has announced their final concert which will coincide with a new documentary.
In a recent interview with Rock the Bells, Darryl “DMC” McDaniels revealed the iconic group will be closing the curtain on live performances with their last ever show at New York’s Madison Square Garden this spring.
“Run-DMC is over,” he said. “The only way Run-DMC gets back together is if The Beatles get back together. Can that happen?”
“The final show that we are ever going to do is going to be at Madison Square Garden in April,” DMC continued. “It’s going to be the last episode of the documentary we’re doing. Run-DMC’s last show ever. ‘Cause it’s time for Run to go be Paul McCartney and me to be John Lennon. We done did what we could do.”
DMC went onto tease appearances from fellow luminaries like Ice-T and the Wu-Tang Clan during the homecoming concert.
“The show is going to be like The Last Waltz by The Band,” he added. “We’re doing that movie idea. You’ll see Ice-T come and do a song with us. You’ll see Wu-Tang come do a song with us. Anybody can buy a ticket to the show.”
As for the documentary, DMC compared the upcoming project to Dr.Dre and Jimmy Iovine’s 2017 HBO docuseries The Defiant Ones and revealed plans to release it through Netflix — or the highest bidder — for a handsome fee.
“We’re gonna do it with Netflix or to the highest bidder,” he said. “It’s going to be a live production. Run-DMC’s doing The Last Waltz at Madison Square Garden. Who wants to pay $100 million to own it?”
Known for hits like “It’s Tricky” and “It’s Like That,” Run-DMC — comprised of Joseph “Rev Run” Simmons, Darryl “DMC” McDaniels and the late Jason “Jam Master Jay” Mizell — first hit the scene in 1983 with the release of their self-titled album.
Increasing their audience base by tapping into rock music, matched with iconic style, the “new school” rappers quickly reached superstardom. In 2016, the trio were honored with a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, solidifying their mark on Hip Hop culture.
related news
On October 30, 2002, Jam Master Jay was killed at his Queens, Jamaica recording studio over an alleged botched cocaine deal. Last year, a judge denied a motion for the charges against the two suspects- Karl Jordan Jr. and Ronald Tinard Washington to be dropped after they alleged foul play.
Jordan’s lawyers had accused federal prosecutors of deliberately waiting 12 years to charge the suspects in order to “hamstring the defense,” but their argument was rejected in court.
“The indictment is devoid of any facts underlying the charges, let alone any allegations connecting the 2002 murder with the 2016 conspiracy,” U.S. District Judge LaShann DeArcy Hall said in a 17-page ruling, adding that “differences between the alleged conspiracies are apparent.”
Hall also disputed the notion that trying Jordan and Washington together would prejudice a jury.
On Saturday (January 21), the self-proclaimed Kings of Hip Hop took to Twitter to honor their late friend and group member on what would’ve been his 58th birthday.
“A contriver of style, flare and all things cool. The band, the sound, the glue,” their tweet read. “Happy birthday to our brother Jason ‘Jam Master Jay’ Mizell! #ripjmj #yojay ‘THE BEST DJ IN THE US OF A!!’”
MC Lyte‘s divorce from John Wyche has officially been finalized, and the rapper will keep her music catalog thanks to a prenup.
The Blast got hold of the official divorce documents. Along with her catalog and “other creative property, including royalties in connection to her creative works,” Lyte will keep everything she went into the marriage with.
“MC Lyte keeps her clothing, jewelry, watches, and personal effects in her possession, custody, or control, and earnings and accumulations before the date of marriage, during the marriage, and post-separation, her Subaru, financial accounts in her name, all furniture, furnishings, and other personal property in her possession, custody, or control,” the docs read. “She also gets to keep her term life insurance policy.”
Each party is also waiving their right to spousal support.
Lyte married Wyche, a Marine Corps Veteran and entrepreneur, in August 2017. The pair split five months later in January 2018, citing “irreconcilable differences.”
“Irreconcilable differences have arisen between the parties, which have led to the irremediable breakdown of the marriage, making it impossible for the parties to live together as husband and wife,” the docs state.
The two met at the beginning of 2016 on Match.com when Lyte sent Wyche a message.
“A few months into getting to know Lana I knew I wanted this woman as my wife,” Wyche told Essence at their wedding – which Essence said was “intimate and soulful.”
Aside from a pending divorce, MC Lyte has been busy with other endeavors. The multi-hyphenate has been back in front of the camera for a sitcom called Partners In Rhyme, which just wrapped its second season in October.
Executive produced by Bentley Kyle White and MC Lyte, the ALLBLK original series tackles the generational gap between those who grew up during Hip Hop’s golden age and those who have only been privy to its current incarnation.
While Lyte plays a version of herself, it’s not quite autobiographical.
“The light-hearted, half-hour sitcom follows the life of rap pioneer Lana Crawford [MC Lyte]. When Lana discovers she is being dropped as an artist from her label and in massive debt, the OG rap star is propositioned into managing her niece Lucious T [Precious Way from ABC’s Queens], an up and coming Instagram rapper.”
Home Depot’s 93-year-old cofounder Bernie Marcus — who retired in 2002 — says he doesn’t want the “woke generation” leading business, arguing that they would spend money “we don’t have” on climate mitigation and wouldn’t focus on the bottom line.
Speaking on Fox Business Network’s “Varney & Co” on Thursday, Marcus — who no longer has any day-to-day involvement with the company — said: “I certainly don’t want to see the woke generation coming up, especially the leaders.”
He said that he had been following the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos “and they’re recommending spending more money on climate control when we don’t have it. We’ve already overspent. And if anything, climate control has caused most of the problems we have today.”
Marcus didn’t elaborate on what he meant. Europe’s energy crisis stemmed largely from its reliance on Russian fossil fuels.
“We need leaders who are basically thinking about the shareholders and their employees,” Marcus added. “And I think today it’s all about woke diversity, things that don’t hit the bottom line.” Marcus provided little evidence for these claims.
A 2020 report by consultancy giant McKinsey & Company actually found that companies who have more diverse leadership are more likely to report higher profitability.
Marcus, who was a major donor to Donald Trump’s 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns, also spoke about the labor market, saying that people “don’t want to work.”
“You can’t hire people,” he said. “Nobody wants to work anymore, especially office people.”
Marcus said that the reason that people didn’t want to work is that “they’re entitled, they’re given everything,” adding that government unemployment benefits were pushing people to stay at home.
“So you get this laziness … and it’s basically a socialistic society,” he said. Marcus also said that people wanted to work “three days a week,” possibly referring to the growth in demand for flexible working during the pandemic, as well as the recent push for a four-day work week.
Marcus made similar comments in an interview with the Financial Times in December.
The mantra ” nobody wants to work anymore” has gathered steam during the pandemic, with some bosses using the phrase as a scapegoat for why they’re struggling to recruit staff. Workers, in turn, say that low pay are the reason why they’ve been switching jobs and holding out for better offers.
The pandemic caused a huge change in how people think about work. Office workers realized the benefits of working remotely and with flexible hours, especially for those with caring responsibilities. Staff in low-paid, customer-facing roles like fast-food and cleaning were at a heightend risk of catching COVID. People rethought what they wanted from their careers and some used the pandemic as an opportunity to retrain for new roles.
This all caused quit rates in the US to reach record highs in 2021, though levels are slowly falling.
The civilian labor-force participation rate – the proportion of the working-age population that is employed or actively seeking work – plummeted at the start of the pandemic, data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics shows. Though it still remains below pre-pandemic levels, the participation rate has increased from a low of 60.1% in April 2021 to 62.3% in December 2022.
BLS datashows that non-farm job openings reached a record high in 11.86 million in March 2022 but have since dropped to 10.46 million in November.
“How do you have a recession when you have people that don’t want jobs?,” Marcus said during Thursday’s interview. “There are plenty of jobs out there.”
“Bernie Marcus retired from The Home Depot more than 20 years ago and does not speak on behalf of the company,” Home Depot told Insider in a statement.
NONAME has challenged Black artists to band together to effect social change by limiting the amount of access they offer to their art through white-owned platforms.
the rapper and activist shared a long message divided into four images as a slideshow on Instagram. In it, Noname started with a statement about the myriad ways in which Black art can be accessed by white consumers.
“One of the biggest mistakes i believe we’ve made in our struggle towards liberation in this country is allwoing white america unfiltered access to our entire culture,” she wrote. “White america has created an institution of violent policing and medical neglect that is killing us EVERY FUCKING DAY. and every day we get on their platforms (tik tok, twitter etc) and we create trends, music, art and language that they turn into billions.”
After pointing out that she believes social media is sometimes manipulated by law enforcement officials, Noname called out the apathetic attitude white consumers seem to have when it comes to music “about the plight of living or the struggle to make it out.”
She went on to draw comparisons between Hip Hop and the evolution of Blues, adding that both genres have a predominantly white audience.
“Do yall never think, maybe white people don’t organize to end economic/racist exploitation that black people face simply because they love consuming the art we make out of survival,” the Chicago native suggested.
Rather than a complaint filled rant, however, Noname also included what she considered could be one solution to the perceived problem before asking fans to drop their thoughts in the comment.
“As black artists making black art, we have a responsibility to our community and to our culture,” she wrote. “I understand needing to survive under capitalism but there is power in collective action! what would it look like if we all said, unless festivals, streaming, social media puts 10% of their profits into a black community fund we use to house and feed people, we will no longer contribute our content.”
Anticipating questions from her followers, the ” Song 33″ rapper also addressed her own upcoming appearance at Coachella in the post simply titled “gate keeping.”
“I’m about to play coachella because i need the bread,” she explained. “Trust, i’m not above anybody but if there was a collective boycott where ALL black artists refuse to share our work unless we see radical change in our conditions, i would immediately do that shit.”
Noname’s words seemed to resonate with a number of her fans, garnering over 42,000 likes and over 1,100 comments in just eight hours. Before closing off the comments, the 31-year-old engaged in dialogue with those who offered their own thoughts about the idea of gatekeeping, and even those who challenged her position.
When one commenter brought up Coachella, Noname reiterated that she was not in a position to turn down work, reminding her followers that she had, in fact, stepped away from performing at one point.
“I stopped playing shows for yearsss! for the exact reason i’m talking about and nothing happened,” se responded. “I’m not a big enough artist for them to care. sorry but i’m not about to have my mom on the street unless EVERY artists willing to make that sacrifice. i almost [did] that shit and never again.”
Noname’s Coachella performance is set to take place on the same day as Frank Ocean‘s return to the stage for his first festival performance of the decade.
He will headline both Sundays and fans are already cooking up theories that he will release new music prior to the festival, which will make its way back to the Empire Polo Club in Indio for the weekends of April 14 to April 16 and April 21 to April 23.
By: SHAWN DONNAN, ANN CHOI, HANNAH LEVITT, & CHRISTOPHER CANNON
When Mauise Ricard III paid a $560.43 application fee to Wells Fargo & Co. on Valentine’s Day in 2020 to refinance his mortgage on a four-bedroom brick colonial in a leafy suburb of Atlanta, he had every reason to expect an easy ride. The Microsoft Corp. engineer is married to a doctor and has a credit score north of 800, putting him in America’s credit elite. The loan officer at the bank even told him he was probably eligible for a fast-track appraisal.
It didn’t take long for problems to appear. Ricard’s house—an investment property that was his home before he moved to another Atlanta suburb in 2017—is in a predominantly Black neighborhood, and in April, the loan officer emailed to say that “perhaps the area is not eligible” for a rapid valuation. By May, she was writing to say the underwriter had more questions. Soon after, Ricard was told he would have to pay a higher 4.5% rate, even though the Federal Reserve had slashed rates to historic lows. Within weeks, Wells Fargo had denied his application. “They kept moving the needle,” Ricard says. “They didn’t want to move forward for whatever reason.”
Disparity by Lender
Wells Fargo approved fewer than half of Black homeowners’ refinancing applications in 2020.
Approval rate
0
20
40
60
80
100%
Wells Fargo
72%
White
67%
Asian
53%
Hispanic
47%
Black
All other lenders
87%
White
85%
Asian
79%
Hispanic
71%
Black Source: Bloomberg analysis of Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data for 8 million completed applications to refinance conventional loans in 2020.
Ricard wasn’t alone. Nationwide, only 47% of Black homeowners who completed a refinance application with Wells Fargo in 2020 were approved, compared with 72% of White homeowners, according to a Bloomberg News analysis of federal mortgage data. While Black applicants had lower approval rates than White ones at all major lenders, the data show, Wells Fargo had the biggest disparity and was alone in rejecting more Black homeowners than it accepted.
If, as expected, the Fed’s policy committee moves to hike interest rates at its March meeting, it will begin closing the door on a remarkable wealth event that has seen U.S. homeowners refinance almost $5 trillion in mortgages over the past two years, the most since the early 2000s. It’s one that allowed White homeowners to save an estimated $3.8 billion annually by refinancing their mortgages in 2020, according to researchers at the central bank. But it’s a door that barely opened for Black Americans, who make up 9% of all homeowners and locked in just $198 million a year, less than 4% of the savings.
Wells Fargo, which declined to comment about individual customers, didn’t dispute Bloomberg’s statistical findings. It says it treats all potential borrowers the same, is more selective than other lenders, and an internal review of the bank’s 2020 refinancing decisions confirmed that “additional, legitimate, credit-related factors” were responsible for the differences. But even when taking selectivity into account, the San Francisco-based bank had by far the worst record among major lenders when it came to refinancings by Black homeowners, according to Bloomberg’s analysis of Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data for 8 million completed applications to refinance conventional loans in 2020.
Home Loan Refinance Gap
Black homeowners had the lowest approval rate by lenders nationwide in 2020, as well as the smallest number of applicants.
Approval rate
0
20
40
60
80
100%
87%
White
4.9M
Number of applicants
579K
85%
Asian
469K
78%
Hispanic
254K
70%
Black Source: Bloomberg analysis of Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data for 8 million completed applications to refinance conventional loans in 2020.
JPMorgan Chase & Co., the largest U.S. bank by assets, accepted 81% of refinancing applications from Black homeowners in 2020 compared with 90% from White ones. Bank of America Corp. approved 66% of its Black applicants and 78% of White ones. Rocket Mortgage LLC, which received 1 million refinancing applications in 2020, more than any other lender, had the smallest gap: It approved 79% of Black applicants and 86% of White ones.
Among major lenders, only Wells Fargo approved a smaller share of refinancing applications from Black homeowners in 2020 than a decade earlier. The bank’s 47% approval rate was its second lowest during the past decade. JPMorgan, Bank of America and Rocket Mortgage, formerly known as Quicken Loans, all approved Black borrowers in 2020 at the highest rate since 2010.
The data also show that 27% of Black borrowers who began an application with Wells Fargo in 2020 withdrew it. That meant only one-third of the 17,702 Black homeowners who sought refinancing were successful. Like the industry as a whole, Wells Fargo approved a greater share of applications from low-income White homeowners than all but the highest-income Black applicants, who had an approval rate about the same as White borrowers in the lowest-income bracket.
Data for 2021 won’t be released until later this year. Wells Fargo says it hasn’t completed an analysis yet and couldn’t comment about whether its refinancing outcomes had changed.
Wells Fargo denied Microsoft engineer Mauise Ricard’s refinance application, even though he has a credit score north of 800.
The U.S. Justice Department has hammered banks for lending practices that tend to elevate costs for minority borrowers. After the 2008 housing crisis revealed discriminatory treatment, authorities unleashed a wave of penalties against U.S. lending giants. Wells Fargo agreed in 2012 to pay more than $184 million to settle federal claims that it unfairly steered Black and Hispanic homeowners into subprime mortgages and charged them higher fees and interest rates. The bank didn’t admit to any wrongdoing and said at the time that it treated all customers fairly regardless of race.
U.S. law has long held that a “disparate impact” on minority communities can be evidence of institutional discrimination, meaning regulators don’t have to prove a bank was engaging in deliberate racism to show that it broke fair-lending or fair-housing laws.
The Biden administration is increasing scrutiny of banks and modern forms of discrimination. “If we allow racist and discriminatory policies to persist, we will not live up to our country’s ideals,” Rohit Chopra, head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, said at a press conference in October announcing a new push by the Justice Department and regulators to combat so-called redlining by financial institutions. Among the issues he singled out was the role of mortgage underwriting algorithms that banks have long used, calling the disparities in lending outcomes a sign of “digital redlining, disguised through so-called neutral algorithms.”
Higher Income, Same Approval
Wells Fargo’s refinancing approval rates were higher for the lowest-income White applicants in 2020 than for all but the highest-income Black applicants.
Approval rate
0
20
40
60
80
100%
Wells Fargo
Lower-income White applicants had almost the same approval rate as…
White
Income
quintile 1
Asian
Hispanic
Black
$63K
2
$90K
3
$120K
4
$168K
5
…high-income Black applicants.
All other lenders
White
Asian
1
Hispanic
Black
$63K
2
$90K
3
$120K
4
$168K
5 Source: Bloomberg analysis of Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data for 8 million completed applications to refinance conventional loans in 2020.
Kristy Fercho, who in August 2020 became the first Black woman to oversee Wells Fargo’s home-lending business and its more than 25,000 employees, says the bank’s processes are race-blind and that its lending decisions were “consistent across racial and ethnic groups.” Any racial disparity in outcomes for refinancing in 2020 was the result of variables Wells Fargo doesn’t control, she and other executives say, including credit scores, the appraised value of homes and broader inequities in the U.S. economy.
The problem is certainly broader than any one bank and gets at the root causes of the racial wealth gap in the U.S. Housing activists have long pointed to a history of mortgage discrimination and resulting disparities in homeownership rates as the major source of enduring wealth inequality. A typical White family had eight times more wealth than a Black one, according to a triennial Fed survey last published in 2019. By the end of September 2021, separate Fed quarterly wealth data showed the gap between White and Black Americans had widened by $20 trillion during the pandemic.
The refinancing gap gets at the ability of Black families to build on the wealth they have. Not being able to refinance a home “means that people have less resources to invest in their children, less resources to start businesses, less resources to renovate their homes, less resources to buy additional homes,” says Andre Perry, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution whose 2018 study found that the average Black home was valued at $48,000 less than its White equivalent. That differential amounts to $156 billion in missing Black wealth.
The anticipated move by the Fed to raise interest rates in March to combat inflation “effectively locks us out of this wealth-creation event,” Perry says. “It was a brief period of time where we really did need lenders, especially, to step up to the plate in terms of racial equity.”
Perry says that while Wells Fargo and other banks have made efforts to increase lending to minority communities, some still treat Black homeowners with institutional disdain. “How you know that Black people are valued less is by looking at the data,” Perry says. “And for me, Wells Fargo has to look itself in the mirror collectively and say, ‘OK, why are our outcomes worse than other lenders?’”
Black Historical Approval Rate
While other lenders have improved, Wells Fargo’s rate fell over the past decade.
71%
all other
Lenders
53%
53%
47%
Wells
Fargo
2010
2015
2020 Source: Bloomberg analysis of Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data for 8 million completed applications to refinance conventional loans in 2020.
Wells Fargo, like other lenders, has been working to distance itself from the past. When the murder of George Floyd prompted a nationwide reckoning over race and America’s economic inequities in 2020, the bank joined the chorus of companies promising to do better. “This is an important moment at our company, and we will not let it go by without substantive changes,” Chief Executive Officer Charlie Scharf wrote in that year’s annual report. “We must move with haste to execute on our plans, and know we will be judged based on our outcomes.”
Scharf was hired in late 2019 after a series of scandals that began with the revelation that employees opened millions of fake accounts to meet sales goals. That led to sanctions, including a Fed-imposed growth ban and the departures of two of Scharf’s predecessors. He’s installed new leaders, including Fercho, who took over a home-lending unit that’s been the source of some of Wells Fargo’s long-standing problems. Regulators spotlighted improper mortgage fees in a 2018 order, and the bank was handed a fresh sanction over lack of progress on that order last year.
City by City
Black applicants at all lenders nationwide in 2020 generally faced lower acceptance rates compared with their metro area’s overall rate.
Black applicant approval rate
Total applicants:
1,000
10,000
100,000
Logan, UT
100%
St. Cloud, MN
Black applicants tended to have higher approval rates in smaller metropolitan areas with smaller Black populations
90
Santa Cruz, CA
80
Los Angeles
Charleston, WV
Black applicants have a higher approval rate than the overall acceptance rate
Washington, D.C.
New York
City
70
Chicago
Atlanta
Sioux Falls,
SD
60
Black applicants have a lower approval rate than the overall acceptance rate
Rochester, NY
El Paso, TX
50
Scranton, PA
40
60
70
80
90%
Overall acceptance rate Source: Bloomberg analysis of Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data for 8 million completed applications to refinance conventional loans in 2020.
The bank has settled several class-action lawsuits brought by municipalities claiming that foreclosures during the financial crisis depressed property values and that Wells made it difficult for minority homeowners to refinance high-interest mortgages. It still faces others. In one federal case filed last year, lawyers for Georgia’s Cobb, DeKalb and Fulton counties cited foreclosures Wells Fargo had sought in minority neighborhoods as recently as May 2019. The foreclosure files included an Atlanta property with a 12.125% adjustable-rate mortgage. Wells Fargo has denied any wrongdoing and in court filings questioned both the counties’ standing to bring a suit and whether too much time had elapsed since the alleged wrongdoing.
Wells Fargo Acceptance Rates Lagged Across the U.S.
Other lenders approved Black applicants at higher rates than Wells Fargo in almost all metropolitan statistical areas in 2020.
Wells Fargo
All other lenders
Black applicant approval rate
100%
Logan, UT
90
San Francisco
80
San Jose
Los Angeles
Washington, D.C.
70
New York
Portland, OR
60
Rochester, NY
Mobile, AL
50
Atlanta
40
Lawton, OK
New Haven, CT
30
Gulfport, MS
Miami
20
Dayton, OH Source: Bloomberg analysis of Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data for 8 million completed applications to refinance conventional loans in 2020.
Fercho says Wells Fargo is looking at how to better serve Black communities that have often been suspicious of lenders based on generations of discrimination. Among the steps: encouraging Black homeowners, who refinance less frequently than White ones, to take advantage of opportunities to lower their rates. Fercho cites her own mother’s reluctance to refinance her mortgage at any point in its 30-year life as an example of a broader issue. When she asked her mother why she had never refinanced given the money she could have saved, “her answer was ‘I could afford my payments. So there was no reason for me to change it.’”
Wells Fargo has also announced a push to increase Black homeownership and in 2021 invested $50 million in 13 Black-owned community banks. In 2017, it pledged to help create 250,000 new Black homeowners by 2027, a goal Fercho says the bank is on pace to meet or exceed.
But the difficulties some Black customers faced left them frustrated with Wells Fargo. When Cherylnita Cone sought to refinance the Wells Fargo mortgage on her three-bedroom bungalow in College Park, Georgia, in 2020, she was surprised to find that the bank quoted her a rate half a percentage point higher than she found elsewhere. Cone, a software systems analyst for a packaging company, and her husband, an aircraft painter for Lockheed Martin Corp., have lived in the home for 25 years. “I would think, ‘Hey, I’m with you all,’” she says. “I pay timely. I have a good credit score. And this is all with the same lender, hoping it would be cheaper.”
Instead it reinforced a view Cone has held since the couple financed their first home in the late 1990s with a 7% mortgage. “Being an African American, a Black female, any time I talk to any other individuals that are Caucasian, their rate is always cheaper,” she says, referring to the broader home-financing market.
Disparate-impact cases can be hard to prove with data alone and often have to involve another element, says Steve Dane, who has brought discrimination cases on behalf of the National Fair Housing Alliance and other clients. “If that’s all you had, and nothing else, I would not bring a case like that,” Dane says. Evidence that a bank’s lending outcomes are at odds with its industry peers could provide that additional element, he says.
So could the location of loan officers. When the Justice Department announced its push on redlining in October, it also unveiled a $5 million settlement with Trustmark National Bank over lending discrimination in Memphis, Tennessee, including allegations that the bank’s loan officers were located in predominantly White neighborhoods.
In Atlanta, Baltimore and Philadelphia, Wells Fargo’s online tool for people looking to refinance directs borrowers in predominantly Black ZIP codes to loan officers in more White areas. The nearest Wells Fargo loan officer available to homeowners in New Haven, Connecticut, which in 2020 was a hot spot for denials, according to the Bloomberg analysis, is in Westport, 25 miles away. Other banks offer loan officers much closer. Wells Fargo declined to comment on the results its online tool provided.
Black homeowners seeking to refinance mortgages in 2020 faced lower approval rates nationwide than those of any other race. About 70% of 254,000 Black applicants who completed applications had their requests approved by lenders, the data show. By comparison, 87% of 4.9 million non-Hispanic White homeowners were accepted.
The banking industry has long argued that credit scores rather than race explain any disparities, but it has lobbied against the release of federal mortgage data containing those scores. A 2021 study by Fed researchers given access to a privileged version of the same data used by Bloomberg that included applicants’ credit scores showed racial gaps can be largely attributed to those scores and the recommendations automated underwriting systems make to lenders. The study, which looked at both home purchases and refinancings, identified some differences among lenders, but the researchers didn’t document them.
Approval by Metro Area
Black homeowners applying for refinancing through Wells Fargo in 2020 faced lower approval rates particularly on the East Coast and in parts of the South.
Black applicant approval rate:
20
40
60
80
100%
Seattle
Portland
Minneapolis
Boston
Buffalo
Detroit
New York
Chicago
Philadelphia
San
Francisco
Salt Lake
City
Columbus
Washington, D.C.
Denver
St. Louis
Kansas
City
Las Vegas
Nashville
Charlotte
Oklahoma
City
Los Angeles
Albuquerque
Phoenix
Atlanta
San Diego
Dallas
El Paso
Austin
Orlando
New Orleans
Houston
Miami Source: Bloomberg analysis of Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data for 8 million completed applications to refinance conventional loans in 2020.
Other researchers and activists say the way credit scores are assembled discriminates against Black families, an increasingly accepted view that has prompted a push to reform the 33-year-old system developed by Fair Isaac Corp. and known as FICO. Those scores are based on the use of mortgages, credit cards, and auto and student loans. But that leaves many people out—almost one-third of Black Americans, according to a 2019 Urban Institute report. “There’s probably about 50 million people that can’t be scored right now under FICO’s main model,” says Kelly Thompson Cochran, deputy director of FinRegLab, a nonprofit technology research group.
Including rental payments in the mix would fix a large part of the problem, housing activists say. Minorities make up half of renters in the U.S. and just a quarter of homeowners, according to U.S. Census data. Studies have shown that including rental payments can help raise credit scores and that renters’ histories of paying rent on time are a good predictor of their ability to make mortgage payments.
Despite research into the validity of alternative credit-scoring models and the limitations of current ones, barriers remain. “It’s hard for individual lenders to say, ‘We’re going to start underwriting these in a completely different way than anybody else,’” says Cochran.
Still, some institutional changes are underway. Fannie Mae decided in September to include rent payments in credit assessments. The rethinking is also happening at banks, including Wells Fargo, and Fercho is a voice in the broader national conversation. She chairs the Mortgage Bankers Association and leads the affordable housing working group for the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency’s Project Reach, which is examining how to improve access to credit in the U.S.
Wells Fargo is considering following Fannie Mae’s decision to use rental payments in its lending decisions, according to Fercho. “We have to get creative as an industry around how do we level the playing field and create some equity,” she says.
The issues surrounding mortgage discrimination can be dizzying. Studies have documented everything from the reluctance of Black homeowners to refinance mortgages to the behavior of loan officers, who tend to approve White homeowners earlier in the month than Black ones. There is also an increased focus on the issue of appraisal discrimination.
But experts say that beyond credit scores and appraisal bias two things have stood out as the cause of the disparities in this refinancing boom: the impact of lenders’ proprietary algorithms, or overlays, and the failure of policymakers to mandate streamlined refinancing programs.
Nikitra Bailey, senior vice president of public policy at the National Fair Housing Alliance, says the stricter overlays many lenders put in place after the financial crisis raised the average credit score needed to refinance a mortgage as high as 775 in 2020. “That’s well above credit scores for communities of color who lacked that intergenerational wealth,” Bailey says.
A streamlined refinancing program would also help address the high upfront costs that discourage many Black homeowners. One such program helped more than 3.5 million borrowers refinance from 2009 to 2018, saving an estimated $35 billion. If a similar program were still in place, says Laurie Goodman, an Urban Institute fellow, “we could make a huge difference in decreasing the racial gap.”
When Myron McKeller set out in 2020 to refinance the $159,000 Wells Fargo mortgage he took out on his three-bedroom townhouse west of downtown Atlanta seven years earlier, he had two goals: reducing his interest rate and getting his home reappraised. The 32-year-old software sales engineer was hoping the reappraisal would reflect how appreciation should have removed the need for him to pay mortgage insurance required of homeowners with less than 20% equity in homes.
But he didn’t even attempt to refinance with Wells Fargo. He’d tried two years earlier and was instead directed into a loan modification with a 5.125% interest rate after an appraisal that felt at odds with what he was seeing in the market.
Myron McKeller looked elsewhere in 2020 after an earlier unsuccessful attempt to refinance his Wells Fargo mortgage.
Many Black homeowners who sought to refinance with Wells Fargo during the pandemic were, like McKeller, middle class and had good credit scores. But even for members of the Black middle class the pandemic has brought blunt lessons in the legacy of housing segregation in Georgia’s Fulton County, which includes Atlanta. Home prices in the county’s predominantly Black southwestern suburbs have lagged behind those to the north for generations, largely because of redlining that labeled Black neighborhoods riskier lending propositions than their White counterparts.
Appraisals for Black-owned homes in Fulton County often come in low, says Bilal Shareef, president of the Empire Board of Realtists, which since 1939 has represented Atlanta’s Black real estate agents. He learned long ago that he needed to fight for clients. In 90% of cases, Shareef says, his pushback leads to dramatically higher new appraisals. That can mean $50,000 to $60,000 more on properties worth $300,000 or less, or a swing in homeowner equity in a property of as much as 20%. “Unfortunately that’s the kind of stigma that we deal with,” Shareef says.
Fair-housing activists also complain of “soft denials” for loans when lenders leave applicants hanging or encourage them to look elsewhere before an application is even submitted. Federal records don’t detail why some refinancing applications aren’t completed, but for people who work in the Atlanta suburbs the patterns of behavior by lenders have become familiar.
When interest rates tumbled in 2020, McKeller took all of his banking business elsewhere, refinancing with an interest rate closer to 3% with a local mortgage company. “Once I was able to refi, I pretty much terminated my relationship with them,” McKeller says. “It was definitely time to move on.”
McKeller’s three-bedroom townhouse in downtown Atlanta.
Wells Fargo approved fewer than 43% of refinancing applications completed by Black homeowners in Fulton County in 2020, Bloomberg’s analysis shows, the lowest approval rate among major lenders. Overall, 69% of Black applicants in the county were approved.
After Wells Fargo rejected his application, Ricard, the Microsoft engineer, found another lender to refinance the mortgage on his house. Ricard, who grew up in Chicago and Tulsa, Oklahoma, moved to Atlanta for college and stayed because it felt like a progressive paradise for young Black professionals.
He and his wife moved their young family to a bigger home in the more expensive, and predominantly White, Fulton County suburb of Sandy Springs in 2017 to be closer to better schools. The transition hasn’t always been easy. The day he moved in, he says, White neighbors called the police. “I’ll just speak the truth,” Ricard says. “Some of my neighbors in our community don’t want us here.”
The move has also given him a rare perspective on the economics of segregation. His new home and those around it are valued far higher than those in the predominantly Black southwestern Fulton County suburb they left behind, where they still own the property they sought to refinance with Wells Fargo. But Ricard says he pays almost as much for the home insurance on his old home, which he now rents out, as his new one.
When he went to refinance the Sandy Springs mortgage in 2020 with another lender, he had a much easier time. He also had an easier experience with another lender when he closed on the refinancing of his original home in December 2020, securing a 3.35% rate, more than a percentage point lower than what Wells Fargo had offered him.
“It’s sad that as a banking institution that they essentially can’t be trusted,” Ricard says of Wells Fargo. “As an African American, a person of color, we deal with enough hardships that life hands us. To be discriminated against financially is a hardship.” Source: Bloomberg analysis of Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data for 8 million completed applications to refinance conventional loans in 2020. Methodology:
Bloomberg News analyzed data collected from 8 million refinancing loan applications in 2020 under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, or HMDA. Only applications for conventional, non-jumbo, single-family and first-lien dwellings were examined because other loan types, such as FHA loans, must meet more restrictive underwriting rules required by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Lenders processed 15 million refinancing applications in 2020. Of those, 11 million were for conventional loans and 3 million were either withdrawn or incomplete. Details on credit scores and automated recommendations are compiled by federal officials under HMDA, but that information isn’t available to the public.
To look for potential patterns and significant differences among lenders, we examined approval and denial rates across all lenders. But the findings focus on the biggest refinancing lenders, including the largest, Rocket Mortgage LLC, and the three top commercial banks—JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo.
We looked at approval rates of completed applications to account for which groups of borrowers lenders deemed more creditworthy. We calculated two statistics: the share of approved applications for each racial group and an approval ratio between White and non-White borrowers. Using a ratio accounts for differences in banks’ internal underwriting guidelines that some lenders say affect all borrowers. Incomplete or withdrawn applications were examined separately because lenders made no decisions on them. Nonetheless, housing advocates consider many withdrawn or incomplete applications to be “soft denials” resulting from inattention or discouragement from lenders. Wells Fargo had the highest share of those who withdrew or did not complete their applications.
Looking at applicants by income, we divided the total number of applications into five similarly sized quintiles to determine the acceptance rate among different racial and income groups. The dataset provided both the county and metropolitan statistical area (MSA) for each loan, which allowed for geographic analysis. Since many rural counties had few applicants, and even fewer Black applicants, we opted to use MSAs, which have a larger sample size to work with, and only included those that had at least 10 Black applicants.
The scenario I’ve been warning about for years is finally here. It’s now confirmed by the White House that FEMA goon squads will be going “door-to-door” across America to coerce unvaccinated people into taking deadly bioweapons spike protein kill shots.
It is now openly admitted that the government is keeping lists of those who are not yet vaccinated, and just today, Biden’s Health Secretary Xavier Becerra doubled down on the plans, claiming, “knocking on a door has never been against the law” and adding, “Because if you haven’t been vaccinated, we can help dispel some of those rumors you’ve heard and hopefully get you vaccinated.”
What rumors? Rumors that the government would be knocking on your door to coerce you into getting injected with a deadly bioweapon? That’s not a rumor, Xavier, that’s an admitted fact.
It turns out that it’s a violation of the law for the federal government to trespass on private property and harass private citizens over their vaccination status. As Robert F. Kennedy aptly states about this nefarious plan:
It’s a foreboding fork in the road to totalitarianism. We are now moving beyond the propaganda stage into this very coercive program where federal agents appear at American homes with the menacing message: ‘We know who you are and where you live. We have you on our list, we have your medical records, we want your neighbors to know that you are dangerous. We don’t recognize your property or privacy rights. You must take our untested, experimental pharmaceutical product. If you want to end this harassment, you must submit to a risky medical intervention made by an unscrupulous company with no liability and if you die or suffer permanent neurological injury, tough luck!’
The Biden regime’s totalitarian plan to threaten Americans on a door-to-door basis smacks of a medical dictatorship where no human rights or civil rights are respected whatsoever. This is exactly what we’ve been warning about over the last several years, usually being mocked by the controlled left-wing media that repeatedly insisted there would never be door-to-door vaccination coercion campaigns in America. They even claimed there would never be vaccine passports or vaccine mandates.
Now we have all three.
The dystopian future I warned you about is here right now.
From The Epoch Times:
“Door to door to vaccinate Americans this year… door to door to confiscate guns next year?” asked Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) on Twitter.
“In 2021, the nine most terrifying words in the English language: ‘I’m from the government, have you been vaccinated yet?’” wrote Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.).
White House spokesperson Jen Psaki confirmed all this over the last two days in official statements. Biden’s Health Secretary doubles down on it. They can’t wait to round up the anti-vaxxers because they know people who resist deadly vaccines are the same people who tend to own guns and vote Republican.
The US government just declared unrestricted warfare on the American people
This announced by the White House is a declaration of war against the American people. They’re essentially saying you get to choose the method of your execution: 1) You can be executed by the spike protein injection which will likely kill you over the next year or two, or 2) You can be executed in a FEMA covid death camp for refusing the vaccine. In this case, you will die via guillotine or a forced spike protein injection at the camp.
If they don’t manage to find you, they will still try to starve you to death with engineered food shortages (famine) that are now being ramped up across America and the world.
And don’t forget the coming grid down blackouts, cyber war attacks, false flag attacks and door-to-door gun confiscation that’s coming next.
This is an all-out war against humanity, and it’s being waged on a global scale. The criminals in charge are knowingly exterminating their own people by the billions, all while claiming it’s for “public health.”
The only people who survive this will be those who are:
Far away from blue cities.
Well stocked and prepared to survive at least one year without a power grid.
Capable of self-defense against imminent threats of violence against your life (an attack with a spike protein injection is an attack with a deadly weapon, and all people have the fundamental human right of self-defense).
In essence, you can now either choose to DIE (and comply) or LIVE (and resist the medical tyranny).
About half of the U.S. population has already chosen to die via spike protein injections. The Biden regime is now trying to mop up the other half to achieve a high kill rate, specifically targeting counties and regions with high “vaccine hesitancy” scores.
On July 4, 1776, during the American Revolution, the Second Continental Congress of the Thirteen Colonies approved the Declaration of Independence (A Trust). While we are no longer the subjects of the British Empire, we are now the subjects of The Corporations.
Today, the American people are governed by a corporate-government dictatorship that serves and protects only the private interests of the corporations and the wealthiest Americans. The democratic and civil rights of the people have been eliminated. This is the 21st century definition of fascism. Our freedom requires we declare our independence from a system that is impoverishing the American people.
Recent reports from the Internal Revenue Service show that nearly 50% of the American people are living at or near the federal poverty level. One-third of working Americans earn less than $23,000 a year, not to mention the millions of unemployed. Youth unemployment is “officially” 16.1% and gets worse by the day.
While American poverty rapidly increases, it is also criminalized. A recent example is 44-year-old homeless Navy veteran James Kelly, who was looking in a garbage dumpster for something to eat. He was charged by the Houston police with breaking a city ordinance: “disturbing the contents of a garbage can in the business district.” Kelly said, “I was just basically looking for something to eat.”
Congress, state and city governments across the country continue to cut life-sustaining, public, government sponsored programs, while at the same time selling off all public property and resources to corporate privateers. In Detroit, the city-owned Detroit Institute of Art announced its intention to sell up to a billion dollars worth of precious paintings. In Chicago, 49 public schools will close to open the way for more corporate owned and operated schools. Efforts are underway to privatize the federally owned Tennessee Valley Authority, the U.S. Post Office and the government controlled mortgage giants, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.
The move by Jesuit priests is the largest such effort by the Roman Catholic Church and comes amid growing calls for reparations across the United States.
By: RACHEL L SWARNS
In one of the largest efforts by an institution to atone for slavery, a prominent order of Catholic priests has vowed to raise $100 million to benefit the descendants of the enslaved people it once owned and to promote racial reconciliation initiatives across the United States.
The move by the leaders of the Jesuit conference of priests represents the largest effort by the Roman Catholic Church to make amends for the buying, selling and enslavement of Black people, church officials and historians said.
The pledge comes at a time when calls for reparations are ringing through Congress, college campuses, church basements and town halls, as leaders grapple with the painful legacies of segregation and the nation’s system of involuntary servitude.
“This is an opportunity for Jesuits to begin a very serious process of truth and reconciliation,” said the Rev. Timothy P. Kesicki, president of the Jesuit Conference of Canada and the United States. “Our shameful history of Jesuit slaveholding in the United States has been taken off the dusty shelf, and it can never be put back.
The money raised by the Jesuits will flow into a new foundation established in partnership with a group of descendants, who pressed for negotiations with the Jesuits after learning from a series of articles in The New York Times that their ancestors had been sold in 1838. The order relied on slave labor and slave sales for more than a century to sustain the clergy and to help finance the construction and the day-to-day operations of churches and schools, including the nation’s first Catholic institution of higher learning, the college now known as Georgetown University.
Father Kesicki said his order had already deposited $15 million into a trust established to support the foundation, whose governing board will include representatives from other institutions with roots in slavery. The Jesuits have also hired a national fund-raising firm with a goal of raising the rest within the next three to five years, he said.
The pledge falls short of the $1 billion that descendant leaders had called on the Jesuits to raise. Father Kesicki and Joseph M. Stewart, the acting president of the newly created foundation, the Descendants Truth & Reconciliation Foundation said that remained a long-term goal as the organization moves to support institutions and initiatives focused on racial healing.
“We now have a pathway forward that has not been traveled before,” said Mr. Stewart, a retired corporate executive whose ancestors were sold in 1838 to help save Georgetown from financial ruin.
The Vatican announced that blessings for unions of same-sex people are “illicit” because God “cannot bless sin,” while blessings for individual persons with homosexual inclinations are permissible.
The Vatican’s orthodoxy office, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, issued a formal response of “negative” to a question of whether the Catholic churches have the power to give the blessing to unions of persons of the same sex on March 15.
Pope Francis approved this response.
“It is not licit to impart a blessing on relationships, or partnerships, even stable, that involve sexual activity outside of marriage (i.e., outside the indissoluble union of a man and a woman open in itself to the transmission of life), as is the case of the unions between persons of the same sex,” the statement said.
What is blessed should be “objectively and positively ordered to receive and express grace” according to the designs of God, the statement explained.
The blessing of homosexual unions cannot be considered licit because “there are absolutely no grounds for considering homosexual unions to be in any way similar or even remotely analogous to God’s plan for marriage and family.”
The statement suggested that it does not preclude the blessings given to individual persons with homosexual inclinations, “God Himself never ceases to bless each of His pilgrim children in this world.”
“[God] does not and cannot bless sin: he blesses sinful man,” the statement added.
The statement said the Christian community and its pastors are called to welcome gay people “with respect and sensitivity.” And the Vatican’s response is not a form of “unjust discrimination,” but rather “a reminder of the truth of the liturgical rite.”
Pope Francis has endorsed providing gay couples with legal protections in same-sex unions.
“Homosexual people have the right to be in a family. They are children of God,” Pope Francis said during a 2019 interview with a Mexican broadcaster, Televisa. “You can’t kick someone out of a family, nor make their life miserable for this. What we have to have is a civil union law; that way, they are legally covered.”
Francis was referring to the position he took when he was archbishop of Buenos Aires. At the time, Argentina’s lawmakers were considering approving gay marriage, which he and the Catholic Church opposed.
The new illumination with led lights of St. Peter’s basilica and St. Peter’s square are pictured on Jan. 25, 2019, in the Vatican.
Pope Francis’s comments were cut by the Vatican but resurfaced in a documentary last year.
Sister Simone Campbell, executive director of the U.S.-based NETWORK Lobby for Catholic Social Justice and an advocate for greater LGBTQ inclusion in the church, said she was relieved the Vatican statement wasn’t worse.
She said she interpreted the statement as saying, “You can bless the individuals (in a same-sex union). You just can’t bless the contract.”
“So it’s possible you could have a ritual where the individuals get blessed to be their committed selves.”
Washington (CNN) Vernon Jordan, a civil rights leader and close adviser to former President Bill Clinton, has died He was 85.A cause of death was not immediately released Jordan died peacefully at his home surrounded by his wife and family, Jordan’s niece Ann Walker confirmed to CNN According to Walker, Jordan had his favorite dinner and dessert — chocolate chip ice cream — before he went to bed.
“It was just the way he would have wanted it,” Walker told CNN.The former president of the National Urban League rose to prominence as a civil rights activist with close connections in all corners of American politics, though he was closest with Democrats, including presidents from Lyndon Johnson to Barack Obama. He also worked with Republican Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush.
In a statement provided to CNN by Clinton’s office, the 42nd President remembered his late friend as someone who “brought his big brain and strong heart to everything and everybody he touched” and “who made them better” He was never too busy to give good advice and encouragement to young people. And he never gave up on his friends or his country,” Clinton said. “He was a wonderful friend to Hillary, Chelsea, and me, in good times and bad. We worked and played, laughed and cried, won and lost together. We loved him very much and always will. “Born on August 15, 1935, Jordan grew up in the segregated South and graduated from DePauw University in Indiana in 1957, the only Black student in his class. He then studied law at Howard University and began his career fighting segregation, starting with a lawsuit against University of Georgia’s integration policy in 1961 on the behalf of two Black students, Hamilton Holmes and Charlayne Hunter. Jordan accompanied the two students to the UGA admissions office that year through an angry mob of White students. He worked as a field director for the NAACP and as a director of the Southern Regional Council for the Voter Education Project before he became president of the National Urban League. In 1980, he survived an assassination attempt on his life. “Today, the world lost an influential figure in the fight for civil rights and American politics, Vernon Jordan. An icon to the world and a lifelong friend to the NAACP, his contribution to moving our society toward justice is unparalleled,” NAACP President Derrick Johnson said in a statement “In 2001, Jordan received the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal for a lifetime of social justice activism. His exemplary life will shine as a guiding light for all that seek truth and justice for all people. “Jordan’s closest political friendship was with Bill and Hillary Clinton, advising the then-Arkansas governor during his 1992 presidential campaign and acting as an outside adviser to his friend. He remained close to the Clintons for the next decades, endorsing both of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaigns. Jordan first met Clinton during a trip to Little Rock, Arkansas, when he was leading the Urban League and Clinton was Arkansas attorney general, and the two formed a friendship that spanned decades and withstood rocky times. “We have formed a bond that is indescribable,” Clinton said at a 2019 event hosted by the Clinton Foundation. Clinton tapped Jordan, who left the Urban League after 10 years to practice law in DC, to serve as chairman of his 1992 presidential transition team. The position propelled Jordan into becoming a Washington power broker as he acted as a close confidant to Clinton, advising him on several hirings, golfing frequently with the President and sharing Christmas Eves together. In the late ’90s, Jordan’s friendship with Clinton found him entangled in then-independent counsel Kenneth Starr’s investigation, which uncovered the affair Clinton had with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky while in office. Jordan had helped Lewinsky job hunt at the request of Clinton’s personal secretary and had recommended an attorney who briefly represented Lewinsky. Jordan testified several times before the grand jury.J ordan also had an illustrious career in the corporate world, serving on the board of directors for several major American corporations .DePauw University on mourned the passing of Jordan, and its president, Lori S. White, said in a statement that the university “has lost a dear friend and the world has lost a determined leader. “”He spoke loudly — through words and deeds — as a civil rights activist and quietly as a trusted counsel to presidents,” White said. “DePauw is better for having had him as a beloved alumnus, and the country and the world are better for having him as a leader. “In a tweet Obama, said he and former first lady Michelle Obama “benefited from Vernon Jordan’s wise counsel and warm friendship—and deeply admired his tireless fight for civil rights. “”We hope the memory of his extraordinary presence and the legacy of his work bring comfort to Ann, Vickee, and his family,” Obama said. This story has been updated with additional reaction and details about Jordan’s life. He earned a Juris Doctor at Howard University School of Law in 1960. He was a member of the Omega Psi Phi and Sigma Pi Phi (Boule) fraternities. Jordan was a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a member of the Bilderberg Group.
