The next time you hear President Bush or any race-pandering neocons talking about the gains that black Americans have made in home ownership, drop this little piece of bad news from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in their laps:
Vardiman is African-American, a fact that could be significant. One large national study — which has been replicated in other smaller studies — concludes that African-Americans and nonwhite Latinos are more likely than whites to be victims of predatory lending. And they’re more likely to be steered into high-risk, high-interest-rate subprime mortgages.
The Center for Responsible Lending, a nonprofit homeownership research group based in Washington, projects that 16 to 20 percent of all subprime loans made last year in Missouri and Illinois will end up in foreclosure.
Such findings are raising concerns that discriminatory lending practices could derail recent gains made in black homeownership. In 2006, 51 percent of black households were owner-occupied, up from 48.4 percent in 2004. By comparison, 75 percent of white households are owner-occupied.
This means that the increasing home ownership rate among blacks has come due to blacks either taking out low-rate ARMs during a time of record low mortgage rates, (a very risky thing to do), and/or affirmative action lending by banks, in that banks will be more likely to approve loans for marginally credit unworthy non-whites than they would for whites, ceteris paribus.
