^ "Every state has its good and bad parts." TRUE. I've been significantly around all fifty states, and I would say I can think of at least 46 of them that have both. For example I'm not convinced that Vermont has any "bad" neighborhoods, and I don't remember seeing any such in Utah either, though the Salt Lake City environs are a rather large metropolis. (There MUST be some bad neighborhoods there...somewhere? Same with Hawai'i??) I can think of something good in EVERY state.
I'm NOT considering climate, nor political or religious demographics, in the "good" or "bad" part - only things such as high crime, extreme absence of cultural activities, major poverty, etc. And, yes, Salt Lake City isn't nearly as monolithically noncultural and boring and repressive as people think it is - I would even be quite comfortable living there. (Some other places have precedence, though.) It's actually a pretty nice place...but, no, I'm not gonna consider living in Provo. FORGET that, lol.
The law that you claim caused the Great Recession (the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977) requires only that banks make loans to creditworthy people, regardless of their street address.
If the banks were marketing variable interest rate loans to people who could not afford variable interest rate loans, that is a problem with the banks, not the law.
The banks made plenty of bad loans, but as stated, it had nothing to do with race. Plenty of white people took out loans they could not afford.
There were a lot of bad mortgages DELIBERATELY written up by banks, because they always knew that they could bundle all of their mortgages and sell them to higher-up financial houses such as Lehman Brothers and Bank of America. By 2007, a friend who was working in the industry was confiding to me that, as a mortgage broker, he was still being basically forced to get involved in mortgages which would certainly be terrible risks, because if somebody is wanting a mortgage, they WANT that mortgage...and there was always at least one bank ready and willing to take the bad risk.
WHY? Because the banks could then bundle and sell the mortgages to these bigger places, as I mentioned.
I don't know how the economic model worked, but I assume that, because a lot of people were eventually paying double or even triple the face value by the time they finished paying it back (at minimum-per-month for sometimes as long as 40 years, usually maximum of 30), I assume that the banks willingly sold the mortgages for a little bit over the FACE VALUE (meaning, a little bit over the original amount of the loan), and these higher-up houses would gladly buy them and presumably collect the payments which would total far more than the original loans.
These bigger financial houses were led to believe that the mortgages were GOOD, and PRUDENT, financial instruments.
But, my friend told me about SISA Loans becoming popular - this is what I meant by the terrible-risk mortgages that he could always shop around to one bank or another around 2006 and 2007. SISA = Stated Income, Stated Assets. Virtually anybody who just wanted to move to a better place, even if moving out of a cramped Section 8 Housing apartment, could just walk in and get a loan. All they had to do was to STATE their income and assets...which wouldn't even be VERIFIED by anybody...and suddenly the loaning bank would have this piece of junk that they had loaned $160,000 for AND the bigger financial house would gladly buy it for $170,000 because they were supposed to be paid-back $286,000 (over the 30 years) or something. VOILA...the original loaning bank has been paid-in-full, with a small profit, for the JUNK that they generated. The mortgages shouldn't have existed at all, but the trash mortgages that they could "turn around and sell off" meant they had more such documents they could make a profit by selling off in bulk. [Shhhhhhhh...don't tell anybody that at least 60% of those 380 mortgages we're selling to Lehman Brothers are actually pure SHIT that are gonna go bad, because they'll pay us the going rate for them.]
The public generally thinks that BANKS KNOW WHAT THEY'RE DOING - so when these bad loans were being offered, people queued for them like bonkers, because suddenly they could live in a nice place. A lot of those people may have questioned it at first, but as soon as they realized that the bank "had their back" by giving them the mortgage, they realized that, HEY, this must be OK after all. People were lulled into a false sense of
security (pun intended).
My friend called them NINJA Loans - No Income, No Job, No Assets - all the buyer had to do was to SAY that he had the income and job, etc. and he/she got the loan. That alternative name for these bad loans was, apparently, an acronym used by people working in the industry, in private, at least by those who knew that they were terrible-risk loans.
Lol at TX Beau who likely moved from CA to TX probably for work reasons and yet espouses the same anti-business policies that drove his job out of California in the first place.
I have a friend (who is, yes, white...and a rather extreme Tea Party type right-wing conservative) who did PRECISELY THAT. He moved from San Diego [Spring Valley] to Dallas...and now he wants to move BACK to California!
I think you'd get a stiffy for some roughneck rough trade, for that you'll need to be in Midland/Odessa.
