An Interactive View of the Housing Boom and Bust

The Urban Institute created a series of maps to show the distribution of 100 million mortgages originated from 2001 through 2012 in cities across the US, broken down by race and ethnicity. The maps chronicle what many researchers have already said: Loans to Hispanic and African American residents shot up dramatically when the housing market was red hot and credit came easy, in part because minorities were targeted by predatory lenders. When the housing market unraveled, these groups were positioned to be hit hardest by foreclosures, and they were.