Thursday, September 29, 2005

Mortgage Watch

Mikaela says:
Remember that houses are by far the most common form of investment and retirement income for the vast majority of Americans. The fact that there is structural racism in the banking industry means that we are SYSTEMATICALLY divesting minorites of their primary source for wealth.

This from L.A. Times:
Racial Gap in Loans is High in California
A study finds that borrowers in minority communities in the L.A. area are more than nine times more likely to get higher-cost mortgages

A study by an advocacy group for the poor, looked at the percentage of higher-cost loans issued in minority communities compared with nonminority neighborhoods in the same metropolitan area.

Residents of predominantly minority districts in the Los Angeles metro area were more than nine times more likely to get high-cost loans to refinance their homes than residents of predominantly white communities — the largest gap, proportionally, in all of the 125 metropolitan areas studied.

Nationally, residents of minority communities were 1.7 times more likely to have such loans than borrowers in nearby white neighborhoods.