Historical Neighborhood Conditions and Modern-Day Health: Exploring Industrial Data in Redlining Maps

Maps created by the Home Owner’s Loan Corporation (HOLC) have increasingly been used as a proxy to measure the modern-day health impacts of practices of historical systemic racism. However, the HOLC maps provide rich information about neighborhood conditions that go beyond a single letter grade. In this work, we propose a heretofore un-examined source of neighborhood variability, appraiser text describing neighborhood conditions, to examine health outcomes. Specifically, we examine whether the described presence of industry within an area is associated with modern rates of asthma prevalence. While we do not find a stastically significant association between industry and athsma, the work points to ways future research may use this snapshot of historical neighborhood conditions to better understand contemporary patterns of health inequity.