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Economic Commentary

Home Mortgage Lending by the Numbers

During the past year, several Federal Reserve reports on home mortgage lending have attracted widespread attention for what they revealed about racial lending patterns. The Federal Reserve Board, in back to- back analyses of 1990 and 1991 data gathered nationwide, reported that black and Hispanic applicants are denied credit at roughly twice the rate of white applicants. And in a study designed to investigate the sources of differential mortgage denial rates in the Boston area, that region’s Reserve Bank concluded that lenders approved conventional home purchase loans for white applicants at a much greater rate than for black and Hispanic applicants who appeared, statistically at least, to be similarly qualified.

The views authors express in Economic Commentary are theirs and not necessarily those of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland or the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. The series editor is Tasia Hane. This paper and its data are subject to revision; please visit clevelandfed.org for updates.

Suggested Citation

Avery, Robert B. , Patricia E. Beeson, and Mark S. Sniderman. 1993. “Home Mortgage Lending by the Numbers.” Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, Economic Commentary 2/15/1993.

This work by Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International