Playbook: Cry racism when minorities do not qualify for mortgages

One of the biggest problems that caused the mortgage “crisis” was lending money to people who could not afford to pay it back. Fixing that problem required lenders to pay attention to income, credit scores, savings habits and debt ratios. Guess what happens?

Sister Toldjah has an awesome piece at her blog referencing the Charlotte Observer’s article implying racism is behind a supposed widening minority loan gap. From the Observer piece…

Overall, the country’s 10 biggest lenders, including Charlotte’s big banks, denied nearly one out of every three applications – the highest rate in the past five years – as the financial crisis erupted. The denial rate was higher for refinancings than for home-purchase loans, as homeowners struggled to get loans with better terms amid rising economic woes and falling housing prices.

A key reason for the latest spike in denial rates, experts suggest, is that lenders disproportionately peddled high-interest rate subprime loans to blacks and Hispanics. Now that market is drying up, eliminating a once-easy source of credit. And those who had unaffordable loans are having a tough time refinancing in the recession.

“The role of race continues to play out in our society,” said Peter Skillern, executive director of the Community Reinvestment Association of North Carolina. “Credit is hard to get for everyone. It’s disproportionately hard to get if you’re African American.”

Oh come on. Skillern certainly refuses to consider historical fact. Programs were put in place by the federal government that made it absolutely necessary for lending institutions to provide mortgages to people and families who could not afford them. If those lenders did not lend, they would be called out to the woodshed and branded racist. The programs started prior to 1999.

In 1977 the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) was designed to stop redlining, considered racial discrimination when it came to mortgage lending. The CRA may have stopped redlining, but banks and mortgage lenders still verified income, checked credit, reviewed savings practices and denied loan applications to people who could not afford to pay back the money.

That just would not do. Lenders were called racist and – as American Thinker M. Jay Wells adeptly explains – community organizers like Barack Obama crowded into the lobbies of financial institutions and demanded the racism stop.

With the mechanisms in place, the community organizing groups began developing directed strategies to exert more and more pressure on the lending industry in the cloak of complicity with CRA. Community organizer Barack Obama worked closely with ACORN activists. Employing the radical Alinsky intimidation tactics Obama had learned and was teaching — “direct action” — activists crowded bank lobbies, blocked drive-up teller lanes and demonstrated at the homes of bankers to browbeat risky lending in poor and minority communities. Those who resisted were accused of racism to the media and government officials.

The agitators could now stall or hijack bank mergers by filing complaints of non-compliance against the institutions. Lawsuits alleging redlining and racism began flooding the court system. With the prospect of expansions and mergers threatened, banks settled cases and, significantly, increasingly made loans they would not have normally made. The net effect, as ACORN litigation increased, was that credit standards lowered.

So the banks get taken to the woodshed and reluctantly start providing sub-prime mortgages in part to keep their business from being ripped apart by Alinsky tactics. Of course, the federal government helped them along by ensuring Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae was available to suck up the high-risk mortgages.

The rest – as they say – is history. Yes, yes… I know that Republicans did not do much to stop it and even Bush (43) supported the idea of home ownership being vitally important. It’s not.

Now, back to the present. Since banks and lending institutions are doing their level best to ensure those who receive lending dollars can afford to pay the money back, we’re on our way back to what was going on in the 1990s.

Sister Toldjah notes the Charlotte Observer is carrying the water for President Obama and Barney Frank (D-Mass.) and submits their conclusion based on income data – and only income data – in the reporting.

So – from that data point (income) alone, the Observer is suggesting – without any other data to back it up (which they admitted in the previous paragraph), that minorities are being discriminated against based on their race in this new era of more thorough scrutiny of credit and financial history. They don’t have the data on income to debt ratios, savings accounts, credit scores, credit history, down payments, etc, but they can base their opinion solely on the basis of income.

Isn’t that nice?

It’s no freaking wonder we’re in the mess we’re in right now. Thanks, in part, to shameless lifetime Democrat politicos like Barney Frank, and liberal newspapers like the Charlotte Observer (who, I should note, had this article plastered on the frontpage/top of the fold in the Sunday edition), unless you’re really paying attention to the fine print of what they’re saying, you won’t get that they are hell bent on trying the same failed, disastrous lending policies of the past in an effort to “level the playing field” again so everyone can have a home, car, whatever they want free of the rountine scrutiny most people get when they go to apply for a loan.

Yup, the main stream media continue to do the work of the current administration refusing to consider logic, all the time pulling on heart strings. Will the cycle continue?