discredited_august2014_cowan Data from all regulated financial institutions shows the impact of the Great Recession on the availability of credit. Lending to businesses declined by 4.8 percent nationally between 2008 and 2011. The dollar volume of small loans to businesses...
overdraft.pdf Four organizations—California Reinvestment Coalition of Oakland, CA; New Economy Project of New York, NY; Reinvestment Partners of Durham, NC; and Woodstock Institute of Chicago, IL—conducted 64 mystery shopping visits at 39 bank branches in Chicago, Durham, New York...
The report defines a zombie property as a property for which a foreclosure case has been filed but not resolved for more than three years. Because neither the borrower nor the servicer has clear control of the property, neither...
decipheringblight_buitrago_june2013.pdf The report also makes several recommendations on data collection practices that would allow municipalities to better understand the scope of the vacant buildings problem in their communities, inform strategies for property redevelopment and reuse, and keep track of...
The Case for Banning Payday Lending – June 2013.pdf A key move in the industry’s playbook is to convince states that the best way to address predatory payday lending is to regulate the industry. But regulations in states that authorize payday...
Female mortgage applicants are less likely to have their loans originated than are male mortgage applicants, Woodstock Institute finds in a new fact sheet.
Continue reading New research finds disparities in mortgage lending to women
Unequal Opportunity Fact Sheet, March 2013 Using available Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) data and controlling for loan-to-income ratios, we find significant disparities in access by women across racial and ethnic groups to mortgages for purchasing and refinancing their...
Coming Up Short: The Scope of Retirement Insecurity Among Illinois Workers By Spencer Cowan, September 2012 The negative impact of the lack of adequate retirement savings will fall not only on the individual workers involved; it will also have adverse impacts...
The report analyzes 2010 HMDA data on home purchase and refinance lending by loan type in seven metropolitan areas: Boston, Charlotte, Chicago, Cleveland, Los Angeles, New York City, and Rochester, NY. The report concludes with recommendations to promote fair...
stayingafloat_march2012_cowanbuitrago_0.pdf It finds that negative equity is disproportionately concentrated in the Chicago region’s African American, Latino, and majority minority neighborhoods, and that borrowers in communities of color have much lower equity than do borrowers in predominantly white communities....