IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/recgxx/v78y2002i2p129-169.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The Disappearance of Race in Mortgage Lending

Author

Listed:
  • Elvin K. Wyly
  • Steven R. Holloway

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.

Suggested Citation

  • Elvin K. Wyly & Steven R. Holloway, 2002. "The Disappearance of Race in Mortgage Lending," Economic Geography, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 78(2), pages 129-169, April.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:recgxx:v:78:y:2002:i:2:p:129-169
    DOI: 10.1111/j.1944-8287.2002.tb00181.x
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1111/j.1944-8287.2002.tb00181.x
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1111/j.1944-8287.2002.tb00181.x?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Dwight Jaffee & John M. Quigley, 2012. "The Future of the Government-Sponsored Enterprises: The Role for Government in the U.S. Mortgage Market," NBER Chapters, in: Housing and the Financial Crisis, pages 361-417, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    2. Gary A. Dymski & Jesus Hernandez & Lisa Mohanty, 2011. "Race, Power, and the Subprime/Foreclosure Crisis: A Mesoanalysis," Economics Working Paper Archive wp_669, Levy Economics Institute.
    3. Howard S Tenenbaum & Nigel M Waters, 2011. "Spatial Patterns of Subprime Mortgages by Local Banks, Nonlocal Banks, and Independents in the Continental US," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 43(8), pages 1761-1778, August.
    4. Ross, Stephen L. & Turner, Margery Austin & Godfrey, Erin & Smith, Robin R., 2008. "Mortgage lending in Chicago and Los Angeles: A paired testing study of the pre-application process," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 63(3), pages 902-919, May.
    5. Elvin K Wyly & Daniel J Hammel, 2004. "Gentrification, Segregation, and Discrimination in the American Urban System," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 36(7), pages 1215-1241, July.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:recgxx:v:78:y:2002:i:2:p:129-169. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/recg .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.