled over tracts) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| gap_dec_min | 8.6 | percentage points of denial rate | smallest over the ten tenths of the same-tract gap in pooled denial rates | non-Hispanic Black minus non-Hispanic white applicants decided in 2024, in the tracts of one tenth where both cells are published | applications decided in 2024 |   | 10 tenths of tracts | none (counts of decided applications, pooled over tracts) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| gap_hispanic | 6.4 | percentage points of denial rate | pooled denial rate of the group minus that of non-Hispanic white applicants over the same tracts, county-cluster bootstrap interval | Hispanic (any race) applicants minus non-Hispanic white applicants, applicants whose home-purchase application was decided in 2024, in the tracts where the cells for Hispanic (any race) and non-Hispanic white applicants are both published | applications decided in 2024 | 95% CI 5.9 to 6.9 | 10,189 tracts | none (counts of decided applications, pooled over tracts) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| gap_inc_max | 10.3 | percentage points of denial rate | largest over the five fifths of the same-tract gap in pooled denial rates | non-Hispanic Black minus non-Hispanic white applicants decided in 2024, in the tracts of one fifth by median applicant income where both cells are published | applications decided in 2024 |   | 5 fifths of tracts | none (counts of decided applications, pooled over tracts) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| gap_inc_min | 9.1 | percentage points of denial rate | smallest over the five fifths of the same-tract gap in pooled denial rates | non-Hispanic Black minus non-Hispanic white applicants decided in 2024, in the tracts of one fifth by median applicant income where both cells are published | applications decided in 2024 |   | 5 fifths of tracts | none (counts of decided applications, pooled over tracts) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| gap_slope_fifth | −0.06 | percentage points of denial rate per fifth | least-squares slope of the five same-tract gaps on the fifth number, recomputed in every county bootstrap draw | non-Hispanic Black minus non-Hispanic white applicants decided in 2024, in the tracts of each fifth by median applicant income where both cells are published | applications decided in 2024 | 95% CI −0.33 to 0.20 | 5 fifths of tracts | none (counts of decided applications, pooled over tracts) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| gap_slope_tenth | 0.00 | percentage points of denial rate per tenth | least-squares slope of the ten same-tract gaps on the tenth number, recomputed in every county bootstrap draw | non-Hispanic Black minus non-Hispanic white applicants decided in 2024, in the tracts of each tenth where both cells are published | applications decided in 2024 | 95% CI −0.22 to 0.21 | 10 tenths of tracts | none (counts of decided applications, pooled over tracts) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| hanson_credit_points | 71 | points of credit score | the authors' comparison of the effect of a Black-signaling name on the originator's response with the effect of a lower stated credit score (Hanson, Hawley, Martin and Liu 2016; email correspondence experiment); copied from the paper's abstract and not computed in this build | licensed mortgage loan originators who received email inquiries from prospective borrowers with names that signal a Black or a white sender | as reported in the paper |   |   | as in the paper | Published estimates from cited studies | A published estimate, not a result of this build. |
| holc_bh_a | 7.8% | percent of decided applications | decided applications in the published Black and Hispanic cells divided by decided applications of all applicants, summed over the tracts, county-cluster bootstrap interval | home-purchase applications decided in 2024 in tracts graded A, the share from published non-Hispanic Black and Hispanic cells (a lower bound, because withheld cells are not counted) | applications decided in 2024 | 95% CI 5.0% to 11.0% | 650 tracts | none (counts of decided applications, pooled over tracts) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| holc_bh_d | 15.0% | percent of decided applications | decided applications in the published Black and Hispanic cells divided by decided applications of all applicants, summed over the tracts, county-cluster bootstrap interval | home-purchase applications decided in 2024 in tracts graded D, the share from published non-Hispanic Black and Hispanic cells (a lower bound, because withheld cells are not counted) | applications decided in 2024 | 95% CI 11.2% to 18.9% | 2,087 tracts | none (counts of decided applications, pooled over tracts) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| holc_cover_min | 50% | percent of a tract's area | the share of a tract that graded polygons must cover for the tract to take a grade (a rule of this chapter, the same as the chapter on home value, income and redlining) | a tract matched to HOLC polygons | HOLC maps drawn 1935 to 1940 |   |   | none (definition) | Mapping Inequality (HOLC maps) |   |
| holc_cover_strict | 90% | percent of a tract's area | the stricter share of a tract that graded polygons must cover, used to show how the grade D minus grade A gap moves with the matching rule | a tract matched to HOLC polygons | HOLC maps drawn 1935 to 1940 |   |   | none (definition) | Mapping Inequality (HOLC maps) |   |
| holc_dgap_black | 0.1 | percentage points of denial rate | pooled denial rate in grade D tracts minus that in grade A tracts, county-cluster bootstrap interval | non-Hispanic Black applicants whose home-purchase application was decided in 2024, in tracts graded D minus those in tracts graded A, each over the tracts where the cell for the group is published | applications decided in 2024 | 95% CI −5.5 to 6.0 | 315 tracts | none (counts of decided applications, pooled over tracts) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| holc_dgap_hispanic | −1.3 | percentage points of denial rate | pooled denial rate in grade D tracts minus that in grade A tracts, county-cluster bootstrap interval | Hispanic (any race) applicants whose home-purchase application was decided in 2024, in tracts graded D minus those in tracts graded A, each over the tracts where the cell for the group is published | applications decided in 2024 | 95% CI −7.7 to 4.4 | 391 tracts | none (counts of decided applications, pooled over tracts) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| holc_dgap_wb | 1.3 | percentage points of denial rate | difference between the two grade D minus grade A pooled-rate gaps, county-cluster bootstrap interval | non-Hispanic white minus non-Hispanic Black applicants decided in 2024: the grade D minus grade A gap of white applicants minus that of Black applicants | applications decided in 2024 | 95% CI −5.0 to 7.4 | 315 tracts | none (counts of decided applications, pooled over tracts) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| holc_dgap_white | 1.4 | percentage points of denial rate | pooled denial rate in grade D tracts minus that in grade A tracts, county-cluster bootstrap interval | non-Hispanic white applicants whose home-purchase application was decided in 2024, in tracts graded D minus those in tracts graded A, each over the tracts where the cell for the group is published | applications decided in 2024 | 95% CI 0.2 to 2.8 | 1,365 tracts | none (counts of decided applications, pooled over tracts) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| holc_gap_b_adi | −0.2 | percentage points of denial rate | coefficient on grade B in a regression of the tract denial rate on grade with a separate baseline for each city and tenth cell, weighted by decided applications, errors clustered by county | home-purchase applications decided in 2024 in tracts graded B minus those in tracts graded A, among tracts of the same city and the same tenth of the Area Deprivation Index | applications decided in 2024 | 95% CI −0.9 to 0.5 | 8,748 tracts | decided applications | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| holc_gap_c_adi | −0.4 | percentage points of denial rate | coefficient on grade C in a regression of the tract denial rate on grade with a separate baseline for each city and tenth cell, weighted by decided applications, errors clustered by county | home-purchase applications decided in 2024 in tracts graded C minus those in tracts graded A, among tracts of the same city and the same tenth of the Area Deprivation Index | applications decided in 2024 | 95% CI −1.3 to 0.6 | 8,748 tracts | decided applications | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| holc_gap_d_adi | 0.0 | percentage points of denial rate | coefficient on grade D in a regression of the tract denial rate on grade (A is the base) with a separate baseline for each city and tenth cell, weighted by decided applications, errors clustered by county | home-purchase applications decided in 2024 in tracts graded D minus those in tracts graded A, among tracts of the same city and the same tenth of the Area Deprivation Index (a separate baseline for each city and tenth cell) | applications decided in 2024 | 95% CI −1.1 to 1.1 | 8,748 tracts | decided applications | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| holc_gap_d_city | 3.5 | percentage points of denial rate | coefficient on grade D in a regression of the tract denial rate on grade (A is the base) with a separate baseline for each city, weighted by decided applications, errors clustered by county | home-purchase applications decided in 2024 in tracts graded D minus those in tracts graded A, among tracts of the same city | applications decided in 2024 | 95% CI 2.1 to 4.8 | 8,748 tracts | decided applications | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| holc_gap_d_raw | 3.4 | percentage points of denial rate | coefficient on grade D in a regression of the tract denial rate on grade (A is the base), weighted by decided applications, errors clustered by county | home-purchase applications decided in 2024 in tracts graded D minus those in tracts graded A, with no adjustment | applications decided in 2024 | 95% CI 2.1 to 4.7 | 8,748 tracts | decided applications | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| holc_gap_d_strict | 2.8 | percentage points of denial rate | pooled denial rate of grade D tracts minus that of grade A tracts, county-cluster bootstrap interval | home-purchase applications decided in 2024 in tracts graded D minus those in tracts graded A, among tracts at least 90 percent covered by graded polygons | applications decided in 2024 | 95% CI 1.0 to 4.6 | 4,736 tracts | none (counts of decided applications, pooled over tracts) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| holc_gap_dc | 0.4 | percentage points of denial rate | pooled denial rate of grade D tracts minus that of grade C tracts, county-cluster bootstrap interval | home-purchase applications decided in 2024 in tracts graded D minus those in tracts graded C | applications decided in 2024 | 95% CI −0.6 to 1.5 | 6,095 tracts | none (counts of decided applications, pooled over tracts) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| holc_min_group_tracts | 30 | tracts | the number of tracts a grade and group point needs to be drawn (a rule of this chapter) | a grade and applicant group point in the HOLC comparison | 2024 |   |   | none (definition) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| holc_n_cells | 1,008 | city and tenth cells | count of distinct (city, tenth of the deprivation index) cells that carry a baseline in the third adjustment | graded tracts with a published home-purchase cell and a deprivation rank | 2024 |   |   | none (full count) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| holc_n_cities | 221 | city and state pairs | count of distinct (city, state) pairs of the polygon covering most of each tract | graded tracts with a published home-purchase cell | HOLC maps drawn 1935 to 1940 |   |   | none (full count) | Mapping Inequality (HOLC maps) |   |
| holc_n_graded | 10,967 | tracts | count of tracts whose area is at least half covered by polygons graded A to D | 2020 census tracts covered at least half by graded HOLC polygons | HOLC maps drawn 1935 to 1940 |   |   | none (full count) | Mapping Inequality (HOLC maps) |   |
| holc_n_published | 8,748 | tracts | count of graded tracts in the HMDA analysis | graded tracts of the 50 states and DC with a published home-purchase cell and a deprivation rank | 2024 |   |   | none (full count) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| holc_rate_a | 7.9% | percent of decided applications denied | denied applications divided by applications that were originated or denied, summed over the tracts (a pooled rate), county-cluster bootstrap interval | home-purchase applications decided in 2024 in tracts graded A on the 1930s HOLC maps | applications decided in 2024 | 95% CI 7.0% to 9.0% | 650 tracts | none (counts of decided applications, pooled over tracts) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| holc_rate_b | 9.4% | percent of decided applications denied | denied applications divided by applications that were originated or denied, summed over the tracts (a pooled rate), county-cluster bootstrap interval | home-purchase applications decided in 2024 in tracts graded B on the 1930s HOLC maps | applications decided in 2024 | 95% CI 8.5% to 10.3% | 2,003 tracts | none (counts of decided applications, pooled over tracts) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| holc_rate_c | 10.9% | percent of decided applications denied | denied applications divided by applications that were originated or denied, summed over the tracts (a pooled rate), county-cluster bootstrap interval | home-purchase applications decided in 2024 in tracts graded C on the 1930s HOLC maps | applications decided in 2024 | 95% CI 10.0% to 11.8% | 4,008 tracts | none (counts of decided applications, pooled over tracts) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| holc_rate_d | 11.3% | percent of decided applications denied | denied applications divided by applications that were originated or denied, summed over the tracts (a pooled rate), county-cluster bootstrap interval | home-purchase applications decided in 2024 in tracts graded D on the 1930s HOLC maps | applications decided in 2024 | 95% CI 10.2% to 12.5% | 2,087 tracts | none (counts of decided applications, pooled over tracts) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| holc_rate_graded | 10.3% | percent of decided applications denied | denied applications divided by applications that were originated or denied, summed over the tracts (a pooled rate), county-cluster bootstrap interval | home-purchase applications decided in 2024 in graded tracts | applications decided in 2024 | 95% CI 9.5% to 11.1% | 8,748 tracts | none (counts of decided applications, pooled over tracts) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| holc_rate_other | 8.9% | percent of decided applications denied | denied applications divided by applications that were originated or denied, summed over the tracts (a pooled rate), county-cluster bootstrap interval | home-purchase applications decided in 2024 in tracts that are not graded | applications decided in 2024 | 95% CI 8.6% to 9.2% | 67,230 tracts | none (counts of decided applications, pooled over tracts) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| holc_share_decided | 7.3% | percent of decided applications | decided applications in graded tracts divided by decided applications in all tracts of the analysis | home-purchase applications that a covered lender originated or denied in 2024, first-lien loans on site-built homes with up to four units that applicants intend as a principal residence, in tracts of the 50 states and DC with a published cell | applications decided in 2024 |   |   | none (full counts) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| income_d1 | $279 thousand | thousands of dollars, median applicant income in the tract | mean over tracts of the tract's median income reported on the applications, weighted by decided applications, county-cluster bootstrap interval | tracts in the least deprived tenth with a published home-purchase cell | applications in 2024 | 95% CI $266 thousand to $292 thousand | 7,584 tracts | decided applications | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| income_d10 | $64 thousand | thousands of dollars, median applicant income in the tract | mean over tracts of the tract's median income reported on the applications, weighted by decided applications, county-cluster bootstrap interval | tracts in the most deprived tenth with a published home-purchase cell | applications in 2024 | 95% CI $63 thousand to $65 thousand | 7,591 tracts | decided applications | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| income_fifth_hi | $125 thousand | thousands of dollars, median applicant income in the tract | lowest tract median applicant income in the highest fifth | tracts in the highest fifth by median applicant income among tracts where both Black and white cells are published | applications in 2024 |   | 1,135 tracts | none (a boundary of the fifth) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| income_fifth_lo | $74 thousand | thousands of dollars, median applicant income in the tract | highest tract median applicant income in the lowest fifth | tracts in the lowest fifth by median applicant income among tracts where both Black and white cells are published | applications in 2024 |   | 1,124 tracts | none (a boundary of the fifth) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| loan_d1 | $827 thousand | thousands of dollars, median loan amount in the tract | mean over tracts of the tract's median loan amount (HMDA rounds to the nearest $10,000), weighted by decided applications, county-cluster bootstrap interval | tracts in the least deprived tenth with a published home-purchase cell | applications in 2024 | 95% CI $774 thousand to $879 thousand | 7,584 tracts | decided applications | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| loan_d10 | $162 thousand | thousands of dollars, median loan amount in the tract | mean over tracts of the tract's median loan amount (HMDA rounds to the nearest $10,000), weighted by decided applications, county-cluster bootstrap interval | tracts in the most deprived tenth with a published home-purchase cell | applications in 2024 | 95% CI $158 thousand to $167 thousand | 7,591 tracts | decided applications | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| median_decided | 31 | decided applications per tract | median over tracts of the originated plus denied applications | home-purchase applications that a covered lender originated or denied in 2024, first-lien loans on site-built homes with up to four units that applicants intend as a principal residence, in tracts of the 50 states and DC with a published cell | applications decided in 2024 |   | 76,072 tracts | none (each tract counts once) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| min_point_tracts | 100 | tracts | the number of tracts a point needs to be drawn (a rule of this chapter) | a point on the lines by applicant group | 2024 |   |   | none (definition) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| n_cloud | 2,000 | tracts | size of a random sample drawn with a fixed seed | tracts with at least 30 decided home-purchase applications | 2024 |   |   | none (sample size) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| n_cloud_pool | 39,697 | tracts | count of tracts the sample is drawn from | tracts with a deprivation rank and at least 30 decided home-purchase applications | 2024 |   |   | none (full count) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| n_decided | 3,097,390 | applications | originated plus denied applications summed over the tracts | home-purchase applications that a covered lender originated or denied in 2024, first-lien loans on site-built homes with up to four units that applicants intend as a principal residence, in tracts of the 50 states and DC with a published cell | applications decided in 2024 |   |   | none (full count) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| n_denied | 278,451 | applications | denied applications summed over the tracts | home-purchase applications that a covered lender originated or denied in 2024, first-lien loans on site-built homes with up to four units that applicants intend as a principal residence, in tracts of the 50 states and DC with a published cell | applications decided in 2024 |   |   | none (full count) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| n_lt10 | 4,865 | tracts | count of tracts with fewer than 10 decided applications (the staged floor counts applications of every action taken) | tracts of the 50 states and DC with a published home-purchase cell | applications decided in 2024 |   |   | none (full count) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| n_no_adi | 94 | tracts | count of tracts with no deprivation rank, left out of the figures that rank tracts | tracts with a published home-purchase cell | 2024 |   |   | none (full count) | Area Deprivation Index |   |
| n_pr_published | 637 | tracts | count of Puerto Rico tracts set aside | Puerto Rico tracts with a published home-purchase cell for all applicants | 2024 |   |   | none (full count) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| n_shared_asian | 5,490 | tracts | count of tracts where the cells for non-Hispanic Asian and non-Hispanic white applicants are both published | tracts of the 50 states and DC | 2024 |   |   | none (full count) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| n_shared_black | 5,657 | tracts | count of tracts where the cells for non-Hispanic Black and non-Hispanic white applicants are both published | tracts of the 50 states and DC | 2024 |   |   | none (full count) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| n_shared_hispanic | 10,189 | tracts | count of tracts where the cells for Hispanic (any race) and non-Hispanic white applicants are both published | tracts of the 50 states and DC | 2024 |   |   | none (full count) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| n_tracts | 76,072 | tracts | count of tracts whose all-applicant home-purchase cell has 10 or more applications and a decided application | tracts of the 50 states and DC with a published home-purchase cell for all applicants | 2024 |   |   | none (full count) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| n_tracts_adi | 75,978 | tracts | count of tracts ranked into tenths | tracts with a published home-purchase cell and an Area Deprivation Index rank | 2024 |   |   | none (full count) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| n_withheld | 5,999 | tracts | count of tracts whose all-applicant cell has fewer than 10 applications and is set to missing when the file is staged | tracts of the 50 states and DC with a home-purchase row in the HMDA file | 2024 |   |   | none (full count) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| pr_decided | 11,409 | applications | originated plus denied applications summed over the tracts | home-purchase applications decided in 2024 in Puerto Rico tracts with a published cell | applications decided in 2024 |   |   | none (full count) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| pr_rate | 19.1% | percent of decided applications denied | denied applications divided by applications that were originated or denied, summed over the tracts (a pooled rate), municipio-cluster bootstrap interval | home-purchase applications decided in 2024 in Puerto Rico tracts with a published cell, first-lien loans on site-built homes with up to four units that applicants intend as a principal residence | applications decided in 2024 | 95% CI 18.3% to 20.0% | 637 tracts | none (counts of decided applications, pooled over tracts) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| pr_shift_all | 0.04 | percentage points of denial rate | pooled denial rate with Puerto Rico tracts added minus the rate without them | home-purchase applications decided in 2024, all tracts with a published cell, with Puerto Rico minus without | applications decided in 2024 |   |   | none (counts of decided applications, pooled over tracts) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| pr_top_share | 69% | percent of ranked Puerto Rico tracts | share at or above the national rank where the most deprived tenth of the 50-state and DC sample starts | Puerto Rico tracts with a published cell and a deprivation rank | ADI 2023 |   |   | none (each tract counts once) | Area Deprivation Index |   |
| rate_all | 9.0% | percent of decided applications denied | denied applications divided by applications that were originated or denied, summed over the tracts (a pooled rate), county-cluster bootstrap interval | home-purchase applications that a covered lender originated or denied in 2024, first-lien loans on site-built homes with up to four units that applicants intend as a principal residence, in tracts of the 50 states and DC with a published cell | applications decided in 2024 | 95% CI 8.7% to 9.3% | 76,072 tracts | none (counts of decided applications, pooled over tracts) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| rate_all_ge30 | 8.5% | percent of decided applications denied | denied applications divided by applications that were originated or denied, summed over the tracts (a pooled rate), county-cluster bootstrap interval | home-purchase applications that a covered lender originated or denied in 2024, first-lien loans on site-built homes with up to four units that applicants intend as a principal residence, in tracts of the 50 states and DC with a published cell, tracts with at least 30 decided applications | applications decided in 2024 | 95% CI 8.2% to 8.8% | 39,714 tracts | none (counts of decided applications, pooled over tracts) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| rate_asian | 8.9% | percent of decided applications denied | denied applications divided by applications that were originated or denied, summed over the tracts (a pooled rate), county-cluster bootstrap interval | non-Hispanic Asian applicants whose home-purchase application was decided in 2024, in tracts where the cell for the group is published (10 or more applications) | applications decided in 2024 | 95% CI 8.4% to 9.4% | 7,532 tracts | none (counts of decided applications, pooled over tracts) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| rate_asian_d1 | 7.8% | percent of decided applications denied | denied applications divided by applications that were originated or denied, summed over the tracts (a pooled rate), county-cluster bootstrap interval | non-Hispanic Asian applicants whose home-purchase application was decided in 2024, in the tract tenth numbered 1 by Area Deprivation Index (1 = least deprived) where the cell is published | applications decided in 2024 | 95% CI 7.3% to 8.7% | 2,241 tracts | none (counts of decided applications, pooled over tracts) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| rate_asian_d8 | 12.9% | percent of decided applications denied | denied applications divided by applications that were originated or denied, summed over the tracts (a pooled rate), county-cluster bootstrap interval | non-Hispanic Asian applicants whose home-purchase application was decided in 2024, in the tract tenth numbered 8 by Area Deprivation Index (1 = least deprived) where the cell is published | applications decided in 2024 | 95% CI 11.0% to 14.5% | 103 tracts | none (counts of decided applications, pooled over tracts) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| rate_black | 17.0% | percent of decided applications denied | denied applications divided by applications that were originated or denied, summed over the tracts (a pooled rate), county-cluster bootstrap interval | non-Hispanic Black applicants whose home-purchase application was decided in 2024, in tracts where the cell for the group is published (10 or more applications) | applications decided in 2024 | 95% CI 16.4% to 17.7% | 8,232 tracts | none (counts of decided applications, pooled over tracts) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| rate_black_d10 | 20.3% | percent of decided applications denied | denied applications divided by applications that were originated or denied, summed over the tracts (a pooled rate), county-cluster bootstrap interval | non-Hispanic Black applicants whose home-purchase application was decided in 2024, in the tract tenth numbered 10 by Area Deprivation Index (1 = least deprived) where the cell is published | applications decided in 2024 | 95% CI 19.0% to 21.6% | 1,081 tracts | none (counts of decided applications, pooled over tracts) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| rate_black_d3 | 14.6% | percent of decided applications denied | denied applications divided by applications that were originated or denied, summed over the tracts (a pooled rate), county-cluster bootstrap interval | non-Hispanic Black applicants whose home-purchase application was decided in 2024, in the tract tenth numbered 3 by Area Deprivation Index (1 = least deprived) where the cell is published | applications decided in 2024 | 95% CI 13.8% to 15.6% | 633 tracts | none (counts of decided applications, pooled over tracts) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| rate_cashout | 35.8% | percent of decided applications denied | denied applications divided by applications that were originated or denied, summed over the tracts (a pooled rate), county-cluster bootstrap interval | cash-out refinance applications that a covered lender originated or denied in 2024, first-lien loans on site-built homes with up to four units that applicants intend as a principal residence, in tracts of the 50 states and DC with a published cell | applications decided in 2024 | 95% CI 35.3% to 36.4% | 46,525 tracts | none (counts of decided applications, pooled over tracts) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| rate_d1 | 7.8% | percent of decided applications denied | denied applications divided by applications that were originated or denied, summed over the tracts (a pooled rate), county-cluster bootstrap interval | home-purchase applications decided in 2024 in the least deprived tenth of tracts by Area Deprivation Index national rank (tenths hold equal numbers of tracts) | applications decided in 2024 | 95% CI 7.2% to 8.4% | 7,584 tracts | none (counts of decided applications, pooled over tracts) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| rate_d10 | 13.8% | percent of decided applications denied | denied applications divided by applications that were originated or denied, summed over the tracts (a pooled rate), county-cluster bootstrap interval | home-purchase applications decided in 2024 in the most deprived tenth of tracts by Area Deprivation Index national rank (tenths hold equal numbers of tracts) | applications decided in 2024 | 95% CI 13.3% to 14.3% | 7,591 tracts | none (counts of decided applications, pooled over tracts) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| rate_d10_with_pr | 14.1% | percent of decided applications denied | denied applications divided by originated or denied applications, summed over those tracts (a sensitivity, not a chapter estimate) | home-purchase applications decided in 2024 in the most deprived tenth of the 50-state and DC tracts plus Puerto Rico tracts at or above the rank where that tenth starts | applications decided in 2024 |   |   | none (counts of decided applications, pooled over tracts) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| rate_d2 | 7.7% | percent of decided applications denied | denied applications divided by applications that were originated or denied, summed over the tracts (a pooled rate), county-cluster bootstrap interval | home-purchase applications decided in 2024 in the second least deprived tenth of tracts by Area Deprivation Index national rank (tenths hold equal numbers of tracts) | applications decided in 2024 | 95% CI 7.2% to 8.2% | 7,686 tracts | none (counts of decided applications, pooled over tracts) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| rate_d3 | 7.6% | percent of decided applications denied | denied applications divided by applications that were originated or denied, summed over the tracts (a pooled rate), county-cluster bootstrap interval | home-purchase applications decided in 2024 in the third least deprived tenth of tracts by Area Deprivation Index national rank (tenths hold equal numbers of tracts) | applications decided in 2024 | 95% CI 7.3% to 8.0% | 7,429 tracts | none (counts of decided applications, pooled over tracts) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| rate_hispanic | 13.1% | percent of decided applications denied | denied applications divided by applications that were originated or denied, summed over the tracts (a pooled rate), county-cluster bootstrap interval | Hispanic (any race) applicants whose home-purchase application was decided in 2024, in tracts where the cell for the group is published (10 or more applications) | applications decided in 2024 | 95% CI 12.4% to 13.9% | 16,060 tracts | none (counts of decided applications, pooled over tracts) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| rate_hispanic_d10 | 14.2% | percent of decided applications denied | denied applications divided by applications that were originated or denied, summed over the tracts (a pooled rate), county-cluster bootstrap interval | Hispanic (any race) applicants whose home-purchase application was decided in 2024, in the tract tenth numbered 10 by Area Deprivation Index (1 = least deprived) where the cell is published | applications decided in 2024 | 95% CI 12.9% to 15.7% | 1,045 tracts | none (counts of decided applications, pooled over tracts) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| rate_hispanic_d3 | 11.8% | percent of decided applications denied | denied applications divided by applications that were originated or denied, summed over the tracts (a pooled rate), county-cluster bootstrap interval | Hispanic (any race) applicants whose home-purchase application was decided in 2024, in the tract tenth numbered 3 by Area Deprivation Index (1 = least deprived) where the cell is published | applications decided in 2024 | 95% CI 11.1% to 12.6% | 1,847 tracts | none (counts of decided applications, pooled over tracts) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| rate_refi | 20.7% | percent of decided applications denied | denied applications divided by applications that were originated or denied, summed over the tracts (a pooled rate), county-cluster bootstrap interval | refinance applications that a covered lender originated or denied in 2024, first-lien loans on site-built homes with up to four units that applicants intend as a principal residence, in tracts of the 50 states and DC with a published cell | applications decided in 2024 | 95% CI 20.2% to 21.2% | 36,779 tracts | none (counts of decided applications, pooled over tracts) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| rate_white | 6.5% | percent of decided applications denied | denied applications divided by applications that were originated or denied, summed over the tracts (a pooled rate), county-cluster bootstrap interval | non-Hispanic white applicants whose home-purchase application was decided in 2024, in tracts where the cell for the group is published (10 or more applications) | applications decided in 2024 | 95% CI 6.3% to 6.6% | 56,664 tracts | none (counts of decided applications, pooled over tracts) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| rate_white_d1 | 6.7% | percent of decided applications denied | denied applications divided by applications that were originated or denied, summed over the tracts (a pooled rate), county-cluster bootstrap interval | non-Hispanic white applicants whose home-purchase application was decided in 2024, in the tract tenth numbered 1 by Area Deprivation Index (1 = least deprived) where the cell is published | applications decided in 2024 | 95% CI 6.0% to 7.5% | 4,805 tracts | none (counts of decided applications, pooled over tracts) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| rate_white_d10 | 10.4% | percent of decided applications denied | denied applications divided by applications that were originated or denied, summed over the tracts (a pooled rate), county-cluster bootstrap interval | non-Hispanic white applicants whose home-purchase application was decided in 2024, in the tract tenth numbered 10 by Area Deprivation Index (1 = least deprived) where the cell is published | applications decided in 2024 | 95% CI 10.1% to 10.8% | 4,227 tracts | none (counts of decided applications, pooled over tracts) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| rate_white_d3 | 5.4% | percent of decided applications denied | denied applications divided by applications that were originated or denied, summed over the tracts (a pooled rate), county-cluster bootstrap interval | non-Hispanic white applicants whose home-purchase application was decided in 2024, in the tract tenth numbered 3 by Area Deprivation Index (1 = least deprived) where the cell is published | applications decided in 2024 | 95% CI 5.2% to 5.6% | 5,868 tracts | none (counts of decided applications, pooled over tracts) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| ratio_asian | 1.6 | ratio of denial rates | pooled denial rate of the group divided by that of non-Hispanic white applicants over the same tracts, county-cluster bootstrap interval | non-Hispanic Asian applicants over non-Hispanic white applicants, applicants whose home-purchase application was decided in 2024, in the tracts where the cells for non-Hispanic Asian and non-Hispanic white applicants are both published | applications decided in 2024 | 95% CI 1.5 to 1.7 | 5,490 tracts | none (counts of decided applications, pooled over tracts) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| ratio_black | 2.6 | ratio of denial rates | pooled denial rate of the group divided by that of non-Hispanic white applicants over the same tracts, county-cluster bootstrap interval | non-Hispanic Black applicants over non-Hispanic white applicants, applicants whose home-purchase application was decided in 2024, in the tracts where the cells for non-Hispanic Black and non-Hispanic white applicants are both published | applications decided in 2024 | 95% CI 2.5 to 2.7 | 5,657 tracts | none (counts of decided applications, pooled over tracts) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| ratio_d10 | 2.0 | ratio of denial rates | pooled denial rate of Black applicants divided by that of white applicants over the same tracts, county-cluster bootstrap interval | non-Hispanic Black over non-Hispanic white applicants decided in 2024, in the most deprived tenth of tracts where both cells are published | applications decided in 2024 | 95% CI 1.8 to 2.3 | 395 tracts | none (counts of decided applications, pooled over tracts) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| ratio_d5 | 2.8 | ratio of denial rates | pooled denial rate of Black applicants divided by that of white applicants over the same tracts, county-cluster bootstrap interval | non-Hispanic Black over non-Hispanic white applicants decided in 2024, in the fifth tenth of tracts by Area Deprivation Index where both cells are published | applications decided in 2024 | 95% CI 2.6 to 3.0 | 809 tracts | none (counts of decided applications, pooled over tracts) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| ratio_hispanic | 2.0 | ratio of denial rates | pooled denial rate of the group divided by that of non-Hispanic white applicants over the same tracts, county-cluster bootstrap interval | Hispanic (any race) applicants over non-Hispanic white applicants, applicants whose home-purchase application was decided in 2024, in the tracts where the cells for Hispanic (any race) and non-Hispanic white applicants are both published | applications decided in 2024 | 95% CI 1.9 to 2.1 | 10,189 tracts | none (counts of decided applications, pooled over tracts) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| same_asian | 8.9% | percent of decided applications denied | denied applications divided by applications that were originated or denied, summed over the tracts (a pooled rate), county-cluster bootstrap interval | non-Hispanic Asian applicants whose home-purchase application was decided in 2024, in the tracts where the cells for non-Hispanic Asian and non-Hispanic white applicants are both published | applications decided in 2024 | 95% CI 8.5% to 9.4% | 5,490 tracts | none (counts of decided applications, pooled over tracts) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| same_black | 16.2% | percent of decided applications denied | denied applications divided by applications that were originated or denied, summed over the tracts (a pooled rate), county-cluster bootstrap interval | non-Hispanic Black applicants whose home-purchase application was decided in 2024, in the tracts where the cells for non-Hispanic Black and non-Hispanic white applicants are both published | applications decided in 2024 | 95% CI 15.7% to 16.8% | 5,657 tracts | none (counts of decided applications, pooled over tracts) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| same_hispanic | 12.8% | percent of decided applications denied | denied applications divided by applications that were originated or denied, summed over the tracts (a pooled rate), county-cluster bootstrap interval | Hispanic (any race) applicants whose home-purchase application was decided in 2024, in the tracts where the cells for Hispanic (any race) and non-Hispanic white applicants are both published | applications decided in 2024 | 95% CI 12.2% to 13.5% | 10,189 tracts | none (counts of decided applications, pooled over tracts) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| same_white_vs_asian | 5.7% | percent of decided applications denied | denied applications divided by applications that were originated or denied, summed over the tracts (a pooled rate), county-cluster bootstrap interval | non-Hispanic white applicants whose home-purchase application was decided in 2024, in the tracts where the cells for non-Hispanic Asian and non-Hispanic white applicants are both published | applications decided in 2024 | 95% CI 5.4% to 6.0% | 5,490 tracts | none (counts of decided applications, pooled over tracts) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| same_white_vs_black | 6.2% | percent of decided applications denied | denied applications divided by applications that were originated or denied, summed over the tracts (a pooled rate), county-cluster bootstrap interval | non-Hispanic white applicants whose home-purchase application was decided in 2024, in the tracts where the cells for non-Hispanic Black and non-Hispanic white applicants are both published | applications decided in 2024 | 95% CI 6.0% to 6.5% | 5,657 tracts | none (counts of decided applications, pooled over tracts) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| same_white_vs_hispanic | 6.5% | percent of decided applications denied | denied applications divided by applications that were originated or denied, summed over the tracts (a pooled rate), county-cluster bootstrap interval | non-Hispanic white applicants whose home-purchase application was decided in 2024, in the tracts where the cells for Hispanic (any race) and non-Hispanic white applicants are both published | applications decided in 2024 | 95% CI 6.2% to 6.8% | 10,189 tracts | none (counts of decided applications, pooled over tracts) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| share_black_lt10 | 27% | percent of tracts that hold both cells | share of those tracts with fewer than 10 decided applications from non-Hispanic Black applicants | tracts where the cells for non-Hispanic Black and non-Hispanic white applicants are both published | applications decided in 2024 |   | 5,657 tracts | none (each tract counts once) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| share_shared_black | 7.4% | percent of tracts | tracts where the cells for non-Hispanic Black and non-Hispanic white applicants are both published, divided by tracts with a published all-applicant cell | home-purchase applications that a covered lender originated or denied in 2024, first-lien loans on site-built homes with up to four units that applicants intend as a principal residence, in tracts of the 50 states and DC with a published cell | applications decided in 2024 |   | 76,072 tracts | none (each tract counts once) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| suppress_floor | 10 | applications | the number of applications, of every action taken, below which the staging step withholds the cell (a rule of this book, not an HMDA flag) | a tract and loan purpose cell of the staged HMDA file | 2024 |   |   | none (definition) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| suppress_max | 9 | applications | the largest number of applications a withheld cell can hold (one below the floor) | a withheld tract and loan purpose cell of the staged HMDA file | 2024 |   |   | none (definition) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| tracts_black_cashout | 2,938 | tracts | count of tracts with a published cash-out refinance cell for non-Hispanic Black applicants (10 or more applications) | tracts of the 50 states and DC | 2024 |   |   | none (full count) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| tracts_black_purchase | 8,232 | tracts | count of tracts with a published home-purchase cell for non-Hispanic Black applicants (10 or more applications) | tracts of the 50 states and DC | 2024 |   |   | none (full count) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| tracts_black_refi | 1,155 | tracts | count of tracts with a published refinance cell for non-Hispanic Black applicants (10 or more applications) | tracts of the 50 states and DC | 2024 |   |   | none (full count) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |
| us_denial | 9.0% | percent of decided applications denied | denied applications divided by applications that were originated or denied, summed over the tracts (a pooled rate), county-cluster bootstrap interval | home-purchase applications decided in 2024 in all tracts with an Area Deprivation Index national rank (all ten tenths pooled) | applications decided in 2024 | 95% CI 8.7% to 9.3% | 75,978 tracts | none (counts of decided applications, pooled over tracts) | HMDA mortgage lending |   |

## Definitions

- Census tract: A small area drawn by the Census Bureau to stand in for a neighborhood. Boundaries are redrawn after each decennial census.
- Bootstrap interval: A range for an estimate found by recomputing it on many random resamples of the data and reading the range from the results. It shows how much the estimate would vary from sample to sample.
- Suppression: The withholding of a number because the count behind it is too small to publish without risking the identification of a person. A suppressed value is missing, not zero.
- Area Deprivation Index (ADI): A score that ranks neighborhoods by income, education, employment and housing conditions drawn from the American Community Survey. In this book a higher national percentile means a more deprived neighborhood.
- HOLC grade: A letter from A to D that the Home Owners' Loan Corporation gave neighborhoods on its 1930s maps, with A labeled best and D hazardous. The maps are known as redlining maps.
- Ecological inference: Drawing conclusions about individuals from data about places or groups. A pattern across counties need not hold for the people inside them.

## Methods

This chapter compares denial rates on home-purchase applications decided in 2024 across census tracts, for all applicants and for four applicant groups. The file covers lenders above the HMDA reporting thresholds and has no loan type; withdrawn and incomplete applications are not in the rate, and a tract, purpose and group cell with fewer than 10 applications is missing, so a comparison between groups covers only tracts where both cells are published. The HOLC grades come from maps drawn in the 1930s and are compared with 2024 lending, and the Area Deprivation Index that ranks tracts is built partly from income and housing costs.

### Which applications are included

The staged HMDA file holds 2024 first-lien applications on site-built homes with up to four units that applicants intend as a principal residence, from lenders above the HMDA reporting thresholds, aggregated to 2020 census tracts by loan purpose (home purchase, refinance, cash-out refinance) and by applicant group (all, and the applicant's reported non-Hispanic white, non-Hispanic Black, Hispanic of any race and non-Hispanic Asian).

The chapter uses home-purchase applications in the 50 states and DC. Puerto Rico is left out. Loan type is not in the file.

Explains Table 1.

### How the denial rate is defined

The denial rate is denied applications divided by applications that were originated or denied (decided), as a percent, summed over tracts: a pooled rate, never an average of tract rates.

Applications that were withdrawn or left incomplete, loans approved but not accepted and purchased loans are not in the rate.

### Cells with few applications are missing

When the file was staged, a tract, purpose and group cell with fewer than 10 applications (of every action taken) was set to missing; a missing cell leaves both the numerator and the denominator and is never imputed or back-calculated.

### How tracts are grouped

Tenths hold near-equal numbers of tracts ranked by the Area Deprivation Index national rank (tracts tied on the rank stay together). The fifths of tract applicant income hold near-equal numbers of tracts that have published cells for Black and white applicants.

Explains Table 2 and Table 5.

### HOLC grades and the Cook County map

Graded polygons (A to D) are intersected with 2020 tracts in an equal-area projection; a tract with at least 50 percent of its area graded takes the grade covering most of it and the city of the polygon covering most of it (the rule of the chapter on home value, income and redlining); the grade D minus grade A gap is also shown for a stricter rule of 90 percent coverage.

Grade comparisons are weighted regressions of the tract denial rate on grade, weighted by decided applications, with errors clustered by county, with no baseline, with a separate baseline for each city, and with a separate baseline for each city and tenth cell.

On the Cook County map, tracts with at least 20 decided applications are shaded; the tooltip interval is a Wilson interval on the counts.

Explains Table 6 and Table 7.

### Intervals, trends and the tract sample

Intervals are percentile intervals from a bootstrap that resamples whole counties with replacement (2,000 replicates, seed 12345, the same draws for every estimate so a difference gets one interval).

The trend of the same-tract gap is the least-squares slope of the gaps of the tenths (or fifths) on their number, recomputed in every bootstrap draw.

The scatter shows a random sample of 2,000 tracts with at least 30 decided applications, drawn with seed 12345.

Explains Table 4 and Table 2.

### Four rankings of the same places

The comparison follows the book's ranking switch rule, fixed on October 28, 2026 before any of these gradients was computed. The main gradient of the chapter is recomputed under four rankings of the same places, with the outcome, period, weights, bins and intervals unchanged: the published ADI; a standardized index that applies the ADI's coefficients to its measures after standardizing each one across tracts; median household income; and the share of adults 25 and older with a bachelor's degree or more. The three alternatives come from ACS tract estimates for 2019 to 2023, the period of the ADI.

All four rankings use the same places, the 71,169 tracts that have the outcome and all four rankings, so the ADI panel can differ slightly from the chapter's main figure. Tracts enter only if they have every input of the standardized index, which leaves out tracts without a median rent, home value or mortgage cost.

A pattern counts as changed when the worse end switches sides, when the two ends differ under one ranking and not the other, or when the rank correlation of bin order and bin mean falls on the other side of 0.9 and moves by at least 0.1.

Explains Table 8.

## What these data cannot show

Applications are not the population. A denial rate is a share of the applications that reached a decision, and who applies differs across tracts and groups. People who expect a denial, who are steered to another loan or who cannot get an answer to an inquiry do not appear, and withdrawn applications leave the rate. The file covers one year and the lenders above the reporting thresholds.

The tract totals hold no credit score, debt-to-income ratio, loan-to-value ratio, loan type or lender for any applicant. A gap between groups, even inside one tract, is therefore not evidence of discrimination by itself and not a measure of how much treatment differs. The application-level HMDA records carry some of those fields and up to four denial reasons for each denied application. Lenders report those reasons themselves, they are not audited, and the tract aggregate does not keep them.

The groups are reported groups. The ethnicity and race in HMDA come from the applicant where the applicant answers and from fallback rules where not, and the four groups leave out other and unreported applicants. A group's cell exists only in tracts with 10 or more of its applications, so group comparisons cover the tracts with more applicants of that group and not a random sample of tracts.

The intervals resample counties. Applications at one lender share its rules and cross county lines, so the intervals do not capture correlation within a lender and may be narrower than the uncertainty. The tenths and grades describe tracts and the applications reported in them. They are not the experience of one borrower, and a pattern across places need not hold for the people inside them (ecological inference). The deprivation index understates deprivation in high-cost cities and is built partly from income and housing costs, which are also what a lender weighs.

The grades followed the housing, incomes and populations of the 1930s, so a tract's grade stands for a mix of what the neighborhood was and what happened after. The adjusted contrast compares tracts of the same city and the same tenth of the index and cannot say whether the maps shaped today's deprivation. A city that HOLC did not survey is absent from the comparison, which does not mean it had no redlining. Tooltip intervals on the Cook County map treat applications as independent and are narrower than a bootstrap over tracts would give.

## References

1. Munnell, Alicia H.; Tootell, Geoffrey M. B.; Browne, Lynn E.; McEneaney, James (1996). Mortgage Lending in Boston: Interpreting HMDA Data. American Economic Review 86(1): 25-53.
2. Hanson, Andrew; Hawley, Zackary; Martin, Hal; Liu, Bo (2016). Discrimination in Mortgage Lending: Evidence from a Correspondence Experiment. Journal of Urban Economics 92: 48-65. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jue.2015.12.004
3. Nelson, Robert K.; Winling, LaDale; Marciano, Richard; Connolly, Nathan; et al. (2023). Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America. American Panorama, ed. Robert K. Nelson and Edward L. Ayers, Digital Scholarship Lab, University of Richmond. https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/

## Provenance

- Pipeline version: 0.1.0
- Build script: book2/chapters/mortgage-denials/build.py (sha256 814f4cc85cbefae10bb7bd60cd4c66a5101602b66203772be914f2c965ecad4c)
- Built on: 2026-10-09
- Site commit: c2b1ff3309cb4a10833f884da91ac0057a66ad0a

Inputs:

| File | Size (bytes) | SHA-256, first 1 MB | SHA-256, last 1 MB |
| --- | ---: | --- | --- |
| book2/chapters/mortgage-denials/hmda.py | 13,482 | 4d7e4a2c3720decb65cc28555be2bd7095512d5e30dce0ff407d07f9dcf37b42 | 4d7e4a2c3720decb65cc28555be2bd7095512d5e30dce0ff407d07f9dcf37b42 |
| book2/chapters/mortgage-denials/holc_tracts.py | 2,291 | 1b366aa0e9a51cfb681e206aa807e438133ed778a1cdf6b787e3ffcb178a014c | 1b366aa0e9a51cfb681e206aa807e438133ed778a1cdf6b787e3ffcb178a014c |
| book2/chapters/mortgage-denials/redlining.py | 9,307 | 28a3d08f1c6ac598be472b24f7a0ed7511a41240bfddbf902aceb16bf3316595 | 28a3d08f1c6ac598be472b24f7a0ed7511a41240bfddbf902aceb16bf3316595 |
| data/analytic/tract_atlas.parquet | 39,659,925 | 29d5e4d943552d54aeb6ba92aadc939d9bd15bdea553c78357dbd516757be627 | 1e10d1ecf722340f23ee2212d4999a90250f85b65fa89b39e32db06d9472e22e |
| data/geo/dim_geo.parquet | 1,180,921 | 29d5e4d943552d54aeb6ba92aadc939d9bd15bdea553c78357dbd516757be627 | e58c8c488df54ab3187f5461f179322afdc49c9bd2315404003fe1272eea32c3 |
| data/geo/holc_areas_2023.parquet | 4,084,019 | 6d293647278dc82053c0ab89a192836f0763e73aff77785f3f06ad4214102600 | 37dc09e2ca32f1f9a001d07433b85faf4bd0a31ea584c16b62654b6556084be4 |
| data/geo/tracts_2020.parquet | 619,858,391 | f4f05c8c7a63d1785ec2aad283de3f6fa839b6c437f13a1b96cea31d3344bf0f | 7b3811247c6b3e322954f24a4a2384af52aef6ed8688f8dbdb0407d21ef80a59 |
| data/raw/acs/deprivation_components_2019_2023/tract.parquet | 13,197,793 | 5545cde2cbe96a8b56e468d65388248a241aa6bd300d3c9e325d08d3f86b11da | 5c8ec454d066988b0f1a01aaa6ed34ebfc05d162e01cf9c6bb01f9198cbaff12 |
| data/staged/adi/adi_atlas_tract2020_2023.parquet | 798,078 | 5e409bc212ff871def780fa27b4cf8b616d9da420b2b9f6455517eddcd8c1a95 | 5e409bc212ff871def780fa27b4cf8b616d9da420b2b9f6455517eddcd8c1a95 |
| data/staged/housing/hmda_tract_2024.parquet | 3,512,343 | b1d15b4f05f469ff89ebdfef102f048e35c92e48b035ccc53d89ec44876cecf9 | 13a15bb3dd0d47f2b9273757967d51a6a624259c0603c7a82fd7b4fba28d856f |
| data/staged/ses/acs5_tract2020_2019_2023.parquet | 7,232,424 | 5fe6f730a35225f14d5d8abfc6b9bce58b52e545f309a7eac74f1dae74d7a31c | 7b4a2475b3852d3f91804716a04566ef8ceadacec2be9fb85f5eb642078efac6 |
| data/staged/svi/svi_tract2020_2022.parquet | 17,740,415 | cb3860d8edc2aaf1f2a02211a58f7a0b80457eb6ad9a37b5ec8abb2d5da9da10 | e371a4a696d5bed05d54ad7c5b6ca2504508805b847ec415c2322be7f66ec2b2 |

Outputs:

| File | SHA-256 |
| --- | --- |
| facts.json | 753a34074702cd60ad13949eee9ff31cd4f2a6b4b4433b30561ff0352bff0f01 |
| figures/alt_rankings.json | 773da62209fd79716ba73b2fab4d60c0e69d89cc89b3e144c91194c4f7af73ec |
| figures/cook_denial_map.json | 227f66edcb44254183f05ac1eb7e4b9f09acb416cfc401d10d9799d727af55ce |
| figures/denial_by_group_and_deprivation.json | 22b4bfd20471b4129942b55ba314102d4fbaa1780069fd2da556b550ec1f32c0 |
| figures/denial_by_holc_grade.json | 4a4de27f7011fc020d03e7c18b443dab14e2bfbc8bd496154d83cfe9bce91b97 |
| figures/denial_by_loan_purpose.json | fc4e94ab111073a6835fe9050f85c88980492e1fca37097fedfdd3d9c79216db |
| figures/denial_vs_deprivation.json | 1bea4e523acf3849a3eb019195ce80b6b66a41af203a003863112da81f25fec0 |
| figures/gap_by_deprivation_and_income.json | 11a3d128277615ae2291bfb4722f3c5934a1fccafe9018000c6c90a6dd101c17 |
| figures/same_tract_gaps.json | 16d7c67b84cb0a3164d1b098b88d1c60ffa23c8fc086316331266a471dac4379 |
| meta.json | 6eeaf4dc3073b8de57a00fa35f6e2d46a24c1133219f34bfb5d685ef257d99f0 |
| public/data/mortgage-denials/cook_denial_map.json | 467118e3283844e371fbfa09dda1644b830e16d7e9353fd25d9b3ce068ec638c |
| public/data/mortgage-denials/denial_vs_deprivation_tracts.json | 66c0543541b745ce9ac42c3b19fc29de5cb4c02a27cbd9b768c909f195bc3c4d |
| refs.json | 49de2f8eefdbb181acdeede03c4e8edd6cb7ef3fab1fee54f9b540cd3c046406 |

## Machine formats

- Report (HTML): https://vishalsingh.org/zipcode/mortgage-denials/report
- Report (Markdown): https://vishalsingh.org/zipcode/mortgage-denials/report.md
- Every estimate (JSON): https://vishalsingh.org/zipcode/report/mortgage-denials/facts.json
- Table 1, figure "denial_by_loan_purpose" (JSON): https://vishalsingh.org/zipcode/report/mortgage-denials/figures/denial_by_loan_purpose.json
- Table 2, figure "denial_vs_deprivation" (JSON): https://vishalsingh.org/zipcode/report/mortgage-denials/figures/denial_vs_deprivation.json
- Table 3, figure "denial_by_group_and_deprivation" (JSON): https://vishalsingh.org/zipcode/report/mortgage-denials/figures/denial_by_group_and_deprivation.json
- Table 4, figure "same_tract_gaps" (JSON): https://vishalsingh.org/zipcode/report/mortgage-denials/figures/same_tract_gaps.json
- Table 5, figure "gap_by_deprivation_and_income" (JSON): https://vishalsingh.org/zipcode/report/mortgage-denials/figures/gap_by_deprivation_and_income.json
- Table 6, figure "denial_by_holc_grade" (JSON): https://vishalsingh.org/zipcode/report/mortgage-denials/figures/denial_by_holc_grade.json
- Table 7, figure "cook_denial_map" (JSON): https://vishalsingh.org/zipcode/report/mortgage-denials/figures/cook_denial_map.json
- Table 8, figure "alt_rankings" (JSON): https://vishalsingh.org/zipcode/report/mortgage-denials/figures/alt_rankings.json
- Payload of "denial_vs_deprivation" (JSON): https://vishalsingh.org/zipcode/data/mortgage-denials/denial_vs_deprivation_tracts.json
- Payload of "cook_denial_map" (JSON): https://vishalsingh.org/zipcode/data/mortgage-denials/cook_denial_map.json
- Index of every report: https://vishalsingh.org/zipcode/llms.txt; all reports in one file: https://vishalsingh.org/zipcode/llms-full.txt