Hannity Smears “Chicano” Author As Anti-White By Taking Quote Out Of Context

I saw this crazy stuff on TV this week. If you have time check out the insanity... FOX insanity that is. Click this link to view the video and text: FOX NOOZ?

-30-

Real estate swings have affected minorities more than whites, study shows

Minorities bought homes at a faster pace than whites from 1995 to 2005, a Pew report says. But in recent years, declines in homeownership among blacks and Latinos were especially severe.

By Tiffany Hsu

The roller-coaster ride of the real estate market over the last 15 years has soared higher and plunged deeper for minorities nationwide than it has for whites, according to a study of homeownership released Tuesday.

The declines in homeownership among African Americans and U.S.-born Latinos in recent years were especially sharp, according to the study by the Pew Hispanic Center, a project of the Pew Research Center in Washington.

Overall, the homeownership rate nationwide dropped from 69% in 2004 to 67.8% last year, a loss of 1.2 percentage points. The rate for black households, though, fell 1.9 percentage points, to 47.5%, reversing increases over four years. The rate for U.S.-born Latinos peaked in 2005 but has since fallen 2.6 percentage points to 53.6%.

The declines among the two minority groups were surprisingly severe, said Robert Kleinhenz, deputy chief economist at the California Assn. of Realtors.

"I don't think it's a function of ethnicity, or at least not exclusively, but has a lot more to do with the socioeconomic situations these households find themselves in," he said.

For Californians, Kleinhenz suspects, the swings are magnified because of traditionally higher home prices and an ownership rate that usually lags behind the national rate by about 10 percentage points.

"We're seeing much more severe corrections taking place in a much shorter period of time," he said. "High home prices drove large segments of the California population to experiment with new types of financing, many of which turned out to be problematic. Households at the margin were trying to get their piece of California homes."

Kleinhenz believes that ownership rates nationwide will start picking up as early as next spring but after that won't reach peak levels any time soon.

During the boom time, roughly 1995 to 2005, minority groups reached for the American dream at a much faster pace than whites did. Homeownership among whites increased 5.6 percentage points to 76.1%, while increases among minority groups ranged from 11.7 percentage points (to 60.8%) for Asians to 6.8 percentage points (to 53.3%) for immigrants. The rate for Latinos rose 9 percentage points to 56.2%, and for African Americans, 7.5 percentage points to 49.4%.

The statistics showed that the gap in homeownership between whites and minorities had narrowed but still remained significant, according to the study's authors, Rakesh Kochhar, Ana Gonzalez-Barrera and Daniel Dockterman.

They also found that blacks and Latinos were more likely than whites to take out higher-priced subprime loans, designed for borrowers with low credit scores. Just 10.5% of loans to whites in 2007 fit that category, compared with 27.6% of loans taken out by Latinos and 33.5% by blacks.

One surprise from the study was that the drop in homeownership hit U.S.-born heads of households harder than immigrants, who were less likely to be homeowners anyway.

The Pew study analyzed data from private and government sources, including the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

tiffany.hsu@latimes.com

An Historic Election

A Chance For Change

Larry Cox
Executive Director
Amnesty International USA

Waking up this morning was like waking up to a new era. That’s because many of us remember a time when activities were segregated by race, whether going to the movies or riding a bus.

And then yesterday, the biggest racial barrier in American politics was annihilated. By record margins, America elected Barack Obama the first African-American president of the United States.

Hope overcame fear. Ordinary citizens mobilized to change the future. This is the heart of Amnesty International. Since 1961, we’ve held out hope for those enduring injustice, when all hope was lost. And through the power of your collective actions, hundreds of thousands now enjoy greater freedom and a safer, more just world.

A record 131 million people cast their vote and exercised one of the most fundamental of human rights. But as Barack Obama said last night,

"This victory alone is not the change we seek--it is only the chance for us to make that change. And that cannot happen if we go back to the way things were. It cannot happen without you."

We have a great opportunity. The world faces overwhelming human rights crises. But with your help, we can turn this country’s policies on human rights back in the direction of alleviating, and not contributing, to these crises.

President-elect Obama has promised to restore the rule of law, to repair America’s damaged perception in the world, to close Guantánamo, and to renounce torture.

These promises bring hope. In the coming days, we will need you to help make those promises a reality.

-30-