Nation reports on Atlanta mortgage crisis’ dismal impact on African-Americans
Tuesday, July 1st, 2008A Nation investigative report focuses almost entirely on the loss of black wealth in Atlanta due to unscrupulous tactics by lenders and their vassals at the Gold Dome. The article states:
Nearly 18,000 homes faced foreclosure in the Atlanta area during the first quarter of 2008, an almost 40 percent jump from the first quarter of 2007. In Fulton County, which encompasses most of the city’s core and is heavily African-American, one in 122 homes was in foreclosure in the first week of April. …
… for black America, the “mortgage meltdown” looks less like a market hiccup than a massive strip mining of hard-won wealth, a devastating loss that will betray the promise of class mobility for tens of thousands of black families. As the mortgage crisis unfolded, observers of all political stripes repeated a boilerplate line: the “affordability products” that have flooded the lending market in recent years — from subprime to interest-only loans — have done more good than bad by fueling a surge in black and Latino homeownership. But while minority homeownership may have grown in the short term, the long-term outlook promises quite the opposite, as southwest Atlanta painfully illustrates.
First-time homebuyers have originated less than a tenth of all subprime loans since 1998, according to a 2007 Center for Responsible Lending analysis. As recently as 2006, just over half of all subprime loans were refinances of existing home loans. The expected foreclosure toll from these loans will outpace the ownership gains by nearly a million families, the center estimates.
