Discriminating Risk: The U.S. Mortgage Lending Industry in the Twentieth Century by Guy Stuart

From the Publisher

The U.S. home mortgage industry first formalized risk criteria in the 1920s and 1930s to determine which applicants should receive funds. Over the past eighty years, these formulae have become more sophisticated. Guy Stuart demonstrates that the very concepts on which lenders base their decisions reflect a set of social and political values about "who deserves what." Stuart examines the fine line between licit choice and illicit discrimination, arguing that lenders, while eradicating blatantly discriminatory practices, have ignored the racial and class biases that remain encoded in their decision processes. He explains why African Americans and Hispanics continue to be at a disadvantage in gaining access to loans: discrimination, he finds, results from the interaction between the way lenders make decisions and the way they shape the social structure of the mortgage and housing markets.

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Table of Contents