EthnicMajority

(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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(Wall Street Journal) A new study finds that African-American and Hispanic Americans are more likely to live in poor neighborhoods — even if they’re affluent.

The study of 2010 census data by John Logan, a sociology professor at Brown University, found that the average white household that earns less than $40,000 is in a more affluent, resource-rich neighborhood than a black or Hispanic household that earns more than $75,000.

Asians are the least likely to live in poor neighborhoods, regardless of their income. On average, affluent Asians live in neighborhoods that are 8.7% poor, while affluent whites live in neighborhoods that are 8.9% poor. Affluent Hispanics live in neighborhoods that are 13% poor, and affluent blacks live in neighborhoods that are 13.9% poor. (Affluent is defined in the study as household income of more than $75,000 while “poor” is defined as income of less than $40,000).

What explains the disparities?

Some say it’s simple discrimination.

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(Consumer Reports) The U.S. Department of Justice is investigating allegations that Wells Fargo discriminated against African American borrowers, according to news reports. The allegations assert that the bank directed African-American borrowers to high-interest, subprime mortgages.

The DOJ is preparing a lawsuit against the bank, which is negotiating a settlement to avoid a public lawsuit, according to the Huffington Post. In a statement to the Huffington Post, Wells Fargo said it practiced responsible lending. "We have a very strong commitment to serving all customers along the credit spectrum, and we do so without bias."

The DOJ's investigation echoes a suit filed by the city of Baltimore against the bank, accusing it of targeting predominantly black neighborhoods with bad loans. Wells Fargo has denied the allegations.

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(Houston Chronicle) Real estate experts offered tips to understand and cater to Hispanic homebuyers during a conference held in San Antonio by the National Association of Real Estate Editors on Thursday.

By next year, 40 percent of all first-time homebuyers in the U.S. are expected to be Hispanic. Part of that group are affluent Mexican nationals fleeing cartel violence .

There are cultural obstacles for real estate professionals targeting this growing segment. For one, some Hispanics are used to a cash-based economy, and many lack credit and appear to be a bigger lending risk than they actually are, said Oscar Gonzales of the Sugar Land-based Gonzales Group.

“It’s not that they have bad credit,” Gonzales said, but “they’re launched into a higher interest (stratum).”

Many Latinos — Gonzales estimated about 30 percent – don’t use a real estate agent when selling or purchasing homes, likely due to lack of education and distrust.

A language barrier has resulted in some being scammed by notaries public who charge victims for real estate services even though they’re unskilled or unlicensed, Gonzales said. In Latin America, the title notario público can refer to a specialized attorney. In Texas, it refers to someone who performs clerical duties.

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(Ethnicmajority, Clifford Tong) Last week a study was published by the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research showing one in five American moms had children with more than one birth father. This type of family structure is even more common among minority women: 59% for African American, and 35% for Hispanic mothers.

While one might think this is attributed to teenage unwed mothers having boatloads of kids before they reach voting age, the data show that this is not the case. 43% of the women who had kids with multiple fathers were married at the time they had their first child. This is indicative that many of these families are the by-product of divorce, not unwed mothers.

Although this is relatively new research and some of the results seem inconclusive, I’m ready to jump to some conclusions. I think it is pretty clear that women have generally waited longer to get married and have children, for a variety of reasons. And although divorce rates are high, children of divorce should have a better chance at a stable household given that their parents are more likely to be mature and financially viable enough to provide it. So I think this age trend is pushing the statistics down, not up.

That means that the data, and more importantly the impact on the children, is still heavily skewed toward mothers who are young, unwed, uneducated, low income, and minority. Given these characteristics, there are many geographical areas where this is the cultural norm, where having a baby is viewed as a short-term status symbol rather than the life commitment and challenge that it is.

Whatever we’re doing to educate our young people about teenage pregnancy, it’s not working. This sounds like a cultural norm that is an epidemic.