by Ralph Brauer | 12/14/2008 05:20:00 PM
Part I of IV
There is an elephant in the room no one wants to mention when you bring up the housing crisis. It is the same elephant that has occupied the room since the very beginning of this nation. Yes, it was there that hot Philadelphia summer when they drafted the Constitution. Maybe that is what Ben Franklin is gazing at as he sits in the center of the famous painting of the signing of the Constitution by Howard Chandler Christy that hangs today in the House of Representatives east stairway. Certainly the elephant had haunted Franklin much of his life causing him to call it "a constant butchery of the human species" in an anonymous letter written in 1772. That elephant that haunted Franklin and continues to haunt us today is racism.
The economic crisis we face today has produced countless essays analyzing its origins and proposing all manner of cures, but almost no one has dared to mention the elephant in the room. As I researched this topic I found only one person who seemed to be on to it: John Kimble, who wrote an excellent op ed piece in the New Orleans Times Picayune in October that should be required reading for everyone. One sentence gets to the heart of the matter:
What few today remember is that one of the government's central goals in undertaking mortgage market reform was to segregate American cities by race.
That such a piece should come from New Orleans does not surprise me; that few have sought to connect what to me seem rather obvious dots is more of a mystery to me. But that is the power of that elephant in the room.
Perhaps now with an African American President we will finally have more open discussion of the elephant in the room and that discussion should begin by acknowledging that the elephant played a significant role in causing the mortgage crisis which in turn has toppled financial giants as if they were a row of dominoes. To understand why we need to go back to the years immediately after the Second World War when the housing boom began.
The Creation of the Suburb
The discussion of the role of racism in America should begin by confronting the most important social, cultural and political reality of the past half century: the American suburb is largely a creation of racist loan policies that came from none other than the federal government. The suburban migration stands as one of the largest freely-undertaken, government-subsidized mass social movements in history. It accomplished by democratic means what dictators over the ages have tried to accomplish by force: alter the physical, economic, and social environment to create a unique culture. As Kenneth Jackson writes in Crabgrass Frontier, his history of the American suburb:
Suburbanization was not an historical inevitability created by geography, technology, and culture, but rather the product of government policies. (p. 293)
Through a variety of government subsidies the creation of the suburbs allowed people of modest means to attain what real estate ads have christened the American dream. The immensity of this achievement is only beginning to dawn on us, for it constituted the kind of land and social reform that governments everywhere still try to accomplish. Kenneth Jackson notes:
Single family housing starts in this country rose from 114,000 in 1944 to 937,000 in 1946, 1,183,000 in 1948 and 1,692,000 in 1950. (p. 233)
The federal government financed this growth through the Federal Housing Administration, an agency created during the New Deal to help spur the growth of home construction. During the postwar housing boom Jackson points out:
The main beneficiary of the $119 billion in FHA mortgage insurance issued in the first four decades of FHA operation was suburbia.
Drawing the Color Line
A half century before the creation of suburban America, W.E.B. DuBois had written in the very first sentence of The Souls of Black Folk the immortal and prescient words:
HEREIN lie buried many things which if read with patience may show the strange meaning of being black here at the dawning of the Twentieth Century. This meaning is not without interest to you, Gentle Reader; for the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.
Little could DuBois have predicted that the color line would become a red line drawn around the American suburb by none other than the FHA. The name redlining actually dates back to the 1930s when the FHA first began using color codes to designate areas where they should not invest. Red areas were off-limits. Jackson states:
FHA also helped to turn the building industry against the minority and inner-city housing market, and its policies supported the income and racial segregation of suburbia.
Even as the suburbs mushroomed across the American landscape, a few were asking questions. In 1955 Columbia Professor Charles Abrams charged:
From its inception the FHA set itself up as protector of the all white neighborhood. It sent its agents into the field to keep Negroes and other minorities from buying houses in white neighborhoods. (Jackson, pp. 213-214)
In what has become the classic source on FHA discrimination, The Politics of Exclusion, Michael Danielson quotes an FHA underwriting manual:
If a neighborhood is to retain stability, it is necessary that properties shall continue to be occupied by the same social and racial classes. A change in social or racial occupancy generally leads to instability and reduction in values.(p. 203)
FHA policies also required appraisers to determine the probability of people of color moving into a neighborhood and even forced homeowners to agree not to sell their property to someone of another race. According to one commentator,
“[T]he most basic sentiment underlying the FHA’s concern was its fear that property values would decline if a rigid black and white segregation was not maintained.
With the rise of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s, the FHA began to make some attempt to right these wrongs, but with the election of Richard Nixon in 1968, the so-called "Southern Strategy" soon put a stop these efforts. Chris Bonastia documented Nixon's dismantling of FHA's residential integration efforts in his paper, "Hedging His Bets: Why Nixon Killed HUD's Desegregation Efforts." Nixon's refusal to back HUD's reform efforts would have an impact on American society that ranks right up there with the decision by President Rutherford B. Hayes to abandon the South to the segregationists, essentially ending Reconstruction.
Yet to see one man and one decision as a historical lynch pin is to take an outmoded view of history, for the truth is that by 1968 the die had already been cast and DuBois' color line had been drawn like a moat around the suburbs designed to keep people of color from entering. It would have taken considerable political will--and perhaps even federal law enforcement--to desegregate the suburbs by then. Dr. Martin Luther King, jr.'s infamous march into the Chicago suburb of Cicero, where he was met with bricks and catcalls, showed the depth of that moat. There is a moment in the video of that march when you hear what sounds like a shot and King turns suddenly as if wondering where the shot came from.
This does not excuse Nixon's actions, which at best were misguided and at worst cowardly and racist. While historians debate how much Richard Nixon personally bought into the Thurmond catechism, his elevation of Thurmond aide Harry Dent to the White House staff after the election sent a clear signal of his alliance with Thurmond. Dent was the one who sat outside the Senate chamber with a pail in case Thurmond needed a quick bathroom break during his record-setting filibuster. Nixon himself put it bluntly:
I am not going to campaign for the black vote at the risk of alienating the suburban vote.
For the federal government to go further than the law, to force integration in the suburbs, I think is unrealistic. I think it will be counter-productive and not in the interest of better race relations. [quoted in Charles M. Lamb, Housing Segregation in Suburban America Since 1960, p. 4, p. 9]
Still, as Lamb would point out in a footnote, two decades later a University of California study found that 44% of white Americans favored encouraging African Americans to move to the suburbs.
The Creation of the Subprime Market
Yet the FHA did not just discriminate against people of color who sought to live in the suburbs, it also made it more difficult for them to obtain loans, period, by refusing to insure loans in areas with high concentrations of people of color. The systemic impact of this is still reverberating through America's inner cities. Without FHA insurance, no reputable bank would issue a home loan to someone living on the other side of the "color line." This in turn had a host of social and cultural impacts, from resource-poor schools to lack of jobs because businesses would not build where the FHA would not write loans.
You don't need to be a systems modeler to see how each of these came to feed on each other. In the last decade scholars have begun to refer to this as "structural racism," by which they mean a convergence of forces and policies that conspires to sustain the color line. Just imagine one systemic loop: you cannot get a good job because you live in a neighborhood with substandard housing and were educated in a substandard school and so you cannot qualify for a loan for better housing which in turn further reinforces the substandard housing. Structural racism is also not a bad metaphor, either, for it suggests the immense weight of these multiple factors that presses down on people living inside those red lines drawn by the FHA.
Where legitimate businesses and institutions are prevented from entering, illegitimate ones will grow. Since regular banks would not lend to people of color in inner city neighborhoods and FHA policies kept them from lending to the few people of color who could afford suburban housing, there obviously was a need for someone to supply these loans and so we have the growth of the so-called subprime market, only back in those days they were known as loan sharks and other unprintable words and had reputation to rival check cashing operations, greedy landlords and take and bake furniture renters. Anyone who has grown up in the inner city can tell stories not only about price-gouging home loans, but high-priced loans for everything from cars to buying furniture or clothes on credit.
What Is Subprime Lending
Subprime lending is a mixture of old-fashioned altruism and blatant thievery with an American twist. Some entered into the business of making loans to people of color because they genuinely believed people deserved an equal opportunity, others saw a chance to make a quick buck. The reality of the situation was that without FHA insurance even the most well-meaning lenders still had to charge more than they would have for a white suburban home-buyer.
A 2003 study for the Lawyers Committee on Civil Rights Under Law reported:
While red-lining has served to exclude poor and minority residents from the benefits of mainstream mortgage lending, purveyors of predatory lending (or so-called “reverse red-lining”) practices have targeted many of the same poor and minority households that traditional lending institutions have ignored or excluded.
In testimony before the House Committee on Banking and Financial Services in 2000 Bill Brennan of the Atlanta Legal Aid Society outlined how subprime lending works for lenders:
Here is what these companies do, the predators. They overcharge on interest and points, they charge egregiously high annual interest and prepaid finance charges, points, which are not justified by the risk involved, because these loans are collateralized by valuable real estate.
Since they usually only lend at 70 to 80 percent loan-to-value ratios, they have a 20 to 30 percent cushion to protect them if they have to foreclose. They usually always buy at the foreclosure sale and pay off the debt and sell the house for a profit.
As for those taking out the loans, Gary Gensler, Undersecretary for Domestic Finance at the treasury Department, told the same Committee:
Borrowers in these markets often have limited access to mainstream financial services. This leads to two things, as the Senator said earlier. Some borrowers who really would qualify for prime loans—we estimate anywhere between 15 and 35 percent of the subprime market could qualify for prime and cannot get that prime loan. Second, the rate and term competition is limited. Subprime lenders don't tend to compete as much on price.
Beyond preying on vulnerable populations, beyond the limited access to mainstream financial services, is that abusive practices tend to be coupled with high-pressure sales tactics, whether by a mortgage broker, a home improvement contractor, sometimes a lender themselves in the local community.
Perhaps the most extensive and longest longitudinal study of predatory lending practices has been the Woodstock Institute's periodic reports on Chicago. It's 1999 report "Two Steps Back" was among the earliest to blow the whistle on predatory lending. They found:
Documented cases of abuse include fees exceeding 10 percent of the loan amount, payments structured so that they do not even cover interest (resulting in increasing principle balances), and flipping a loan numerous times in a couple of years.
At the same time, lending to lower-income and minority communities is often viewed as an isolated line of business, in which the focus is on the short term transaction and associated fees. Lenders active in such communities tend to be mortgage and finance companies subject to much less regulation than banks and thrifts. The increased scale of the subprime industry itself has resulted in a larger number of abuses. Moreover, there has not been a proportionate increase in regulation or regulatory resources devoted to this new industry.
As usual graphs and tables tell the story in black and white:
The date on the graph may be a little difficult to see. It is 1998. On the first table, the percentage of subprime loans going to African American communities is 53%. Only 9% went to predominantly white communities. The Woodstock study went on to deal with the obvious question: is it race or income that is the strongest determinant of who receives a subprime loan? They found it was the former:
Thus, whether a neighborhood is predominantly African-American explains the greatest amount of variation in subprime lending,
The Final Results
In 1997 Bill Brennan could tell the New York Times:
We have financial apartheid in our country. We have low-income, often minority borrowers, who are charged unconscionably high interest rates, either directly or indirectly through the cover of added charges.
Three years later Census data would confirm Brennan's charge. The Lawyers Committee on Civil Rights Under Law found:
The typical white person lives in a neighborhood that is overwhelmingly white, with a few minorities (80.2% white, 6.7% African American, 7.9% Hispanic American, and 3.9% Asian American), the typical African American lives in a neighborhood that is mostly black (51.4% black, 33.0% white, 11.4% Hispanic American, and 3.3% Asian American). By comparison, the typical Hispanic American lives in a neighborhood that is more evenly Hispanic American and white (45.5% Hispanic, 36.5% white, 10.8% black, and 5.9% Asian American); and the typical Asian American lives in a neighborhood that is mostly white (17.9% Asian American, 54% white, 9.2% black, and 17.4% Hispanic American).
In a study released this year by United for a Fair Economy, the authors note:
According to federal data, people of color are more than three times more likely to have subprime loans: high-cost loans account for 55% of loans to Blacks, but only 17% of loans to Whites.
This is a decade after the Woodstock study identified a similar pattern in Chicago.
Reflections
This history makes you wonder what kind of country we might have become had racism not pervaded the home mortgage market. The United for a Fair Economy study puts it eloquently:
While the housing crisis has affected all sectors of society, it has disproportionately affected communities and individuals of color. For them, the dream that Martin Luther King, Jr. once spoke of has been foreclosed.
Now the injustices white America heaped on black America for half a century have come home to roost. The sobering thought to ponder is that what you have read so far is merely the very tip of a rather large iceberg, for there are literally dozens and dozens of books and countless articles on racism and housing. If you enter "racism" and "housing" in Google you will find over four million entries. Yet despite over half a century of studies, reports and papers about discriminatory lending, little was done about it.
The most damning piece of evidence in this entire story is not that racism fostered predatory loans, but that like organized crime going from petty bootleggers and drug dealers to big time operators, the practice of predatory loan sharking expanded and went mainstream-- moving from being the providence of small-time shady operators to mainstream banks. Essentially, loan-sharking cast off its sleazy past and the bigger it became the more people looked the other way.
That is until it suddenly threatens to take down the entire American economy. Now like the figures in that painting of Constitution Hall, fingers are pointing and people are staring.
If racism played a big role in creating the mortgage crisis, the solution to our current problems will prove tougher to deal with than what the so-called experts have been telling us. We could be witnessing the fourth American revolution. The first was the war for independence, the second the Civil War, the third the Great Depression and now the present crisis which combines the themes of the previous two--race and economics.
The next essay in this series focuses on how we got here and why, for only by understanding that journey can we see a way out of the current morass. What is clear so far is that this crisis is not merely the fault of a few misguided CEOs, but rather the culmination of decades of discrimination in which all of us are culpable.
Now the time has come to stop pretending there is no elephant in the room and deal with it.
Resources
For a good bibliography on the subject click here.
Continue to Part II
Crossposts: The Strange Death of Liberal America, My Left Wing, The Wild, Wild Left
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