The Buffalo News, July 24, 2019: ‘American dream’ still comes in black and white
More than 50 years after the federal Fair Housing Act took aim at discrimination in the housing market, and four decades after the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act did the same by shining a light on lending practices, blacks are still twice as likely as whites to be denied a mortgage, according to a new national study.
And Buffalo Niagara is no exception, according to the analysis by Clever Real Estate, a St. Louis-based online agency that pairs sellers with agents at discounted prices.
Clever used federal data to examine approval and denial rates for some 1.7 million home mortgage applicants across the 50 states.
The study’s bottom line: African American applicants are twice as likely to be denied mortgages as white applicants, even when controlling for income, according to Clever’s  “Exploring Racial Discrimination in Mortgage Lending: A Call for Greater Transparency.”
Clever found that 19% of African Americans were denied mortgages, compared to only 9% of whites.
