The Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC), little known or remembered now, has an instructive history, beginning in 1933 during a housing and mortgage finance collapse of a severity unimaginable today. The HOLC was a very large government intervention designed to reduce the burden on borrowers while increasing the liquidity of mortgages the same goals being pursued in current policy debates but the HOLC was also designed to be temporary and as self-supporting as possible.