With falling housing prices and rising interest rates, it’s not an easy time to be a new homeowner in America. Yet the going is even tougher for minority households. In fact, for most protected groups, fairness in home financing has not improved at all in the last 33 years.
Despite overall mortgage fairness increasing in recent years, discrimination still occurs against historically disadvantaged groups, especially Black, Hispanic, and Native Americans.
FairPlay, the startup behind the world’s first Fairness-as-a-Service solution for countering algorithmic bias, released a December report analyzing publicly available data to identify the nation’s fairest cities and lenders.
The results highlight the hurdles faced by each minority group.
“Reservations” About Reservations
In 2021, Native American applicants were approved for mortgages at 81.9% the rate of White homebuyers. This group suffered especially low approval ratings in Arizona and New Mexico, the data showed.
The Top 10 Fairest Cities for Native Americans include Miami, San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, Minneapolis, San Diego, Las Vegas, Detroit, Fort Worth, and Los Angeles.
As for the Top 10 Fairest Lenders for Native Americans, they include Primary Residential Mortgage, Huntington National Bank, Paramount Residential Mortgage, Prosperity Home Mortgage, Home Point Financial, Union Home Mortgage, Lakeview Loan Servicing, Caliber Home Loans, Loandepot.com, and Cornerstone Home Lending.
Native American communities face their own unique hurdles in accessing credit.
“Affordability, availability, substandard housing – just everything about the housing market is terrible on reservations,” Darrell LaMere, a Billings-based loan officer, tells the Public News Service. “Housing is in dire straits right now, on every reservation in Montana.”
The legal status of reservations can sometimes turn away potential…
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