The housing crunch has decimated the lives of so many across New York City, but no one has been hit harder than blacks and Latinos, a New York Times analysis finds.
Slow to reach the Northeast coast, the housing disaster made up for lost time, moving through New York at an alarming pace. It now reaches from the Connecticut Gold Coast to the furthermost points on Long Island, where 6 percent of all mortgaged homes are in danger of foreclosure, and has swallowed up billions of dollars in real estate wealth.
Black and Latino homeowners have been hit worst. They dominate 85 percent of the neighborhoods strangled by the foreclosure crisis, according to the Times. Defaults are three times more likely to happen in minority-concentrated areas compared with white ones. Even when blacks earn as much as whites, they're still more likely to be victimized by predatory lenders. For example, a black household making $68,000 a year is five times as likely as a white household making the same amount of money – or less – to hold high-interest subprime mortgages, according to the Times. That makes it five times as hard to hold onto their homes.
Olive Thompson, a 45-year-old nursing assistant, exhausted her 401(k) in an effort to save her $215,000 four-bedroom home earlier this year. The mother of four ultimately declared bankruptcy – and she lost her house anyway. The home across the street from her went into foreclosure, too, according to the Times.
"Next thing I know, it's boarded up," Thompson told the paper.
This scenario is particularly dangerous for a community that has struggled for decades to increase homeownership rates amid rampant discrimination and a deeply entrenched fear that the system doesn't work for them. Black homeownership has been increasing at a dramatic pace in the last five years, reports the Times, but that growth is threatened by plummeting home value, loss of credit and eviction.
"My district feels like ground zero," City Councilman James Sanders Jr., a Queens democrat, told the Times. "In military terms, we are being pillaged."
An interracial couple moved out of an expensive neighborhood into a more manageable place in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Since they got there, they've seen foreclosures swallow up homes around them. They've seen apartment buildings get padlocked and neighborhood youth with nothing to do standing idly on the stoops of empty homes at night.
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"We figured we've move here and participate in the rebirth of this block," Alexia Billiart told the Times. "It seems to be going backward; it's a little scary."
