Monthly Archive for July, 2007

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Further Coverage of Racially-Influenced Mortgages

Published by Waldo Jaquith on July 13, 2007 in Business. 17 Comments

Brian McNeill writes in the Progress today about the alarming new study that black Charlottesville-area homeowners are substantially more likely to have a high-cost mortgage than whites. Unfortunately, what McNeill found is mostly stonewalling. The Mortgage Bankers Association says that this is “oversimplifying a complex issue,” which may well be true, but they fail to provide a more complex description that would explain things. Charlottesville-area lenders wouldn’t talk to McNeill. And the Virginia Mortgage Lenders Association both says she doesn’t know and guesses the problem comes from out-of-state firms, which just sounds like wishful thinking. The only particularly useful answer comes from the Virginia Poverty Law Center, which points out that subprime lenders “market themselves to black communities by advertising on hip-hop radio stations and urban-focused television stations,” though even that falls short without knowing whether that’s taking place in Charlottesville and, if so, if it’s happening at a rate greater than anywhere else in the country.

It’s not McNeill’s fault that mortgage brokers aren’t eager to talk about racial disparity in their lending, of course, but it remains that a symptom has been identified, but we just can’t locate its cause.

Local mortgage broker Michael Martin provided a useful comment on the topic, writing in part:

I know there are the scoundrels in the mortgage business. The worst one I know of was a non-white who preyed on anyone, regardless of color. He would get massive phone lists of local people with bad credit, call them and arm twist them into the most outrageous refinances. He made up to forty grand a month this way, mostly to finance a prodigious crack addiction. He would even make deals while in prison, calling from the yard with a cell phone, having his mother show up at closing to make sure the suckers signed the loan docs.
He didn’t care about race. Im his own twisted way, he actually thought he was helping his clients. There were only two things that his victims shared: gullibility and naiveté.

All of which, I have to say, reminds me very much of the “We Buy Houses” scams.

Study: C’ville Has #1 Race-Based Mortgage Gap

Published by Waldo Jaquith on July 11, 2007 in Business. 42 Comments

A study of mortgage rates throughout the country has revealed that Charlottesville has the nation’s biggest disparity between rates for blacks and whites, North Carolina’s News & Observer reports. The study (250k PDF) uses 2005 data available under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act for metropolitan areas to compare mortgage rates for African American homeowners to those for white homeowners and found that 43% of all loans to blacks in the area were high cost, while only 11% of those to whites were. That makes blacks 388% more likely to have high cost loans than whites, and that’s using data across all income levels. We’re tied with Durham, N.C. The National Community Reinvestment Coalition writes in the study:

The Charlottesville, VA MSA also ranked the worst in home lending to low- to moderate-income (LMI) African-American borrowers. Of all loans to LMI African-American borrowers, 48.0% were high-cost, while only 15.2% of the loans received by LMI whites were high-cost. This means that LMI African-American borrowers were 3.16 times more likely to receive a high-cost loan than LMI white borrowers.

The report was presented today at the NAACP conference in Detroit.

Greenbrier Cans Principal for Husband’s Murder Charge

Published by Waldo Jaquith on July 10, 2007 in Education. 35 Comments

The city school system has fired the new principal for Greenbrier Elementary before she could even start her job, Dana Hackett reports for NBC 29. The reason, oddly, is that her husband was once a suspect in a San Antonio murder case eleven years ago. Maj. Robert Eric Duncan had been the boss of the father of the 11-year-old victim at Randolph AFB. A military grand jury had filed charges against him in the 1990 murder, under military law, but they ultimately concluded that there wasn’t enough evidence against him. The girl’s family recently requested that the case be reactivated, believing that an investigation into Duncan by a local TV station had provided the evidence necessary to convict him, and the Texas Rangers agreed to take on the case. Presumably this affects Duncan’s wife because the TV station’s investigation showed that she’d provided a pair of conflicting alibis for her husband. All of this leaves Greenbrier without a principal and the Duncans in the middle of moving to Charlottesville. The erstwhile principal is hinting at legal action, but Virginia employment law probably leaves her out of luck.

The Politics of Eating Locally

Published by Waldo Jaquith on July 10, 2007 in Business and Politics. 19 Comments

Green Tomato In this week’s C-Ville, Meg McEvoy has a long look at the local food movement. Like anybody else who’s given it a whirl, she discovers that locally-grown food is almost universally tastier than its flavorless supermarket counterparts and not hard to find. But area farmers complain that state and local laws make it difficult for them to compete against factory farms, so they’ve gotten organized and they’re doing something about it.

The topic of the importance of a strong, self-sufficient local economy and food supply is near and dear to my heart. For more on this topic, see UVa’s 2006 regional food assessment, Michael Pollan’s “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” or Bill McKibben’s “Deep Economy.” Or, on the blogging front, horticulturist Tracey Gerlach blogs about her adventures with producing some of her own food at “Life in Sugar Hollow.”

Council Candidate Haskins Blogging

Published by Waldo Jaquith on July 10, 2007 in Blogs and Politics. Closed

Peter Kleeman isn’t the only City Council candidate with an active blog about his campaign, Jim Duncan points out — Barbara Haskins is blogging, too. She started her blog on Saturday and, since then, she’s written a series of posts on topics ranging from her party affiliation (she’s not saying) to city/county relations, affordable housing to the debate between the rescue squad and the city. (Mayor David Brown blogs, too, but not about the race thus far.) Hopefully the growing roster of blogging candidates will engage one another through their weblogs, carrying on discussions and linking to one another’s good ideas as other Charlottesville bloggers do. That could make for a really intelligent, civilized election.

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