Ampersand
Denial Is So White
This article is from the January/February 2008 issue of Dollars & Sense: The Magazine of Economic Justice available at http://www.dollarsandsense.org
This article is from the January/February 2008 issue of Dollars & Sense magazine.
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This cartoon is from the January/February 2008 issue of Dollars & Sense: The Magazine of Economic Justice available at http://www.dollarsandsense.org
The Short Run
A Dream Foreclosed
Rampant home foreclosures have made the headlines lately, but hidden on the back pages, or ignored entirely, is the wildly disparate impact on communities of color.
In its annual report for Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Foreclosed: State of the Dream 2008, United for a Fair Economy found that "the subprime lending debacle has caused the greatest loss of wealth to people of color in modern U.S. history."
The study found that people of color are more than three times more likely than Whites to have subprime loans, and comprise the majority of subprime loan recipients in many cities. As the mortagage lending industry targeted people of color, “subprime loans became predatory loans."
Among the many effects of the mortgage crisis, homeownership rates for Blacks are now declining compared to Whites. Based on the rate of improvement from 1970 to 2006, parity between the races will not be achieved for another 5,423 years.
