EthnicMajority

(Epoch Times) Asian-Americans are the fastest-growing community in the United States and their businesses are more likely to create jobs than any other, but they are largely ignored by government and political parties, according to recent research.

The Asian-American population grew 46 percent, to over 17 million, between 2000 and 2010—faster than any other group, including Latinos, the 2010 U.S. Census reported.

Asian-American entrepreneurs are also great drivers of the economy, owning more than 1.5 million businesses, employing around 3 million people, and turning over an annual payroll of nearly $80 billion.

This success, however, tends to overshadow real needs that exist in Asian-American communities.

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(Huffington Post) Wells Fargo & Co., the nation's largest mortgage lender, is facing the second of at least two federal probes into how it treats minority borrowers and the properties it owns in minority neighborhoods. Department of Housing and Urban Development officials confirmed this week that the agency will investigate allegations lodged against the bank Tuesday by the National Fair Housing Alliance. The alliance complaint accused Wells Fargo of working to maintain and market bank-owned foreclosed properties in predominantly white communities far more aggressively than it does in mostly black and Latino neighborhoods.

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(Huffington Post) Three years since a Wells Fargo Bank loan officer shared the details of how she and her colleagues targeted and directed prospective African American homebuyers into taking out expensive high-interest subprime mortgages to The New York Times, racial discrimination in the housing market is still an issue.

According to a new investigative report by the National Fair Housing Alliance (NFHA), a coalition of fair housing non-profit organizations, six major banks are engaging in discriminatory practices in the maintenance and marketing of foreclosed Real Estate Owned (REO) properties in predominantly Latino and African American neighborhoods.

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(Business Insider) After the dust settles over the recession, it's becoming increasingly clear that African Americans will have the most lost ground to cover–especially in retirement planning. 

A new report by Aon Hewitt and Ariel Investments shows just how much damage deteriorating finances and a weak job market has done to their nest eggs.

(Washington Post) America’s historic Chinatowns, home for a century to immigrants seeking social support and refuge from racism, are fading as rising living costs, jobs elsewhere and a desire for wider spaces lure Asian-Americans more than ever to the suburbs.

As the Lunar New Year begins Monday, annual festivities in Washington, D.C.’s shriveled Chinatown are, for the first time, being promoted by a large marketing firm. New York’s Chinatown, one of the nation’s oldest, has lost its status as home to the city’s largest Chinese population, based on the 2010 census.

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(Planetizen) Foreclosures continue to decimate communities around the nation, with black neighborhoods being the hardest hit. However, it is investors, not homeowners, who account for the adverse impact on the nation's black communities, write John Gilderbloom and Gregory Squires.

Foreclosures continue to decimate communities around the nation, with black neighborhoods being the hardest hit. Some pundits and politicians point to federal policies that encouraged homeownership in low- and moderate-income communities, coupled with reckless behavior on the part of greedy homeowners, as the crux of the problem. As Fox News reporter Neil Cavuto observed "loaning to minorities and risky borrowers is a disaster." But our recent research demonstrates that it is investors, not homeowners, who account for the adverse impact on our nation's black communities.

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(Miami Herald) In the largest residential fair-lending settlement in history, the Bank of America Corp. has agreed to pay $335 million to settle allegations that its Countrywide Financial Corp. unit discriminated against minority homebuyers, the U.S. Department of Justice announced Wednesday.

The agreement resolves a civil complaint that the mortgage lender charged black and Hispanic borrowers higher fees and steered them into costlier mortgages than other buyers from 2004 to 2008, a period when the company originated millions of home loans.

It also marks Charlotte, N.C.-based Bank of America’s latest step to move past the mortgage-related troubles that have pummeled its bottom line and stock price since acquiring Countrywide in 2008.

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(St. Louis American) Recently the Pew Research Center released an alarming report highlighting the fact that white Americans now have 20 times more wealth than African Americans and 18 times more wealth than Hispanic Americans. While this came as a shock to some, it is par for the course for others.

Historically, whites have always earned and accumulated more wealth than minorities in American society. Despite this, the white-black wealth gap is the widest it has been since the census began tracking the disparity in 1984, when the ratio was roughly 12 to 1.

The collapse of the housing market bubble coupled with the recession caused median wealth to fall by 53 percent for African-American households, 66 percent for Hispanics and 16 percent for whites. One of the main reasons for such a major decline in minority wealth is due to the fact that African Americans and Hispanic Americans tend to invest heavily in their homes without investing in other asset building products such as stocks, bonds and savings accounts.

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(Huffington Post) Latino families, the last major group to attain the American dream of Home Ownership, have been especially devastated by the wave of foreclosures since the beginning of the 2008 recession.

And in New York, the rate of foreclosures among Latinos is higher that that among every other population group.

A recent study by the New York Communities for Change organization found that blacks and Hispanics constituted 32 percent of homeowners in New York between December 2009 and December 2010, but a full 56 percent of those were notified pre-foreclosures, making them 175 percent more likely to be foreclosed upon than the general population of homeowners facing the same fate.

Christopher and Wendy Castro, a Dominican couple living in the Long Island hamlet of Brentwood in the Town of Islip, are making a desperate attempt to keep the home they acquired in 1989.

Wendy told HuffPost LatinoVoices that they applied for a loan modification in June 2010 but their application was rejected. Then, they received a notification that their house was in the foreclosure process.

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(Boston Globe) Thousands of black and Latino homeowners in Massachusetts will likely save money under a $125 million subprime lending settlement with a subsidiary of H&R Block Inc. unveiled today by attorney general Martha Coakley. The agreement resolves allegations of unfair lending and discriminatory practices by Sand Canyon, formerly known as Option One.

Under the deal, Sand Canyon, based in Irvine, Calif., will pay $9.8 million to the state and direct American Home Mortgage Servicing Inc. — which services about 5,500 loans in Massachusetts that originated with Option One — to begin a $115 million loan modification program.

Homeowners with Option One loans could receive lower monthly payments, andinterest rates, and have their principal balances reduced to reflect current property values. In addition, some borrrowers will receive refunds for fees they paid that the state considered excessive.

“Option One made loans that it knew were likely to fail and it discriminated against African-American and Latino borrowers,” Coakley said during a press conference.

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