Minority borrowing hits 14-year low

Blacks and Hispanics are smaller portion of the market than they were in 2000

Julian Castro, the secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development
Julian Castro, the secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development

The share of mortgages lent to minority borrowers has fallen to at least a 14-year low, according to federal data.

Minority borrowers’ share of the mortgage market has been shrinking ever since the collapse of subprime lending, and they continued to lose ground to white borrowers through 2013, according to Bloomberg News.

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Minorities tend to have both less savings and lower credit scores than whites, and advocates say that they have been hit hardest by tight-fisted lending policies. And those fair-lending advocates and civil-rights groups are now urging the government to change how creditworthiness is determined to give blacks and Hispanics a better shot at buying a home.

“These numbers are a wake-up call that the housing market is a major driver of the economy and it can’t be a vibrant market when so many new households are excluded from it,” Jim Carr, a former Fannie Mae executive who is now a scholar at the Opportunity Agenda, a New York-based organization that works on racial equity issues, told Bloomber News. [Bloomberg News]Christopher Cameron