(bob herbert/nyt) I’ve been visiting some of the people who have been most affected by the subprime mortgage debacle. It’s a largely bewildered, frightened group that includes people like Dorothy Levey, a 79-year-old widow who sits alone inside the small house she has lived in for 41 years, afraid to answer the telephone or the door. She has every reason to be worried. The monthly note on her house in the city of Markham, just outside Chicago, is approximately 100 percent of her meager monthly income. Broke and behind in her payments, Ms. Levey expects a foreclosure notice to show up any day, followed by a visit from “the sheriff, or whoever they send to tell you to get out of your own home.” For years redlining and other discriminatory practices served as roadblocks to homeownership in neighborhoods with significant numbers of poor and working-class residents, many of them black and brown. Making affordable loans available to such residents was important. But we have since moved to the opposite extreme. Over the past several years mortgage lenders recognized that there were big bucks to be made in those neighborhoods, and they pounced. They weren’t satisfied to offer reasonable loans at reasonable rates to customers who could handle them. They went far beyond that. They took advantage of a poorly regulated landscape to exploit unsophisticated home buyers and homeowners with mortgages and refinancing schemes that were all but guaranteed to result in a tragic explosion of foreclosures. (For the full article view source. It is worth a read. A reminder that people are suffering behind the subprime mortgage disaster).

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