I’d have to go with the latter based on The Charlotte Observer’s atrocious, sprawling series on race and lending of the past few days. Thames intones that, “Today we learn that to be black in America is to be much more likely to pay a higher interest rate for a home purchase loan.”
Well, no, Rick we have not, no matter how much you’d like to think so in pursuit of whatever journalistic prize the series is designed to win. The series shows that — shock — the better your credit history, the lower the interest rate lenders will offer you. It is a bullet point right there in the gotcha story: “Blacks on average have less wealth and more credit problems.” Lenders want more reward for more risk. Next?
Further, contrary to the Observer’s assumptions, income level is not the same thing as credit worthiness. It could very well be the case that a borrower with a lower income and a better credit history is more attractive to lenders that borrower with a higher income and a more spotty credit history. And even borrowers with identical incomes could look very different to lenders based on differences in credit histories. Make one of these borrowers white and one black, and boom, “proof” of racial bias. That would be wrong, of course.
Let me put this in concrete terms as the Observer evidently has trouble with abstractions. A couple years ago, my wife and I resolved to redo our kitchen, an expensive proposition for anyone. We had some cash put away for the task, but we discovered that Home Depot was offering a promotion whereby they’d toss in a free sink and some other stuff if you used their credit card to buy the stuff. As long as you paid everything off in six months, no interest charge or fees applied. This was obviously a good short-term deal for us. Free stuff and a six-month float on a large budget item. But it came with a catch.
Applying for and securing the Home Depot credit line meant that our credit score would take a hit. We were, after all, essentially adding thousands of dollars to the credit obligations that we could, in theory, be responsible for far into the future. Future lenders would have to consider that additional potential obligation as they gauged our credit worthiness, indeed to do otherwise would be irresponsible lending. Now would knocking a few points off of our credit score be related to race in anyway? No. Would it be related to race if we were black? Rick Thames thinks so.
And there are other huge problems with the series, only one of which I’ll bother with now, and that is the portrayal of a local black mortgage broker as some sort of race traitor for finding higher interest loans for black customers. Were this the UK I’d advise Fred Warren to sue the Observer. Instead, Warren quite correctly asks the paper’s erstwhile interrogators: “Which is worse trying to make a loan so a family can become homeowners, even if it is a little higher rate, or shutting them out?”
Fred Warren is working hard trying to keep Charlotte a great place to live. Can’t say the same about the local Knight Ridder outpost.