UPDATE: "The High Cost of Subprime Lending"

UPDATE: Our report on subprime lending was covered on King 5 yesterday. Click here to watch.

Today, the Budget & Policy Center is releasing a new report on the "High Cost of Subprime Lending in Washington State." We will be blogging on the topic throughout the week. You can read the entire report by clicking here.

In Washington State in 2006, African-American and Hispanic homeowners were most likely to pay a higher premium for their mortgage than whites or Asians.*

The effect on household finances of having a high-cost mortgage can be significant. The cost of a $230,000 mortgage can easily be $600 higher per month, or over $200,000 over the course of a 30-year loan. In the middle of the current housing crisis, having a high-cost mortgage also suggests a higher likelihood of foreclosure.

The graph below shows the share of mortgages that were high-cost in 2006 by the race/ethnicity of the borrower. The differences were stark. Over 40 percent of the mortgages lent to African Americans and Hispanics were high-cost, compared to around 22 percent for non-Hispanic whites and Asians.

It is unlikely that factors such as credit scores, debt-to-income ratios, and loan-to-value ratios can explain a gap of this magnitude. The blue bars show the high-cost mortgage rate for households with high incomes. Even among borrowers whose incomes were twice the area median, 39 percent of African-Americans and 37 percent of Hispanics had high-cost loans.

The difference in loan pricing suggest that the impact of further deterioration in the housing market will likely fall disproportionately on African Americans and Hispanics.

*The federal Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) classifies mortgage as “high-cost” based on the loan’s annual percentage rate (APR). The APR is a better measure of the total cost than the contract interest rate alone because it includes points, fees, and other finance charges. Mortgages with APRs above designated thresholds are defined as “high-cost.”