REVEALED: Black homebuyers are 80% more likely to get rejected for mortgages than whites because of secret bias hidden in loan-approval algorithms
That means that 91% of Black applicants are approved for loans while 95% of White applicants are approved.
Alternate headline
White homebuyers are only 4% more likely to be approved for mortgages than Black buyers because loan-approval algorithms are more color-blind than historic methods
But that wouldn't sell many newspapers, would it?
We are being manipulated. Outrage is being generated because the rage-reaction shuts off logical thinking.
To the credit of the Daily Mail, they stopped putting this article on their main page shortly after I saw it.
As someone who used to do a lot of home loans, I can tell that is a load of crap. People who get rejected are always people with some sort of issue, most often poor credit or insufficient income. In general the person taking the loan application has no control over the outcome which is handled by an underwriter who never sees the applicant.
ReplyDeleteI agree.
DeleteThe author of the piece does back-flips trying to make the case that people who are heavy users of pay-day loans will suddenly have income and discipline to make house payments.
Critical thinking is absent from this piece.
In my experience, the algorithm is +99% of the decision, as long as all the numbers add up and there aren't any "red flags" in the applicants package, the underwriter will approve.
ReplyDeleteIf there are one or two oddities in the package, like a "consumer loan" on the credit report (for example rent-to-own falls into this category, but so does buying a tractor on installments), only then does the underwriter get to make a judgement call.
Would be nice if the big banks grow a spine when the CRT crowd starts pressuring underwriting to produce "equitable outcomes" despite the algorithms highlighting clear indications that some applicants are much riskier than others.
Nah, who am I kidding? Here comes housing bubble 2.0...