Foreclosures in Black and White
From the NYT; linked above:More on this from Democracy Now. And dig this ACORN study (the following text is a link that refuses to turn blue for some reason): Foreclosure Exposure: a study of racial and income disparities in home mortgage lending in 172 American cities. Here's part two: the cost to cities.As the newspaper headlines have made clear for some time, we are in a mortgage crisis and a foreclosure explosion.
A recent Times editorial, “Subprime in Black and White,” dealt with evidence that during the housing boom, African-America
n and Hispanic borrowers were far more likely than other borrowers to be steered into high cost loans — even after controlling for factors like borrower income and loan size. The maps [to the right] illustrate the effects of such racial disparities in New York City. The first map shows the neighborhoods where subprime loans were concentrated. The second, nearly identical, map shows where foreclosures have occurred.
Note those gray diagonal lines in the maps. They indicate areas where racial and ethnic groups that are minorities in society as a whole are local majorities. Those diagonal lines also overlap extraordinarily
with where the high cost subprime loans were given out — and where the foreclosures are occurring. The foreclosure crisis is set to cause a lot of pain in the months ahead. The maps indicate that the pain will fall disproportionat
ely, with African-America n and Hispanic neighborhoods especially hard hit.