‘Redlining’ home loan discrimination re-emerges as a concern for regulators, By Rachel L. Swarns, October 30, 2015, New York Times: “The green welcome sign hangs in the front door of the downtown branch ofHudson City Savings Bank, New Jersey’s largest savings bank. But for years, federal regulators said, its executives did what they could to keep certain customers out. They steered clear of black and Hispanic neighborhoods as they opened branches across New York and Connecticut, federal officials said. They focused on marketing mortgages in predominantly white sections of suburban New Jersey and Long Island, not here or in Bridgeport, Conn. The results were stark. In 2014, Hudson approved 1,886 mortgages in the market that includes New Jersey and sections of New York and Connecticut, federal mortgage data show. Only 25 of those loans went to black borrowers…”
Tag: Economic mobility
Resources for Low-Income Entrepreneurs
Low-income entrepreneurs welcome added assistance, By Katie Johnson, October 12, 2015, Boston Globe: “For a decade, Tiffany White worked as an executive assistant in Dorchester, living paycheck to paycheck to support herself and her son. But now she is on the other side of the corporate divide, the owner of a new business looking to hire as many as six employees for a natural skin and nail care studio scheduled to open in Hyde Park in November. White, 46, credits her leap to becoming a business owner to a free 12-week entrepreneurship program aimed at residents of Dorchester, Roxbury, and Mattapan…”
Upward Mobility
An atlas of upward mobility shows paths out of poverty, By David Leonhardt, Amanda Cox and Claire Cain Miller, May 4, 2015, New York Times: “In the wake of the Los Angeles riots more than 20 years ago, Congress created an anti-poverty experiment called Moving to Opportunity. It gave vouchers to help poor families move to better neighborhoods and awarded them on a random basis, so researchers could study the effects. The results were deeply disappointing. Parents who received the vouchers did not seem to earn more in later years than otherwise similar adults, and children did not seem to do better in school. The program’s apparent failure has haunted social scientists and policy makers, making poverty seem all the more intractable. Now, however, a large new study is about to overturn the findings of Moving to Opportunity. Based on the earnings records of millions of families that moved with children, it finds that poor children who grow up in some cities and towns have sharply better odds of escaping poverty than similar poor children elsewhere…”