US blacks see 'financial apartheid' in subprime crisis: "People of color are more than three times more likely to have subprime loans,' concluded the organization United for a Fair Economy in a recent report which estimated that minorities have seen between 163 billion and 278 billion dollars of their equity go up in smoke since 2000.
With its weakened economy and a large black population more used to renting, Cleveland has become a poster child of the subprime crisis in a country where some 2.1 million borrowers are behind on their mortgage payments.
City officials estimate that foreclosures have swallowed some 70,000 homes and turned entire neighborhoods into ghost towns."
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I talk about this issue a bit on my blog.
Words like "apartheid" get media attention, but the real apartheid was a really a matter of class rather than of race or ethnicity.
The forces of wealth hoarding and privatization in this country conspire to create a de facto social policy of segregation: between the haves and the haves not.
I think one interpretation of the housing bubble is that these many minority HomeDebtors are the proof of an expanding access to the "life of the haves;" when in actuality, it was clearly a policy to mask the fact that it is truly attainable for less and less of American citizens.
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