Alex Schwartz Co-authored Report “Underwater America” Featured in the National Journal

Alex-Schwartz1-e1399649858552In this article, highlighted by the National Journal, Schwartz discusses how last month homeowners’ equity reached the highest level since the recession began but still, about 9.8 million homes are still “underwater,” — that is, households “owe more on their mortgages that their homes are worth,” which is a reported 6.28 million, according to a recent report from the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society at the University of California (Berkeley). The report’s authors analyzed home-equity data from Zillow, an online real-estate database, and demographic data from the Census Bureau to find out how many homes per ZIP code are still underwater and who owns them. They found that neighborhoods in which more than 40 percent of homeowners have negative equity tend to have two things in common: a median household income below the national average and a disproportionate share of African-American and Latino residents.

In the article, Schwartz and his co-authors begin to analyze negative equity and foreclosure data together with race and income data, at the ZIP code level, the city level, and the metropolitan area level.  The report shows that if we were to look at the neighborhood level, a significant number of communities across the country still face very high underwater rates. The report also shows that the legacy of predatory lending has resulted in a disproportionately negative impact on African American and Latino communities.

 

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