I read several articles last week on how African Americans and Latinos get turned down more often than whites for home-mortgage loans. The result is that many aren’t able to buy homes or lose the use of their homes when they can’t make repairs.
The latter is especially worrisome when their neighborhoods are being gentrified. Folks who have lived in communities for decades can find themselves selling their homes or the banks taking them over.
TD Bank and Capital One – which uses actor Samuel L. Jackson to hawk its credit cards – were among the worst. Last year, Capital One stepped out of the home-loan business.
The revelations came from a yearlong study conducted by Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting in California. The study found that “this modern-day redlining persisted in 61 metro areas even when controlling for applicants’ income, loan amount and neighborhood.” The problem was prevalent in major cities across the country, and the worst places were in the South, including Greenville, NC, and Mobile. AL. Philadelphia, the cradle of liberty, rivaled some of the southern cities.
The report went on to say that the homeownership gap between black and whites is wider now than it was during the Jim Crow period, after having shrunk since the 1970s.
When I saw North Carolina on the list, it sparked a memory. At auction three years ago, I came across a letter by an African American woman named Lucy Dalton who had lost her home in 1934 over the same kind of practice. She wrote a letter to President Franklin Roosevelt complaining about the government agency that was set up to help homeowners keep their homes through refinanced low-interest mortgages.
The agency drew up maps showing which neighborhoods would more likely be able to pay off the loans. Black neighborhoods like Dalton’s were considered undesirable. According to the latest report, how lending is conducted in Philadelphia is not too far from the redlining maps drawn by the government back then.
Here’s Dalton’s plea to Roosevelt. It shows how little has changed in some areas. Click her name at the end of the letter to read her story in the blog post I wrote about her:
Hon.& Daer Sir:
Some months ago I wrote you concerning my property and the Home Owners Loan Corporation Office here in Asheville? N.C. I am a ain calling your attention to the same matter as to how some of us are bein treated.
My home is taken away from me.I was put out doors. This could be helped if it were not a rin like affair in this place .
Some people can have a loan and some has to pass under such red tapes and then turn down.Some of us cannot even have a word with the people in authority here,we are so much i nored.
I am a poor Colored Woman trying to have a home for living in my old age My husband and I have put all our life earnings in this place and now it is taken away from us , because the man hold the mortgage will not take bond.
My application is file months ago and was refused with out explanation.I would like very much that the office here reopen the application and help me to secure my home. I would like to find out also why the mortgagee will not take the Bonds.
I mortgage one lot and house and the mortgagee took both houses away from me I want you to see into that for me and help me. to et a place of my own to call home . .
If there is no relief tell me ,and if there is any I want you to help me to fine it,I am in an awful condition.
Yours very truly,
