The Disappearance of Race in Mortgage Lending

Elvin K. Wyly and Steven R. Holloway

Economic Geography, 2002, vol. 78, issue 2, 129-169

Abstract: In the past 25 years, housing researchers, governmental regulators, industry advocates, and community activists have all relied on a unified analytical infrastructure that was developed in the 1970s to monitor racial and geographic inequalities in U.S. housing markets. Since the mid-1990s, however, several developments in the housing finance sector have undermined a key element of this system: data collected under the auspices of the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act of 1975. The second-largest racial-ethnic group among mortgage loan applicants is now officially designated as “information not provided.” In this article, we analyze the causes and geography of this disappearance and its consequences for civil rights enforcement, academic research on redlining and discrimination, and community activism. Our analysis is simultaneously a cautionary narrative of the steady erosion of a valuable public data system and a strategic intervention intended to salvage the empirical contributions of the data for interdisciplinary research, community right-to-know purposes, and public policy development. Using Atlanta, Georgia, as a case study, we marshal a suite of multivariate techniques to disentangle the geographic, individual, and institutional factors responsible for the rise in unreported applications. We also devise a simple method to estimate the “true” racial and ethnic composition of the pool of unknown applicants. The contributions of this endeavor are mediated by the political and epistemological problems of racialization and categorical reification.

Date: 2002
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DOI: 10.1111/j.1944-8287.2002.tb00181.x

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