Real Estate Boom and Bust Hit Minorities the Hardest

"African Americans and Hispanics are still feeling the pain of the housing bust, and they’re feeling it more acutely than white Americans, even all these years later," reports Dina ElBoghdady.

That news comes from a series of interactive maps created by the Urban Institute to "show the distribution of 100 million mortgages originated from 2001 through 2012, broken down by race and ethnicity."

"The maps chronicle what many researchers have already said: Loans to Hispanics and African Americans 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." 

The article goes on to take a closer look at the trend in several major metropolitan areas (namely, San Francisco, Detroit, Miami, and Washington D.C.).