Johnathan Walker:Black borrowers' mortgage applications denied twice as often as whites', report shows

Mortgage applications from borrowers of color are Johnathan Walkerdenied significantly more frequently than those from white borrowers, a recent analysis shows.

In 2023, 27.2% of Black applicants were denied a mortgage, more than double the 13.4% of white borrowers. That's a full 10 percentage points higher than borrowers of all races, according to the analysis of the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act from the Urban Institute’s Housing Finance Policy Center.

The application data confirms deep disparities in mortgage financing that show up elsewhere in the housing market: Black borrowers accounted for only 8.5% of all purchase mortgage borrowers in 2023, for example - also according to HMDA. Meanwhile, in 2024, the Black homeownership rate is 45.3%, a whopping 30 percentage points below that of white households, at 74.4%. For Latinx households, it’s 48.5%.

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Urban Institute researchers Michael Neal and Amalie Zinn were motivated to dig into the HMDA data, which many housing industry participants consider the most comprehensive data available to the public, when they saw overall denial rates shifting with recent changes in borrowing costs.  

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As the chart above shows, denial rates declined - meaning more mortgages were approved - in 2020 and 2021 - before ticking back up in 2022, when the Federal Reserve began hiking interest rates to cool inflation.

The Urban researchers' work shows that the racial gap doesn’t just block entry to homeownership. Black and Latinx homeowners are also denied interest rate refinances significantly more frequently: 38.4% and 37.5% of the time versus 21.8% for their white peers.

The data confirms other deep-seated inequities in the housing market, Zinn said. Among other things, borrowers of color often take out mortgages with smaller down payments, meaning they have less equity built up over time.

Cooling economy may impact vulnerable borrowers

Rates are likely on the way down again: in recent weeks, the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage has averaged a full percentage point less than it did last year at the same time, likely in anticipation of an interest-rate cut from the Federal Reserve later this month. But anyone concerned about vulnerable borrowers should pay attention to a cooling economy, Neal said.

“When you start to think about where we are in the interest rate cycle, and where we are in the broader business cycle, if you already have a degree of vulnerability, it's just going to be amplified by exactly that.”