The Subprime Mortgage Calamity and the African American Woman

Sandra Phillips ()

The Review of Black Political Economy, 2012, vol. 39, issue 2, 227-237

Abstract: Many media and scholarly reports have focused on the subprime mortgage crisis and the resultant global financial meltdown. Most of the literature notes unequivocally that discrimination in the mortgage market has been, and remains, race-based and that it has damaged the African-American population disproportionately. This paper discusses the consequences of the subprime mortgage calamity and its negative impact on the Black community, women in general, and African-American women in particular. After controlling for individual, credit and housing characteristics, research shows that disparities in lending have persisted. Studies indicate that 63% of those given subprime mortgages qualified for prime mortgages. African-American females received the most high-cost loans and were over twice as likely to be given a subprime mortgage compared to White females. Moreover, African-American women were five times more likely to have received a subprime loan than similarly situated White males. Upper-income Black women were more often targeted for high-cost loans than lower-income women of color. As a result, the subprime mortgage crisis has precipitated an enormous loss of home equity and wealth among African-Americans that will affect generations to come. Copyright Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2012

Keywords: Subprime mortgage crisis; African American women and subprime mortgage crisis; Wealth depletion and African American women (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s12114-011-9107-1 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:blkpoe:v:39:y:2012:i:2:p:227-237

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/12114

DOI: 10.1007/s12114-011-9107-1

Access Statistics for this article

The Review of Black Political Economy is currently edited by C. Conrad

More articles in The Review of Black Political Economy from Springer, National Economic Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().