“How the Housing Crisis Left Us More Racially Segregated”
9th May 2015
Steve Sailer fisks the Washington Post — granted, not a difficult task.
Racial segregation between blacks and whites in the U.S. has been declining for decades, but very gradually, and in some places less so than others. The recent uptick in segregation that Hall, Crowder and Spring measured is small but still significant. It was also particularly large in Western cities heavily hit by the housing bubble like Las Vegas and Sacramento.
Alternatively, you could say that the Housing Bubble that preceded the Housing Bust artificially increased integration by giving more mortgages to minorities, as President Bush had insisted at his 10/15/2002 White House Conference on Increasing Minority Homeownership. There, Bush demanded 5.5 million additional minority homeowners by 2010, and he told his federal regulators (as well as financial and real estate industry leaders) that the way to get to this higher level of racial equality was to stop being so persnickety about traditional credit standards, such as down payments and documentation.
Unfortunately, it turned out that the old-fashioned ideas about credit risks were more realistic about who could afford to pay back mortgages than Bush’s notion that outdated redlining prejudices were the cause of the racial Housing Gap.
Those who think that George W Bush was a conservative need to take a look at his record, not the contrast with more-Leftists Democrats.