African Americans Among First Victims Of Subprime Meltdown

"In a sign of the spreading economic fallout of mortgage foreclosures, several suburbs of Cleveland, one of the nation's hardest-hit cities, are spending millions of dollars to maintain vacant houses as they try to contain blight and real-estate panic.

Foreclosures in Cleveland's inner ring of suburbs, while still low compared with those in Cleveland itself, have climbed sharply, especially in lower-income neighborhoods that border the city. Hundreds of houses are vacant because they are caught in legal limbo, have been abandoned by distant banks or the owners cannot find buyers.

At greatest risk in Cleveland's suburbs are the low- and moderate-income neighborhoods where subprime lending has soared. The practice involves lenders issuing mortgages at high interest rates for people with lower incomes or poor credit ratings, usually involving adjustable rates and sometimes no down payment and no investigation of the borrower's circumstances.

'What makes the subprime mortgages so devastating from a community perspective is that they're so concentrated geographically,' said Dan Immergluck, a professor of city planning at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

In a report for Shaker Heights, Mark Duda and William C. Apgar of Harvard University found that expensive refinancing deals had been aggressively 'push-marketed' in the city's less affluent west and south sides, bordering Cleveland. They said that 'the rising number of foreclosures threatens to undermine the stability' of those areas.

'The moral outrage,' Ms. Rawson, the mayor, said, 'is that subprime lenders have targeted our seniors and African-Americans, people who saved all their lives to get a step up.'"