Posted on 05/31/2015 2:53:23 PM PDT by PROCON
The mortgage crisis that brought the economy to its knees seven years ago was especially devastating for black communities, where homeowners who qualified for safe, traditional mortgages were often steered into ruinously priced loans that paid off handsomely for brokers and lenders while leaving borrowers vulnerable to foreclosure. The crisis left many middle-class minority communities strewn with abandoned houses, further widening the already huge wealth gap between African-Americans and whites.
A study published this month in the journal Social Problems lays out how this happened in Baltimore in the run-up to the recession and comes at a time when the banking industry and its friends in Congress are fighting proposed federal rules that would make it much easier to ferret out discrimination and enforce fair-lending laws.
The research, by the sociologists Jacob Rugh, Len Albright and Douglas Massey, focuses on 3,027 loans made in Baltimore from 2000 to 2008 by Wells Fargo, which in 2012 agreed to pay $175 million to settle allegations of predatory lending in Baltimore and elsewhere. The study takes into account credit scores, income, down payments all of the information that was available to brokers and lenders when these loans were made.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
***SIGH***
Sounds to me they’re saying blacks are too stupid to buy a house.
It is the NY Times after all.
Interesting isn’t it that liberal policies (because that is what the Pelosi-Reid congress gave us) such as the take over of Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac (On September 7, 2008, Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) director James B. Lockhart III announced he had put Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac under the conservatorship of the FHFA (see Federal takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac). The action has been described as “one of the most sweeping government interventions in private financial markets in decades”.) have only hurt the minority communities and never helped them?
It's not about race, dummies...
It's about too large a percentage of that community being ignorant, arrogant, privileged, indolent thugs!
That goes for the Mayor, too...
The ONLY “penalties” in mortgage finance are the result of credit ratings.
Didn’t Bawney Fwank have his hand involved in that debacle too?
WRONG!!!!! Banks were FORCED by LAW to write mortgages to the "under-privileged" (read that: BLACK and HISPANIC minorities) and accept as statements of fact, a mortgage applicant's income, when that applicant could not prove how much they made in a month.
Banks wrote those mortgages BY FORCE OF LAW and then quickly packaged them up and sold them off to Fannie Mae / Freddie Mac because both Fannie and Freddie BY FORCE OF LAW were mandated by the Federal Government to buy every mortgage presented to them.
Anyone who wants to know why the mortgage industry "blew up" the banks and we experienced one of the most horrific downturns in the housing industry need look no further than the FEDERAL GOVERNMENT which imposed the rules through threat of legal action, upon every bank in the country.
I worked in the Mortgage division of one of the country's largest Mortgage Lenders while that bubble built. We all knew it wasn't sustainable, yet the Government forced all the banks to keep writing loans to people with no documented source of income.
WTF did the stupid Government think was going to happen? And to blame it on the banks when it was GOVERNMENT MANDATED to write loans to people with no source of documented income was a disaster waiting to happen.
Not a single one of these people were forced to take out a loan that they couldn’t pay back. In fact it was DemocRats who coerced banks into making risky loans.
What nonsenses! Minorities were hardest hit, but it was because they bought homes they couldn’t afford and took on ‘liar’ mortgage loans they couldn’t pay off.
Totally misleading.
They had horrible credit or no documentation of income and thus were only offered crappy deals.
It had nothing to do with their skin color.
We had a black neighbor that bought 4 properties and walked away from them when house prices collapsed.
“Sounds to me theyre saying blacks are too stupid to buy a house.”
No, just too stupid to take out a loan to buy a house.
N-no
I-income
N-no
J-job
A-no Assets
Completely schizophrenic article: every other sentence whines about predatory lending while the other half of the sentences whine about “discriminatory” lending practices, but I doubt the average Slimes reader will pick on the implausible dichotomy of these two sets of excuses, both of which naturally supposedly impact blacks disproportionately, because apparently blacks are, what, more stupid than non-blacks when it comes to home loans?
“Racial Penalties in Baltimore Mortgages”
Well, I’m glad SOMEONE finally figured out why the murder and violent crime rate doubled in Baltimore since the mayor ordered her police to provide plenty of “space to destroy”, and apparently the reason has nothing to do with the fact that the police arrest rates were halved during the last month, but it’s all because of “predatory” lending practices over the last few years. Apparently, all of those “predatory” loans just came due or something during the last month.
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