Home Mortgage Lending by Race and Income in the Time of Low Interest Rates: Examples from Select Counties in Kentucky, Ohio, and Pennsylvania from 2018 through 2021

Abstract

Signed into law in 1975 by President Ford, the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) requires most financial institutions to disclose information on their mortgage lending. Annually, this information creates a publicly accessible data set that includes millions of records and covers about 90 percent of mortgage lending in the United States (Gerardi, Willen, and Zhang, 2020). More information on HMDA can be found in the summary "What is HMDA and why is it important?" Several years ago, the Cleveland Fed examined data for seven large urban counties in the Fourth District. At that time, we looked at how these counties performed post-Great Recession. In this report, we revisit those seven counties and examine how they performed during the COVID-19 pandemic and in an environment of record-low interest rates. This report is an analysis of HMDA data from 2018 through 2021 in seven counties: Allegheny, Pennsylvania (Pittsburgh); Cuyahoga, Ohio (Cleveland); Fayette, Kentucky (Lexington); Franklin, Ohio (Columbus); Hamilton, Ohio (Cincinnati); Lucas, Ohio (Toledo); and Montgomery, Ohio (Dayton). It focuses on several aspects of mortgage lending categorized by borrower race and income.