Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting: “In the 1930s, the federal government encouraged lending institutions to deny mortgages to people who lived in neighborhoods with large populations of immigrants and African Americans. The practice became known as redlining because the government drew lines around certain neighborhoods, deeming them “hazardous,” and colored them red. It wasn’t until 1968 that the Fair Housing Act outlawed this type of discrimination. But millions of mortgage records analyzed by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting show that the legacy of redlining persists 50 years later: In dozens of cities across the country, African Americans, Latinos, Asians and Native Americans remain more likely to be denied a conventional mortgage than whites. This disparity existed even after controlling for the applicants’ income, loan amount and certain neighborhood characteristics. Reveal’s analysis exposed a pattern of denials in major metropolitan areas such as Atlanta, St. Louis and San Antonio and in smaller ones such as Chico, California; Iowa City, Iowa; and Mobile, Alabama. Philadelphia became a focus of Reveal’s coverage because it consistently proved statistically significant, regardless of which variables were included – and because it has one of the widest lending disparities among the largest metro areas. Black applicants there were almost three times as likely to be denied a conventional home purchase loan as white applicants. Reveal’s analysis was based on publicly available data released through the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, or HDMA, and maintained by the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council. The act, passed in 1975, requires mortgage lenders to report basic data about loan applications to ensure fair lending practices.”

• How Reveal identified lending disparities in federal mortgage data – By Aaron Glantz and Emmanuel Martinez / February 15, 2018