Disparities in Mortgage Lending

The Center for Responsible Lending’s research team of Carolina Reid (who has been working tirelessly at developing data on subprime mortgages for some time now), Roberto Quercia, We Li and Debbie Grunstein Bocian has produced Lost Ground, 2011: Disparities in Mortgage Lending and Foreclosures. They argue:

1) The nation is not even halfway through the foreclosure crisis. Among mortgages made between 2004 and 2008, 6.4 percent have ended in foreclosure, and an additional 8.3 percent are at immediate, serious risk.

2) Foreclosure patterns are strongly linked with patterns of risky lending.

The foreclosure rates are consistently worse for borrowers who received high-risk loan products that were aggressively marketed before the housing crash, such as loans with prepayment penalties, hybrid adjustable-rate mortgages (ARMs), and option ARMs.

Foreclosure rates are highest in neighborhoods where these loans were concentrated.

3) The majority of people affected by foreclosures have been white families. However, borrowers of color are more than twice as likely to lose their home as white households. These higher rates reflect the fact that African Americans and Latinos were consistently more likely to receive high-risk loan products, even after accounting for income and credit status.

It is really striking how African-Americans and Hispanics were steered into crappy loans, even controlling for income and credit history. Beyond all this, the web site accompanying the report has really nicely organized data on severely delinquent loans and loans in foreclosure by state, race, ethnicity and MSA.

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About Richard K. Green 103 Articles

Affiliation: University of Southern California

Richard K. Green, Ph.D., is the Director of the USC Lusk Center for Real Estate. He holds the Lusk Chair in Real Estate and is Professor in the School of Policy, Planning, and Development and the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California.

Prior to joining the USC faculty, Dr. Green spent four years as the Oliver T. Carr, Jr., Chair of Real Estate Finance at The George Washington University School of Business. He was Director of the Center for Washington Area Studies and the Center for Real Estate and Urban Studies at that institution. Dr. Green also taught real estate finance and economics courses for 12 years at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he was Wangard Faculty Scholar and Chair of Real Estate and Urban Land Economics. He also has been principal economist and director of financial strategy and policy analysis at Freddie Mac.

His research addresses housing markets, housing policy, tax policy, transportation, mortgage finance and urban growth. He is a member of two academic journal editorial boards, and a reviewer for several others.

His work is published in a number of journals including the American Economic Review, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics, Journal of Urban Economics, Land Economics, Regional Science and Urban Economics, Real Estate Economics, Housing Policy Debate, Journal of Housing Economics, and Urban Studies.

His book with Stephen Malpezzi, A Primer on U.S. Housing Markets and Housing Policy, is used at universities throughout the country. His work has been cited or he has been quoted in the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, the Christian Science Monitor, the Los Angeles Times, Newsweek and the Economist, as well as other outlets.

Dr. Green earned his Ph.D. and M.S. in economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He earned his A.B. in economics from Harvard University.

Visit: Real Estate and Urban Economics Blog

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