Racialized Recovery: Postforeclosure Pathways in Boston Neighborhoods

Abstract

Following the Great Recession, homeownership rates declined precipitously, raising concerns for the stability and well–being of neighborhoods. While many studies document shifts in household constraints, this article draws from foreclosure records from 2006 to 2011, subsequent transactions, tax exemption filings, and maintenance data in Boston, Massachusetts to show how the foreclosure crisis altered the landscape of ownership and unfolded differentially across hard–hit neighborhoods. Results from logistic regression analyses show that corporate investors were more likely to purchase foreclosures in predominantly black hard–hit neighborhoods, while owner–occupants were more likely to purchase foreclosures in hard–hit mixed–ethnoracial neighborhoods with substantial shares of non–Hispanic/Latinx whites. Relative to other foreclosure buyers, corporations were more likely to resell previously foreclosed properties to other investors and have reported maintenance issues against them. The findings have implications for further disadvantages for hard–hit black neighborhoods and highlight how the housing crisis exacerbated neighborhood inequality by race and ethnicity.

The three tenures: A case of property maintenance

“…They attribute the discrepancy partly to maintenance differences (Ihlanfeldt and Mayock, 2016: 292). More direct evidence is presented by Hwang (2019). In Boston’s hardest-hit neighbourhoods she found the incidence of maintenance problems at time of purchase was lower for owner-occupiers than for absentee investors, a difference that remained after two years.…”

‘It feels like money’s just flying out the window’: financial security, stress and health in gentrifying neighborhoods

“…A key cause of this disparity is decades of discriminatory housing and lending policies and practices at the federal, state and local levels that have inhibited people of color, and Black people in particular, from owning homes and accumulating intergenerational wealth, and leaving Boston as one of the most racially segregated cities in the country (Muñoz et al 2015). During the 2008 housing market crash, foreclosures in Boston were heavily concentrated in inner core areas with high proportions of Black and Latinx residents like Roxbury, Dorchester and Mattapan (Hwang 2019). Recent eviction filings have also been disproportionately concentrated in Boston's communities of color (Robinson and Steil 2020).…”

Is Housing Diversity Good for Community Stability? Evidence from the Housing Crisis

“…We first estimated two ordinary least squares (OLS) models for the two dependent variables of the foreclosure and sales rates, respectively. Model specifications and other control variables were based on theorized relationships and those found significant in the existing literature (Pedersen and Delgadillo 2007; Anacker, Carr, and Pradhan 2012; Pfeiffer and Molina 2013; Hwang 2015; Raymond, Wang, and Immergluck 2016). The outcomes of these results are listed in the first two columns of Tables 4 and 5, respectively.…”