Mortgage Discrimination

The U.S. Department of Housing and Human Development (HUD) presents the report "What We Know About Mortgage Lending Discrimination in America." The report outlines how discrimination can affect access to mortgage capital for minorities.

Whether or not there is discrimination in the mortgage lending market is one of the most extensively debated issues in the civil rights arena. Because many early studies were flawed and the results misinterpreted on both sides of the debate, there is little agreement as to the next essential steps in either research or enforcement. This comprehensive volume seeks to clarify the debate by including rigorous review of fair lending research, applied projects, and enforcement activities to date, as well as recommendations for research needed to resolve unanswered questions. The intent of the authors is to help the housing industry, regulators, advocates, and the research community to better understand the issue of discrimination in an important area of American life -- the right to take out a mortgage to buy a home based on one's credit worthiness, not on one's race or ethnic group.

First published in 1997, this volume features a wealth of contributions discussing mortgage lending discrimination and the role of the FHA, fair lending enforcement and the Decatur case, along with the future of mortgage discrimination research. This key civil rights debate in the wake of the Fair Housing Act 25 years prior is evaluated and clarified through rigorous review of fair lending research, applied projects and enforcement activities to date. It argues forcefully that the right to take out a mortgage to buy a home should be conditioned only upon one’s credit worthiness and not on one’s race or ethnic group.

An analysis of current findings on mortgage-lending discrimination and suggestions for new procedures to improve its detection. In 2000, homeownership in the United States stood at an all-time high of 67.4 percent, but the homeownership rate was more than 50 percent higher for non-Hispanic whites than for blacks or Hispanics. Homeownership is the most common method for wealth accumulation and is viewed as critical for access to the most desirable communities and most comprehensive public services. Homeownership and mortgage lending are linked, of course, as the vast majority of home purchases are made with the help of a mortgage loan. Barriers to obtaining a mortgage represent obstacles to attaining the American dream of owning one's own home. These barriers take on added urgency when they are related to race or ethnicity. In this book Stephen Ross and John Yinger discuss what has been learned about mortgage-lending discrimination in recent years. They re-analyze existing loan-approval and loan-performance data and devise new tests for detecting discrimination in contemporary mortgage markets. They provide an in-depth review of the 1996 Boston Fed Study and its critics, along with new evidence that the minority-white loan-approval disparities in the Boston data represent discrimination, not variation in underwriting standards that can be justified on business grounds. Their analysis also reveals several major weaknesses in the current fair-lending enforcement system, namely, that it entirely overlooks one of the two main types of discrimination (disparate impact), misses many cases of the other main type (disparate treatment), and insulates some discriminating lenders from investigation. Ross and Yinger devise new procedures to overcome these weaknesses and show how the procedures can also be applied to discrimination in loan-pricing and credit-scoring.

Although the existence of statistical disparities between whites and minorities in the extension home mortgage loans is acknowledged by all parties, disagreement exists as to the reasons for these disparities. Equal opportunity activists contend that racial discrimination by mortgage lending institutions is a contributing, if not the primary, source of these patterns. Other parties, however, suggest that the patterns reflect fundamental differences in the economic circumstances of population groups.

This book substitutes rigorous and systematic analysis for the undocumented claims that have characterized the debate on "redlining"--the denial of mortgage money to poorer neighborhoods. In addition, Schafer and Ladd discuss discrimination against individuals, appraisal practices, and the likelihood of default, analyze recent policy decisions, and recommend a range of new policies. The thorough documentation that supports this analysis was obtained through an examination of individual mortgage applications--denials as well as approvals--in New York and California, the only two states in which such data is available, its disclosure mandated under state law.One of the book's major findings is that discrimination in home financing is based far more on an individual's race than on the location of the property--that although the redlining debate has turned on the issue of geographic discrimination, the underlying reality is one of racial discrimination, and individuals are more often the targets than are neighborhoods.After an introductory chapter, "Discrimination in Mortgage Lending" takes up default risk in mortgage lending, appraisal practices, the flow of funds, lending decision models, the decision to lend in California, mortgage credit terms in California, the decision to lend in New York, mortgage credit terms in New York, a summary of results, and recommendations.