Turn the corner on 145th Street in Jamaica, Queens, and it is as though a cyclone has wheeled through.
One resident, Lakisha Brown, a hospital worker and mother of two, snatched her house back from foreclosure last month, if only temporarily. “We need to sell fast,” she says. “I’m just trying to save what’s left of my credit.” Across the street in this black middle-class neighborhood, Patrick Nicholas, a surgical technician in blue scrubs, shakes his dreadlocks and shrugs. He rents but is moving out. “The owner got foreclosed and told us to leave,” he says.
Six doors away, past two foreclosed and boarded-up homes, a burly man in a blue union jacket declines to give his name but his problem is evident. A foreclosure notice is pasted to the door of his house. His tone is mournful. “Tough times, man,” he says. “Tough, tough times.”
Late to arrive in the Northeast, the foreclosure crisis has swept through the New York region at an explosive pace in the past two years, destroying billions of dollars in housing wealth, according to a New York Times analysis of foreclosures filed since 2005 and federal mortgage data.
It now touches every corner of the region, from estates along the Connecticut Gold Coast to the suburban tracts of Long Island, where 6 percent of all mortgages are at least 90 days delinquent, the point at which foreclosure proceedings usually begin.
But the storm has fallen with a special ferocity on black and Latino homeowners, the analysis shows. Defaults occur three times as often in mostly minority census tracts as in mostly white ones. Eighty-five percent of the worst-hit neighborhoods — where the default rate is at least double the regional average — have a majority of black and Latino homeowners.
And the hardest blows rain down on the backbone of minority neighborhoods: the black middle class. In New York City, for example, black households making more than $68,000 a year are almost five times as likely to hold high-interest subprime mortgages as are whites of similar — or even lower — incomes.
This holds a special poignancy. Just four or five years ago, black homeownership was rising sharply, after decades in which discriminatory lending and zoning practices discouraged many blacks from buying. Now, as damage ripples outward, black families in foreclosure lose savings and credit, neighbors see the value of their homes decline, and renters are evicted.
That pattern plays out across the nation. A study released this week by the Pew Research Center also shows foreclosure taking the heaviest toll on counties that have black and Latino majorities, with the New York region among the badly hit.
On 145th Street in southeast Queens, just south of Linden Boulevard, attached brick homes with tidy, fenced-in gardens stretch into the distance. Children play tag under blooming oaks. But 8 of these roughly 50 homes face foreclosure; 4 are vacant; 2 have plywood boards nailed over punched-out windows.
“My district feels like ground zero,” said City Councilman James Sanders Jr., an African-American who represents hundreds of blocks in Queens like this one. “In military terms, we are being pillaged.”
Years ago many banks drew red lines on maps around black neighborhoods and refused to lend; more recently, some banks began taking aim at those neighborhoods for the marketing of subprime loans, say consumer advocates.
Black buyers often enter a separate lending universe: A dozen banks and mortgage companies, almost all of which turned big profits making subprime loans, accounted for half the loans given to the region’s black middle-income borrowers in 2005 and 2006, according to The Times’s analysis. The N.A.A.C.P. has filed a class-action suit against many of the nation’s largest banks, charging that such lending practices amount to reverse redlining.
“This was not only a problem of regulation on the mortgage front, but also a targeted scourge on minority communities,” said Shaun Donovan, the secretary of Housing and Urban Development, in a speech this year at New York University. Roughly 33 percent of the subprime mortgages given out in New York City in 2007, Mr. Donovan said, went to borrowers with credit scores that should have qualified them for conventional prevailing-rate loans.
For anyone taking out a $350,000 mortgage, a difference of three percentage points — a typical spread between conventional and subprime loans — tacks on $272,000 in additional interest over the life of a 30-year loan.
