I'm guest-blogging at Credit Slips this week about our new bankruptcy report, consumer debt, and more. Below is an excerpt from one of these posts.

Woodstock Institute recently released a report called Paying More for the American Dream V: The Persistence and Evolution of the Dual Mortgage Market in collaboration with six other research and advocacy organizations from around the country.  The report is the fifth in an annual series that looks at systematic inequalities in the housing finance system and their impact on lower-income neighborhoods and communities of color.  I pulled data used in this report to create the chart below.  To me, this chart, more than perhaps any other data visualization I’ve seen, illustrates the different directions in which America’s white communities and its communities of color are headed.

The chart uses data reported under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act and looks at the change in conventional mortgage refinance originations in the Chicago region between 2008 and 2009 (the most recent year for which data is available).  It breaks these changes out by the race and ethnic composition of the census tract in which the loan was originated.  The chart shows that in predominantly white communities (those less than 10 percent minority), conventional refinance originations more than doubled between 2008 and 2009.  It also shows that in communities of color (those greater than 80 percent minority) conventional refinance originations declined by 41 percent over the same period of time.

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