By Anna Challet, New America Media
Despite soaring home prices in the Bay Area, many homeowners in communities of color are dealing with a perfect storm of housing ills.
“The Bay Area has strong pockets of homeownership by people of color – in Oakland, in Richmond, in the Bayview,” said Gloria Bruce, Deputy Director of East Bay Housing Organizations. But due to the number of foreclosures in recent years, she said, “there are fewer homeowners than there used to be, and the homes are less likely to be controlled by people who live in the community.”
In 2011, the Center for Responsible Lending reported that homeowners of color nationwide, particularly Latinos and African Americans, were about twice as likely to lose their home to foreclosure as their white counterparts – owing in part to the fact that these homeowners were more likely to have been targeted for subprime loans.
Today, of the 6.9 million California homeowners who have a mortgage, over 2 million of them are underwater, according to foreclosure database Property Radar, meaning they owe more on their home than it is actually worth on the open market. Many of the hardest-hit areas in terms of home devaluation are in communities of color. Some 46 percent of the homes in the 94607 area code of West Oakland, for example – a historically African American neighborhood – are currently underwater, according to real estate database Zillow.
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