A recently released analysis of a quarter-century of Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data illustrates why Boston hasn’t shaken its reputation for racism.

The Massachusetts Community & Banking Council published the 23rd edition of economist Jim Campen’s annual report on HMDA data at the end of last year. It shows that black and Latino applicants are declined loans much more often than white applicants. Worse, Campen said, is that little has changed in the more than two decades he’s been studying the data.

The report analyzed 2015 HMDA data on first-lien loans for owner-occupied homes and found that “for applicants with incomes between $76,000 and $100,000, the black denial rate was 3.0 times greater than the white denial rate in Boston.”

The report found that white applicants had substantially lower loan denial rates than Asians, blacks and Latinos for both FHA and non-FHA loans.

“It seems like the report continues to report on the same problems with little or no improvement from year to year,” Campen said. “The predominant finding in this report is the pattern is persistent.”

While Campen has been studying racial and other disparities in mortgage lending in Massachusetts for more than two decades, he’s not the first to discover the trend.

The Shot Heard ’Round The City

Today, Alicia H. Munnell is the Peter F. Drucker Professor of Management Sciences at Boston College, where she’s worked since 1997. Before that, she was a member of President Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers and assistant secretary of the Treasury for economic policy.

But before that, she worked for the Federal Reserve in Boston, where she and three co-authors published a paper that found pervasive racial discrimination in Boston’s mortgage lending in October 1992, sending shock waves throughout the community. She said she and her co-authors were punished professionally by the banking community for years, even though “generations of students have been given the data we used to see if they could massage it differently to alter the findings and nothing has eliminated the race component.”

Munnell and her colleagues’ analysis of 1990 HMDA data concluded that black and Latino applicants were two to three times more likely than whites to be denied a loan, even when their mortgage applications were virtually identical. The paper found high-income black buyers were more likely to be denied mortgages than low-income whites.

When critics argued the HMDA data Munnell and her colleagues relied on was incomplete, the team incorporated more data. It resulted in narrowing the gap between white and minority approval rates, but it also eliminated a lot of other explanations for the disparity that remained.

“Black and Hispanic mortgage applicants in the Boston metropolitan area are roughly 60 percent more likely to be turned down than whites,” the report concluded.

Lack Of Applicants

Subsequently, 23 annual editions of Campen’s “Changing Patterns” report indicate little change in that pattern.

“The main thing is not denials in these neighborhoods, it’s the lack of applications,” Campen said. “We live in a very segregated part of the world here.”

The report found that there was not a single home loan made to a black or Latino buyer in 86 of the state’s 351 cities and towns in 2015. In fact, Boston, Worcester, Randolph and Springfield accounted for 46 percent of all loans to black homebuyers in 2015. Lawrence, Springfield, Lynn, Boston, Worcester, Methuen and Revere accounted for 42 percent of all loans to Latino homebuyers.

No home purchase loans were made to black borrowers in 143 of Massachusetts’ 351 municipalities in 2015. That’s more than 40 percent. In 68 towns, there was a single loan made to a black borrower.

There were no home purchase loans made to Latino borrowers in 98 communities and just one made in 50 other communities.

Guaranteed Rate has the largest market share in Greater Boston and also ranked first in making loans to black and Latino buyers, according to the report. However, Leader Bank, which came in a close second, ranked 11th in lending to minority buyers. Wells Fargo came in 4th overall and 12th in lending to minorities.

New Administration, New HMDA Requirements

New, more detailed HMDA reporting requirements are slated to take effect at the beginning of next year for most lenders, but President Donald Trump’s executive orders to roll back regulations with promises of more to come call into question whether or not the new rules will take effect and how they will be enforced.

The more detailed reporting requirements bring up privacy concerns about what information will be released to the public. The report says the CFPB is expected to release a proposed rule on that later this year, which will be followed by a period of public comment and revision before the final rule is released.

“These new HMDA requirements were mandated by Dodd-Frank,” Campen said. “It took several years to write the new rules. They haven’t announced what will be made public. That will be done under the Trump administration. It’s possible that very little of the new information will make its way to the public.”

Munnell said she thinks it seems like attitudes toward minority applicants have changed since her paper was published, though the disparities persist.

“We shouldn’t have to live with this,” she said.