Segregation and the Foreclosure Crisis
The rapid growth of subprime lending and rise of foreclosures were key features of the 2008 Great Recession, severely impacting the economy and affecting millions of homeowners. The housing crisis disproportionately impacted minority households and communities of color. These projects uncover how segregation played a significant role in driving these disparities. One project utilizes spatial measures of residential segregation and geocoded mortgage data to demonstrate how segregation shaped the geography of subprime lending across the 100 largest metropolitan areas in the US. The findings demonstrate that segregation played a pivotal role in the housing crisis by creating relatively larger areas of concentrated minorities into which subprime loans could be efficiently and effectively channeled. The second study examines foreclosure records and subsequent transactions, tax exemption filings, and maintenance data in Boston, Massachusetts to show how the foreclosure crisis unfolded differently across hard‐hit neighborhoods. The rise of corporate owners in Black neighborhoods relative to other hard-hit neighborhoods and the tendency of these owners to resell previously foreclosed properties to other investors and have reported maintenance issues against them explain the longer recovery in Black neighborhoods and how the housing crisis exacerbated neighborhood inequality by race.
Publications & Data
Academic Publications
Hwang, Jackelyn. 2019. “Racialized Recovery: Postforeclosure Pathways in Boston Neighborhoods.” City & Community, 18(4): 1287-313. [Preprint]
Hwang, Jackelyn, Michael Hankinson, and Kreg Steven Brown. 2015. “Racial and Spatial Targeting: Segregation and Subprime Lending within and across Metropolitan Areas.” Social Forces, 93(3): 1081-1108. [Preprint, Replication data].
Public Engagement
Hwang, Jackelyn, Michael Hankinson, and Kreg Steven Brown. (2016 June 14). “When it comes to subprime lending, both race and space matter.” Work in Progress Blog. American Sociological Association.
Hwang, Jackelyn. (2015 February 25). “Not All Hard-Hit Neighborhoods Recovery Equally.” Housing Perspectives Blog. Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies.
Selected Media Coverage: STANFORD magazine, Joint Center for Housing Studies
In an effort to make our findings accessible, where possible, we provide a link to preprint versions of our publications. We are also steadily assembling our data and code to share publicly when possible.