A new report is out from the ACLU that shows black Americans were unfairly targeted by banks in the run-up to the housing crisis. The report says that blacks were subjected to redlining, or denying services and being charged more for services.
How blacks suffered far more from the housing crisis, from the Guardian:
The resulting economic downturn has adversely affected them to a much greater degree than white homeowners, said the ACLU’s Rachel Goodman, who said the findings suggest banks knowingly preyed on black mortgage-seekers when it came to issuing sub-prime mortgages.
“Race must have been a factor somewhere in the decision-making, because it otherwise doesn’t make a lot of sense,” Goodman said. Goodman pointed out that the report differs significantly from other studies of wealth by race, in that it compares people who are all homeowners and thus presumably fit some definition of “middle class”.
Goodman said the black families in the study, which surveyed 3,000 households (741 of them black), had been subjected to “redlining” – denying or charging more for necessary services – loans to people in historically black neighborhoods, which made the residents of those neighborhoods particularly susceptible to predation by fly-by-night mortgage outfits pushing sub-prime loans so they could turn them around on the then-booming secondary market.
The ACLU didn’t have any recommendations based on its findings. But we can imagine most people hearing this might advise the banks to, in general, stop being scumbags.