Shankar Vedantam, Washington Post
- Subprime mortgages have been linked to a meltdown in housing and questionable Wall Street practices, and they may have been the original domino that set off America’s current economic crisis.
But the loans — typically made to people with poor credit — have long been hailed for one reason: They were thought to be a powerful way to increase homeownership rates among minorities, and to provide a mechanism to undo the “redlining” policies of past decades, in which some banks refused to extend loans in predominantly minority neighborhoods, even to applicants with good credit.
Intersecting lines of new sociological evidence, however, suggest that this silver lining may have actually been a part of the cloud: There is growing evidence that the subprime mortgage industry may have both benefited from and contributed to racial segregation in the United States.
