Affluent Black County Mired In Mortgage Mess

[DrPhil]

Originally Posted by Munchkin03

I'm here! Finally! I was out of town for a wedding this weekend and was mad busy in the days leading up to it.

I hinted at this upthread, but there's a lot of pressure for black professionals to buy houses even when it might not be the best time to do so in their lives. It used to be that homeownership was the official sign that "you've made it," and you can still see it with a lot of black Baby Boomers and Greatest Generation folks. When I got my masters, my father was on me hard to buy--I knew it was a dumb idea, given how mutable my life was and how expensive real estate was in NYC, and I chose to focus my financial priorities on building savings and investing for retirement. I'll have the rest of my life to buy a house. But, there are a lot of people in their early to mid 20s who take what their parents say as gospel, especially if their parents did "well." (It's a relative term since so many Black Greatest Generation and Baby Boomers had stable government or union jobs, VA housing loans, and the GI bill to get out of college without debt. It would require lot more income--and much lower housing costs--to replicate that sort of middle-class prosperity today.)

This pressure is a lot worse in areas where there are lots of young black professionals--DC and Atlanta come to mind--and those happen to be places where housing stock is pretty expensive. Black young professionals, more so than their white and Asian counterparts, come out of school with more debt and less family assistance for things like down payments and closing costs. Lenders knew what they were doing by reaching out to these folks with no-down-payment loans with teaser interest rates. Also, back in 2005 or so, people were afraid of being priced out of the real estate game.

It's just a messy situation all around, and today's black professionals--most of whom were either first generation college students and/or first generation homeowners--were more vulnerable than their white colleagues with similar education and income.

I agree. There's a reason why these things disproportionately impact Blacks. That includes those who were discriminated against by lenders/didn't have the proper resources and those who consciously spent way more than they could comfortably afford.

Originally Posted by Munchkin03

Did anyone read the NYTimes article a few years ago, about how their economics editor got sucked into one of these crazy loans? He's white, but he lives in the DC area. Unlike the PG County folks, he was able to spin a book out of the experience, and the advance saved him from foreclosure (he was about 8 months behind).

Is this his story? Yikes.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/0..._n_203305.html