The Distribution and Social Impact of Mortgage Foreclosures in the United States

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SES-0937219Andrew A. BeveridgeElena VesselinovCUNY Queens College"This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5)."This project focuses on understanding the impact of foreclosures on neighborhoods in the United States. We address two sets of research questions: 1) Which neighborhoods, communities, and metropolitan areas have been hit hardest by the foreclosure crisis? and 2) How does neighborhood racial, ethnic and economic composition affect the impact of foreclosures? Three theoretical models will help us interpret the results of our research: the place stratification model; the spatial assimilation model; and the ethnic community model. The expectations based on the place stratification model are that the neighborhoods of African Americans, as well as other minorities who are darker complexioned, including some Latinos, immigrants from the Caribbean and some from South Asia, will be hit the hardest by the foreclosure crisis. Following the spatial assimilation model, we expect that the neighborhoods of minorities of higher socio-economic status will be as affected as neighborhoods of whites of similar socio-economic status. Finally, the ethnic community model posits that the neighborhoods of better off minorities will be less affected than the neighborhoods of comparable whites.The project is based on a unique dataset constructed for our specific aims, with georeferenced information for all foreclosures in the United States, which will define the foreclosure patterns. To analyze them we are combining the foreclosure information with data from the 2000 Census, as well as data from the 2005 through 2008 American Community Surveys, and data from the 2000 through 2008 Home Mortgage Disclosure Act filings. The significance and the broader impact of this project are two-fold. First, we will be able to determine and examine the social characteristics of neighborhoods that have been hardest hit by the foreclosure crisis throughout the United States. Second, we will make the foreclosure maps and some of the foreclosure data available to the public through Social Explorer (www.socialexplorer.com), a popular demographics website through which visitors made more than 2.8 million maps and over 250,000 reports in the last year.