Charles Davis bought his home in 2003 using adjustable-rate, high-interest loans and betting an improving economy would help him handle rising payments ahead. Things didn’t go as planned.
Davis, 54, has struggled to stave off foreclosure on the brick ranch-style house where he lives with his wife, Valerie, and three teenage kids. He financed his home with a $200,000 mortgage at 8.5 percent interest, and a second $50,000 loan at nearly 12 percent. Those rates were fixed for only two years, and payments are escalating.
Davis went to his bankers to refinance. They said no. Over the past year or so, he talked to four or five companies and was turned away. His bank has him on a “forbearance” plan, which lowers his payments, but has also started foreclosure proceedings. If he misses a payment, he fears he could lose his house.
“I got into a bad deal,” says Davis, an African-American, adding no one told him about help for first-time home buyers or warned him about the risks of adjustable loans.
Across the nation, black and Hispanic borrowers helped fuel a multi-year housing boom, accounting for 49 percent of the increase in homeowners from 1995 to 2005, says Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. But Hispanics and African-Americans were far more likely to leverage the American dream with subprime loans — higher-cost products for buyers with impaired credit — that are now going bad at an alarming rate.
About 46 percent of Hispanics and 55 percent of blacks who took out purchase mortgages in 2005 got subprime loans compared with about 17 percent of whites and Asians, according to Federal Reserve data.
Concentrated foreclosures in minority neighborhoods could reduce property values. The NAACP, National Council of La Raza and other civil rights groups recently called for a six-month moratorium on subprime home foreclosures. Problems are centered on borrowers who took out subprime adjustable-rate mortgages, now resetting at higher rates.
One of those swept up in the subprime frenzy was Paris Alston, 35, who moved from a homeless shelter to a steady job and hard-to-get federally subsidized housing. Last year, after seeing an ad targeted at first-time buyers, she jumped into a subprime adjustable-rate loan that started with a 9.95 percent interest rate that could jump to as much as 15.25 percent.
“I was getting older in my life, I wanted to have something for my kids,” says Alston, adding the lender made the process easy — until it came time to sign the documents.
“They inflated everything. … My income was more than what I expected. When I asked to go over the loan application, they said, ‘You don’t need to. All you need to do is sign it,’” Alston says.
Instead of the $1,200 monthly payments she expected, Alston faced $3,000 in loan, tax and condo fee bills. That was not just more than her monthly income, it was more than she had paid for an entire year’s rent on her subsidized apartment. Alston lost her home.
Targeting Minorities
There are many reasons minorities turn to subprime lenders. Firms have aggressively marketed their products to populations that have long been underserved by, and often don’t trust, traditional banks.
Recent immigrants lack credit histories, and 35 percent of Latino families don’t have checking accounts. Hispanic families are more apt to have undocumented income, leading them to lenders who make loans without income verification, according to the National Council of La Raza. Lower rates of minority homeownership mean less wealth to draw on.
Regulation has been spotty. Federal data on race and lending were recently expanded by regulators. But they don’t include credit scores, making it difficult to easily ferret out reasons for pricing disparities.
Independent analyses and government investigations indicate minority borrowers are steered to higher-cost loans even when they qualify for cheaper products. Lack of financial savvy is another reason, though many loan documents are now so complex even sophisticated borrowers are taken.
Countrywide Home Loans settled a New York suit over racial disparities in lending last year, compensating some Latino and Hispanic borrowers and setting up a $3 million education program.
Doug Duncan, chief economist of the Mortgage Bankers Association, points out that voluntary data by lenders show many minority applicants who are turned down for loans are denied due to poor credit. Federal data also don’t take into account such things as collateral, property values and borrower debt-to-income ratio.
Duncan warns that efforts to tighten lending laws to protect borrowers, including minorities, could end up constricting credit and preventing people from refinancing. At a recent meeting, subprime lenders told the Mortgage Bankers Association they expect loan volume to fall 30 percent to 40 percent next year.
“This is before any regulatory action,” Duncan says. “This is the reason why we’re cautioning regulators and lenders to be very careful.”
Gaby Sanchez, 33, found her lender through her Realtor and was given a high-cost loan she couldn’t afford when the interest rate reset.
“They said our credit wasn’t that great, so the loan we were given was two-year, interest-only. … To refinance we were going to go through them again,” Sanchez says. “We had the number, we kept trying and trying until we found out they were no longer in business.”
Sanchez tried other lenders who also offered high-rate loans, until she found nonprofit group Del Norte. The group helped her and her husband, Fabian Lopez, 36, get an affordable, fixed-rate loan.
Another reason for the surge in subprime loans: Lenders have been supported by politicians and community leaders eager to promote minority homeownership, which still remains about 25 percentage points below that of whites.
“Access became such a buzzword that people forgot about basic lending practices,” says Keith Corbett, executive vice president of the Center for Responsible Lending. “You are really in debt servitude, having a loan with a loan-to-value ratio of 100 percent or greater.” n
Enough Regulation?
Federal regulators have tightened lending standards. But the record is muddy regarding whether they have done enough to go after possible lending discrimination.
A Fed analysis of lending data shows a good chunk, but not all the difference in lending among races, can be explained by other factors, such as borrower income.
The Fed two years ago said its analysis of 2004 data indicated 200 lenders might be giving too many high-cost loans to minorities who could qualify for better deals. The 2005 data raised red flags about 270 lenders. The Fed, which oversees 45 of those lenders, conducted several examinations and referred one lender to the Justice Department.
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, another bank regulator, based on an analysis of the 2004 data, did a number of targeted exams. But the OCC says the vast amount of day-to-day OCC supervision does not involve public enforcement actions, and the agency does not keep data on enforcement actions based on the lending information.
“There’s a real lack of transparency,” says Marva Williams, senior vice president of the nonprofit Woodstock Institute in Chicago and a member of the Fed’s community advisory panel. “It’s difficult or impossible to know which institutions have received complaints, the nature of those complaints and the status of any investigation.”
Going forward, Congress is debating national standards for lending, while regulators and lenders are setting up multibillion-dollar programs to help people get out of bad loans. Robert Pulster, executive director of Boston’s ESAC, says recovery will be tough.
“These are poor communities. … [Homeowners] were borrowing money. They did everything they could to sustain them for as long as they could, so any resources they have are depleted,” Pulster says. “There’s no quick fix.”
