Homebuilding added more than its fair share to the roar of the 1920s. An urgent demand for housing after World War I fueled a residential construction boom that led to historic peaks in homeownership. Foreclosures were rare, and when they did happen, lenders quickly recouped their losses by selling into a strong market. But no mortgage system is built to deal with credit problems on the scale of those of the Great Depression. As foreclosures quintupled and spread across the country, it was clear that the 1920s mortgage loan system was not up to task, and borrowers, lenders, and real-estate professionals sought action at the federal level.   The Home Owners’ Loan Corporation is the story of the disastrous housing market during the Great Depression and the extent to which the Home Owners Loan Corporation fulfilled its aim to stem foreclosures by buying troubled mortgages from lenders and refinancing them. Using new databases from historical records and employing modern statistical tools to investigate important, unanswered questions, premier economic historians Fishback, Rose, and Snowden offer an unparalleled view of the mortgage loan industry of the 1920s and \u201830s and a clear understanding of the HOLC within the context of the housing market in which it operated. Combining data that covers every county in the United States with actual stories of HOLC borrowers, they illustrate how the incentives and behavior of borrowers, lenders, and others during crises transcend vastly different contexts to influence the effectiveness of policy.  Almost 100 years after the Great Depression, when politicians from Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton to John McCain have called for similar programs to quell another mortgage crisis, this accessible explanation of the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation offers invaluable lessons for our own time.
