Building A Database for Scholarly Inquiry on Racial Segregation

A team of Murphy students spent a portion of the semester helping to build a database to support crucial scholarly projects focusing on housing segregation, the racial wealth gap, and related topics. 

The database includes key pieces of information culled from a variety of real estate records on homes in the New Orleans communities of Pontchartrain Park and Gentilly Woods.  Unique among American housing developments, Pontchartrain Park is the largest Black community whose construction was financed by loans insured by the Federal Housing Administration when the agency limited its programs to whites. Gentilly Woods is a near-identical white counterpart to Pontchartrain Park.  Both communities consisted of prefabricated homes that were manufactured by the same builder and assembled on site, and Gentilly Woods was completed just before the builder broke ground on Pontchartrain Park.  However, the homes in Pontchartrain Park cost substantially more.  The database that this project will produce will enable scholars to better understand and quantify how the FHA’s racially exclusive programs financially impacted homeowners. 

The project has provided an enriching experience for the 15 Murphy Institute students who have worked on it.  They helped retrieve, copy and scan over two thousand mortgages housed at the Orleans Parish Notarial Archives.  Prior to this project, those records had not been converted to digital form, making it difficult to access and analyze them.  The Murphy students got firsthand experience working with archival material, allowing them to appreciate the work that goes into maintaining, preserving, and utilizing historical records.  

For Raynah Jacobs, a senior majoring in Political Economy, the work exposed her to “the thriving community of researchers that the archives – the only one of its kind in the country – serves."  Tucker Ward, a senior majoring in Political Science, echoed those sentiments, observing that the work allowed her to gain “a deep appreciation for archivists, researchers, and the lawyers that utilize and maintain these centers.” 

The project is being supervised by Richard Winchester, a professor of law at Brooklyn Law School.  He discovered the story about the two communities – and the discrepancies in home prices – while doing research on the Federal Housing Administration and its whites only policy.  The funding from the Murphy Institute is making it possible for him to explore an aspect of the policy that would have otherwise gone unexplored.