The 2010 Hunger Report

The subprime mortgage market is an egregious example of the impact of social and economic inequalities in the United States. To a startling extent, it was government policy that made it possible.  Federal regulations essentially sanctioned the bifurcation of the credit market into a regulated prime market for people with assets and an unregulated subprime market mainly for low-income borrowers. In the subprime market, predatory lending was able to flourish; traps in the fine print like the one Carol Mackey encountered were just part of the deal. Those consigned to the subprime market either played by these rules or lived without access to credit.

In the early 1940s, the Miami City Planning Board established “a permanent dividing wall between white and colored occupancy in the north of Grand Avenue.” For the next two decades, well after the Supreme Court ruling that struck down “separate but equal” laws, the wall continued to separate the majority black West Grove from the rest of Coconut Grove. Parts of the wall remain in place today as an indelible marker of what West Grove once stood for. In the 1990s, blatant racism reared its head again in the guise of subprime lending.