Foreclosure Crisis Causing Problems for Women in Baltimore
The main topic of conversation at Vixxen Hair Salon, located on Belair Road, Baltimore, has always been money but Ajanta Booker, the owner, says that since last August its been money and foreclosure.
A community of brick row houses, the Belair-Edison neighborhood, has recently been bought, for the most part, by single black women with children. According to an analysis of public records by a nonprofit community development organization called Reinvestment Fund, in the past four years more than half of the houses that have been foreclosed in the neighborhood were owned primarily by women.
The neighborhoods fragile stability is being threatened by the foreclosures and they highlight a wider dimension of the crisis. The fact that sub prime mortgages, responsible for driving the foreclosure rates, have gone disproportionately to women.
According to the National Association of Realtors single women have accounted for almost 40 percent of home sales in 2006, the figure being twice the national average, and according to the National Community Reinvestment Coalition nearly half of these have been subprime mortgages. Women, in general, have been among the fastest-growing groups of homeowners in recent years.
Kue McIntyre, a 33 year old single mother of three said that when she bought her house it was the American Dream but now she’s trying to avoid losing it to foreclosure. She says that she wants to save it for her boys and give it to them when they turn 18.
Sub prime lending is the practice of making high-cost loans to borrowers with low incomes or deficient credit history. The Mortgage Bankers Association says that sub prime loans make up for 13 percent of existing home loans. According to the Consumer Federation of America there was a 32 percent more chance of women receiving a subprime loan even though men and women have roughly the same credit scores and compared to white borrowers Blacks and Latinos are also more likely to get these high-risk loans.
In a study by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition it was concluded that women received 37 percent of high-cost home loans in 2005, compared to just 28 percent of prime loans. The findings of this study are backed by an earlier one by the Consumers Union according to which this disproportion was attributed to women’s credit status due to divorce and family medical emergencies. The fact that women have less wealth than men also increases the likelihood of them getting subprime loans. The principal means for women of closing this wealth gap has been home ownership but advocates say that the disparity of subprime loans is making it harder for women at all income levels to build wealth.
According to the director of credit and housing policy for the Consumer Federation of America, Allen J. Fishbein, the disproportion between men and women goes up as income levels rise. Among high earners black women are five times as more likely to receive subprime loans than white men and Mr. Fishbein believes that it’s logical to assume that since women received a higher percentage of subprime mortgages they would end up with higher rates of foreclosure.
The Belair-Edison neighborhood has 6,400 houses most of which are owner-occupied and it borders some of Baltimore’s poorer areas. Even though it has been regarded as a success story in a city trying to recover from the loss of its manufacturing base and one third of its population the stability of the neighborhood is fragile. There has been an increase in crime and one community leader voiced his opinion after a double homicide outside of a Sunday Church service and said that this was due to instability in the housing market. 181 houses in the neighborhood were foreclosed in 2007. That’s one in 35 and these figures represent a slight drop from those of the previous year Ms. McIntyre’s was offered at a foreclosure auction in December but there were no buyers. She’s still living in it hoping to work out a payment plan with her lender.
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[...] a closer look, according to Foreclosure Data Online: A community of brick row houses, the Belair-Edison neighborhood, has recently been bought, for the [...]