Finance

As a part of the New Deal in the 1930s, the Federal Housing Administration classified urban residential areas in terms of their lending risk for the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC). The program itself was designed to make home ownership more accessible for first time home buyers, and facilitate the refinancing of existing home mortgages.

A Report to the Connecticut Fair Housing Center. There are clear racial disparities in home mortgage lending in Connecticut. Data for the period from 2010 to 2014 show that blacks and Hispanics are denied loans more often than whites, even when controlling for income. In fact, very high income blacks are more likely to be denied loans than low income whites. Lending activity is also depressed in racially diverse, and majority non-white neighborhoods.

Before the housing crisis, toxic subprime loans were deeply embedded in the mortgage market in the Twin Cities and were highly targeted towards communities of color. These loans contributed eventually to the foreclosure crisis and the staggering drops in housing values that disproportionately affected people of color, stripping many moderate- and low-income communities of enormous amounts of housing wealth.

This report documents strong racial disparities in mortgage lending in the Twin Cities metropolitan area. The Twin Cities has some of the greatest racial lending disparities in the nation, and communities of color have borne the brunt of both the subprime lending and foreclosure crisis. The report shows how much race and segregation influence mortgage lending patters in the Twin Cities.

This analysis of race, income and small consumer loans covers the Twin Cities, Portland, Ore., and Seattle.

This article, from the William Mitchell Law Review, summarizes the implementation and outcomes of the Fiscal Disparities Act of 1971 in Minnesota.

This article, from the Buffalo Law Review, examines two states where significant changes in school equity occurred in the 1990s. 

This analysis of municipalities in the Twin Cities metropolitan area shows variations in access to opportunity. The index combines 24 local characteristics measuring fiscal health, jobs/transportation, quality of life and education.