GE to Pay $1.5 Billion U.S. Fine overSubprime Mortgage Fraud.

April 12, 2019. General Electric Co will pay a $1.5 billion civil fine to resolve the US Department of Justice (DOJ) examination of defective subprime mortgages from its former WMC Mortgage unit before the 2008 global financial crisis. DOJ said the agreement resolves claims that GE concealed the poor quality of the loans and WMC’s lax fraud controls when packaging the loans into residential mortgage-backed securities that it then sold to misled investors. WMC was purchased by GE’s finance unit, General Electric Capital Corp, in 2004, and issued over $65 billion of mortgage loans in the next three years. DOJ said WMC overstated the quality of a majority of loans it packaged into residential mortgage-backed securities, and its fraudulent practices resulted in billions of dollars of investor losses. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ge-settlement/ge-to-pay-1-5-billion-u-s-fine-over-crisis-era-subprime-mortgages-idUSKCN1RO233.

RECENT FAIR HOUSING NEWS

Same-Sex Couples 73% More Likely to be Denied Mortgage. The just-published analysis of 2009-2015 national mortgage date compared same-sex couples' experiences to that of heterosexual couples with the same financial worthiness, according to an analysis of national mortgage data from 1990 to 2015. The researchers say their findings signal a need to include sexual orientation as a protected class under federal lending laws. 

Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study also found that when same-sex couples were approved for a home loan, they were given inferior terms. They paid an average of 0.2% more in interest and fees, which totals annually up to as much as $86 million. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/04/17/same-sex-couples-applying-mortgage-face-higher-rejection-worse-rates-study-finds/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.c072a491e8cb.

State Farm Agrees to Pay $250 Million, Avoids Racketeering Trial. The payment is to customers who claimed the company tried to rig the Illinois justice system to wipe out a $1 billion jury verdict from 19 years ago. The largest U.S. auto insurer apparently led an effort to get a judge friendly to its cause for the Illinois Supreme Court, secretly funding Judge Lloyd Karmeier’s 2004 election campaign by giving money through advocacy groups that were not required to disclose donors. Under the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, any damages would have been tripled. A judge granted preliminary approval to the accord and set a final fairness hearing for December. https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/national/2018/09/04/500127.htm.

IN THE LATEST FAIR HOUSING NEWS:

Providence, RI Considers Banning Landlords Who Refuse Section 8 Vouchers. Read the March 21, 2019 WPRI.com article.

New Study Finds that Residents of  Historically Redlined Neighborhoods are Over Twice as Likely to go to the Emergency Room (ER) for Asthma. People of color are far more likely to breathe polluted air. Read the May 23, 2019 Citylab article.

Pattern Reversed in Diversifying Neighborhoods: The Decline in Racially Segregated Neighborhoods Between 2000-2017 is Caused by Whites Moving into Minority Areas. Read the April 27, 2019 New York Times article. Read the May 1, 2019 New York Times analysis article.

New Report Discovers that America's Most Polluting Incinerators Disproportionately Affect Low-Income Neighborhoods and Communities of Color. Read the report. Read the May 21, 2019 London Guardian article. Read the May 21, 2019 Pacific Standard article.

Multiple Complaints of Racial Discrimination in Harford County. . Read the April 1, 2019 Atlanta Black Star article. Read the June 1, 2019 Baltimore Sun article.

Study by the Poverty & Race Research Action Council (PRRAC) Finds that “Immigrant Integration” – New Immigrants Inclusion in American Society – is Endangered by their Housing and School Segregation. Immigrant Integration and Immigrant Segregation. Read the April 2019 PRRAC report.

Fewer Homeless Veterans Using Shelters, Study Finds

A Quarter of Homeless are Veterans

Among the various findings in a just-released government report entitled "Veteran Homelessness: A Supplemental Report to the 2010 Annual Homeless Assessment Report to Congress" by the U. S. Department of Housing & Urban Development (HUD) and the Department of Veteran Affairs, as reported in the New York Times - are:

• Homeless veterans are most likely to be middle-aged white men with a disability.
• Younger veterans are more than twice as likely to be homeless than non-Veterans in the same age group.
• California has the most homeless veterans of any state, about 25% of the total.
• The number of veterans who used emergency shelters or transitional housing for the homeless in 2010 dropped 3% from the year before, to 144,842, from 149,465.
• Veterans continue to be overrepresented in the nation’s homeless population. They are 13% of all homeless adults in shelters, although just over 9% of the total adult population. Once veterans fall into poverty, a higher percentage of them become homeless, about one in nine.

Baltimore's Role in Civil Rights History Discussed in New Book

Review of Book about Baltimore's Civil Rights History

Amy Nathan's just-published Round and Round Together: Taking a Merry-Go-Round Ride into the Civil Rights Movement (The Nautilus Series) (Paul Dry Books, 2011).

This book is, according to Kirkus Reviews, "A snapshot of the civil-rights movement in one city provides insight into the important role of individual communities as change moved through the country... a case study of how citizens of one city both precipitated and responded to the whirlwind of social change around them." 

The city is Baltimore, and the book entertainingly chronicles the integration battles at Gwynn Oak, Kresge's, etc. Jacques Kelly has a very interesting article on this in The Baltimore Sun. You can read it here. If you want to buy the book, Amazon has it, among many others.

"A Nation Under Our Feet" Highlights Black Political Struggles

Book Review of A Nation Under Our Feet 

Have you ever read this one? A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration by Steven Hahn (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2005) won the Pulitzer Prize in history when it was published, and deservedly so. It chronicles the various, long, difficult struggles for political, social, and economic equality for blacks in the rural South. One interesting finding is that slave associations (kinship, work, religion) were very strong, and plantation life was the beginning of black political movement. Recommended.

Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth Passes

FRED SHUTTLESWORTH, CIVIL RIGHTS LEADER, PASSES
Shuttlesworth, one of the leaders of the civil rights movement, has passed at 89. Shuttlesworth is one of the figures in the International Civil Rights Walk of Fame at the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site in Atlanta. King once called Shuttlesworth "the most courageous civil rights fighter in the South." Shuttlesworth organized two weeks of daily demonstrations by black children, students, clergymen, and others against segregated Alabama. After much struggle, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were passed, after the historic Alabama marches that year from Selma to Montgomery, which Mr. Shuttlesworth also helped organize. Read the October 5, 2011 New York Times article.

New Approach to Getting Homeless Off the Streets Is Working

At the Safe Havens in New York City, which started in 2007, nonprofit groups help homeless adults find permanent homes with adjacent social services. The City said it had been able to lure them off the streets by opening smaller and more welcoming shelters, averaging 40 beds. The City's Department of Homeless Services has also contracted with one nonprofit group in each borough to scour the streets around the clock, seven days a week, and persuade homeless people to move inside. The number of single, homeless people in the borough has fallen 80% since 2005, according to a City estimate. Read the October 17, 2011 New York Times article.