Housing Discrimination

This paper offers a comprehensive interpretation of how an “Indian neighborhood” emerged in the Phillips district of South Minneapolis in the decades that followed the Second World War. It examines some of the ways that postwar urban strategies and political developments (suburbanization, the expansion of the middle class, interstate construction, and inner-city devalorization, for example) operated to divide the city by producing and sustaining discrete zones of privilege and deprivation, cementing the “structured advantage” of some and the exclusion of others. Building on this analysis, it concludes with a consideration of how the distribution of these advantages is illustrative of the enduring potency of the “colonial relation.”

Landlord defames deaf disabled senior citizen after her disabled parking space is blocked three times in one month by three different drivers. Two of these incidents were planned but landlord gave no 24 written notice as required by law. Landlord then tries to evict her based on her "startled" reaction to strange men intruding into her private premises making noise.

This paper argues that postwar Minneapolis Jews relocated to suburbs such as St. Louis Park in part as a response to the continuing movement of blacks forced by a segregated housing market into the Jewish enclave of North Minneapolis. Jewish leaders, conscious of their community’s prewar experience with antisemitism, responded by adopting a liberal view on housing issues. This view emphasized the role of individuals over institutions in the creation of segregation and aided leaders as they facilitated their population’s acceptance into the suburbs and downplayed charges of Jewish racism and exploitation. The liberalism of Jewish leaders clashed with North Minneapolis blacks’ experience of the ghettoization, or “racial transition, resegregation, and economic decline,'' resulting from the interrelated phenomena of housing discrimination, panic selling, and urban renewal, and the growing gap between these viewpoints led to a repeated series of conflicts between blacks and Jews during the late 1960s. Postwar liberalism incentivized both groups to view conflicts around residential segregation through a culturalist lense and eventually forced them to regard each other as the chief threats to each other's status and security. Because of this, leaders of these groups did not examine the structural factors that shaped the housing market both groups operated in.

There are two dominant discourses on finance: in the first, finance is the great enabler; in the second, finance is the great divider, the driver of social exclusion. What starts out as finance as an enabler can easily turn into finance as a divider. If someone's mortgage loan application is accepted, they may see finance as the enabler of homeownership, but if the loan conditions are predatory in nature, finance becomes a means of extraction. This paper focuses on two ways in which housing finance creates harm: redlining and predatory lending. This paper does not discuss new empirical research on redlining or predatory lending, but provides a selective overview of studies documenting these two forms of housing finance as harm. These two forms of housing finance share a number of characteristics related to exclusion, social groups, geography and local impact. Mortgage redlining is a form of place-based discrimination from housing finance. By delineating neighborhoods in which lenders do not grant mortgage loans they exclude households who want to buy a house and those who cannot sell their house. Predatory lending is a subset of subprime lending. Predatory loans are designed to exploit vulnerable borrowers. The rise of predatory lending had little to do with the mantra of emerging homeownership markets. In conclusion, mortgage lenders have the power to harm potential borrowers through direct exclusion (mortgage redlining) or indirect exclusion through overpriced loans (subprime and in particular predatory lending). 
Keywords: mortgage finance, redlining, subprime lending, predatory loans, social exclusion, homeownership

"In the years following World War II, New York City was home to the world’s largest urban black population. African Americans, as well as black people from throughout the diaspora, had been organizing in the city to secure their rights well into the previous century. By the mid-1960s, the national civil rights movement was making significant headway at the federal level, capped off by the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act. Despite the confluence of these factors, black New Yorkers were worse off by nearly every measurable index in 1965 than they were in 1945. They lived in more segregated neighborhoods, went to worse schools and had poorer employment prospects.

The residential and educational inequality black New Yorkers experienced had profound economic consequences that are often overlooked in studying how black activists, citizens and their allies organized against the forces of segregation. Housing segregation concentrated 70 percent of New York’s 1.1 million black people into two neighborhoods, Central Harlem and Bedford Stuyvesant. Residential segregation only increased during the postwar period, ratcheting up competition for apartments in the city’s black neighborhoods, which allowed landlords to charge rents that were the same or more than what most residents of the city’s white neighborhoods paid for much better housing. Likewise, many merchants in predominantly black neighborhoods saw residents as constituting a captive market that allowed them to charge prices for inferior goods that were higher than what people in other neighborhoods would pay for higher quality items. The city’s policy of neighborhood schools required students to attend the schools closest to their homes. For black students, this overwhelmingly meant enrollment in an inferior segregated school, overcrowded and staffed by unlicensed substitute teachers.

Poor education led to poor job prospects, a situation made worse by the fact that the kinds of jobs that had traditionally been key to African American economic wellbeing were quickly disappearing. While black income was growing rapidly throughout the country during the same period, and black New Yorkers did see their incomes increase, their increases did not keep pace with regional trends, leaving them earning substantially less than black people elsewhere in the American Northeast. By the mid-1960s, racial segregation in New York City was taking an increasingly substantial economic toll on African American residents."

During historic times of turmoil and change, social scientists of various stripes are often called upon to shape our understanding of ways mortgage markets function. The question is asked; just how did we get here?  Subprime Cities: The Political Economy of Mortgage Markets presents a collection of works from social scientists that offer important insights into what is happening in today’s mortgage market including the causes, effects, and aftermath of the ‘subprime’ mortgage crisis. In addition to shedding light on how the current housing crisis has spread to other sectors of the economy, readings address the mortgage market itself and how problems have spread throughout mortgage and housing markets. Various chapters address changes that have resulted in the subprime mortgage crisis; others focus on the structural changes in the mortgage market, rather than on the crisis itself. Documentation of the geographical, social, and institutional inequalities associated with the crisis reveal how the recent mortgage boom created ‘subprime cities’, and how the victims of the crisis are the product of deep structural inequalities.  This book is a provocative wake-up call for us to reconsider the structures of housing finance and housing policy if we are to avoid another crisis.

Signs on both doors state "deaf, private property, no trespassing, no talking..." Landlord was informed in writing in July 2011 that I do not listen to anyone talk, and all communication must be in writing because normal amounts of noise cause pain (hyperacusis) and I will not change, this is a permanent condition.

I have been suing the local sheriff since 2013 because they send deputies to talk to me, disturb me, and defame me in my private home only because I cannot and I will not listen to them talk. They refuse to ID themselves, refuse to read and refuse to leave quickly. They often attempt to force unwanted unnecessary services which have been repeatedly rejected. The latest such discrimination resulted in the creation of a false MHRT report, kept, at taxpayer expense for 10 (ten) years. I want it expunged.

Sheriff refuses to communicate in writing. I cannot hear. DOJ responded today.

Just as in society, the mortgage market may exclude people on the basis of place, as well as race. Place-based exclusion in the mortgage market often takes the form of “redlining,” a tacit agreement among lending institutions to delineate sections of cities into areas where no home mortgages are to be issued. Place, Exclusion, and Mortgage Markets presents an in-depth examination of the practice of redlining and the broader implications of contemporary urban exclusion processes. Through a careful balance of comparative research and literature reviews, author Manuel B. Aalbers reveals how redlining, which is most visible at the urban level, is also constituted at the interaction of several spatial scales: neighborhood, urban, regional, national, and global. By utilizing several research strategies and presenting documented evidence from various urban sectors in the United States, Italy, and the Netherlands, this book offers fresh insights and much needed analytical clarity to shape our understanding of redlining and other urban exclusion processes.

''Whilst searching for a house using these sutras, either because of the fortune of my about to be born daughter or because of the ethical anger of some of my non Muslim friends I manage to rent a house from a Muslim family. My political, social and cultural research into rented houses came to a temporary halt. I need to remember during this Ramzan time that the all seeing and all controlling lord of known and unknown world had put me through this test so that I am aware of untouchability. Let all praises be to him. Amen.'' by N A M Ismail. Translated by Sridhara Aghalaya

The Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) of 1977 was part of the US government’s response to bank redlining. In the wake of the social rights movement in general and the community reinvestment movement in particular, redlining returned to the political and research agendas in the late 1960s and 1970s. Community-based organizations and others claimed that lenders were redlining large parts of inner cities. Redlining became heavily associated with racial discrimination. In 1968, discrimination in housing and mortgage lending became prohibited through the Fair Housing Act. In addition, the federal government responded by implementing the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) in 1975, and the CRA in 1977. Today, few would deny the evidence of redlining in the 1930s and 1970s-1980s, but recent evidence of redlining is scarce. Mortgage lenders have found ways to by-pass suspicion of redlining by granting mortgage loans in the “good” part of a Census tract and withholding it from the “bad” part (cherry-picking behavior). Although some changes have increased the effectiveness of the CRA, other changes have made it easier for banks to get away with lending behavior that is not CRA compliant. More importantly, the updates to the CRA were unable to keep with changes in the structure of the US mortgage market. During the subprime mortgage and foreclosure crisis that started in 2007 the CRA got heavily criticized for enabling subprime lending and therefore being at the root of the global financial crisis. It is argued that the CRA forced lenders to grant loans to low-income borrowers who should not have been given a loan under “normal” conditions. This entry discusses five reasons why the CRA should not be blamed for promoting unsound lending. The CRA was designed to promote fair lending to all borrowers. Subprime lending, on the other hand, was designed by lenders to make money by selling risky and overpriced loans, often to people who did not need these loans or could have applied for cheaper ones. CRA loans and subprime loans are simply two different things. There are many factors that play a significant part in unleashing the subprime mortgage crisis, but if the CRA is to be blamed for anything, it is only for not having been allowed to keep up with changes in the mortgage market. One of the future challenges is to adapt the CRA to cover all mortgage lenders: the rules need to be applied to both banks and non-bank lenders. The CRA should be updated to account for the structural changes in the mortgage market and strengthened to promote sound, inclusionary lending.

... Title: We Want Our Town Back!: Housing Discrimination and Exclusion Author: Haley, Brian, University of California Santa Barbara Publication Date: 10-18-2006 ... Brian Haley Department of Anthropology and Center for Chicano Studies University of California, Santa Barbara ...