Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

THE ECONOMY:

With little data, panel plans talk on foreclosures and minorities

If You Go

  • What: A town-hall discussion about foreclosure problems in Southern Nevada
  • When: 7-9 p.m. today
  • Where: County Commission chambers, 500 S. Grand Central Parkway
  • Broadcasts: Live on Clark County TV, cable channel 4. Panel discussion will be taped for broadcasts on KNPR 88.9-FM and KCEP 88.1-FM.

Enlargeable graphic

Click to enlarge photo

Panelists at tonight’s town-hall meeting on how the foreclosure crisis affects minorities in the valley are handicapped by a lack of research on the topic.

According to its hosts, public radio stations KNPR 88.9-FM and KCEP 88.1-FM, the event is meant to address “how ethnic minorities have disproportionately been affected” by foreclosures in the region.

But panelists and others said they couldn’t point to any research that details that effect. They said the region needs more information on the issue. The Las Vegas Valley is, after all, ground zero for the crisis, topping the rest of the nation in monthly foreclosure rankings for most of the past two years.

Tonight’s event, they said, underscores how the valley and Nevada as a whole tend to be slow to study key issues.

“Las Vegas can spend millions on showing things off, on gaudiness ... but when it comes to important research, there’s none,” Keith Schwer, director of UNLV’s Center for Business and Economic Research, said when asked about the lack of in-depth, local studies on foreclosures.

Panelist Gail Burks, president of the Nevada Fair Housing Center, said part of the problem is a lack of funding and infrastructure for gathering information. Another obstacle is the sheer amount of resources needed to help people facing foreclosure, which leaves little time to stop and do research.

The little-publicized release last week of a Nevada Association of Realtors-commissioned survey of 300 people serves, ironically, to illustrate the need. Only one of the five panelists interviewed mentioned the survey to the Sun. The others, instead, pointed to different studies that show blacks and Hispanics received subprime loans in higher percentages than whites in the years leading up to the current crisis.

“If you peel back the onion, if a group gets disparate treatment in acquiring the loan, it is easy to make the assumption they would be disparately affected” by foreclosures, said Kenneth LoBene, state coordinator for the Housing and Urban Development Department and another of six panelists.

The Realtors association survey on foreclosures provides no support for that idea, however. It shows percentages of minorities that are smaller than the actual population.

The survey’s participants were chosen because of factors that made them likely to face foreclosure, said Joel Searby, a consultant with SGS, the firm the association hired to do the study. Of the 307 people surveyed, 7.8 percent were black, nearly the same as the state population, and 14.7 percent were Hispanic, considerably less than the state population of 25 percent.

Searby said the association commissioned the study because “there was a real void of information on those who had been through foreclosure, though there was a glut of data on mortgage information.” The survey asked participants about educational level, household income, loan type and other economic and social characteristics.

The information is meant to help Realtors identify homebuyers who are less likely to face foreclosure in the future, but “it is also good information for legislation and other public policy,” Searby said.

Burks said the federal government has data on subprime loans and foreclosures, but she allowed that no one in the Las Vegas Valley has crunched all the numbers in an easy-to-use way.

Local elected officials also spoke of the need for user-friendly information on the subject. Clark County Commissioner Chris Giunchigliani, one of the panelists invited to tonight’s event, said she has been hearing for about a year that Hispanics in her district are disproportionately affected by foreclosures, in part because they got into loans they didn’t fully understand because of language barriers. Recently, however, she has heard that other, newer areas on the outskirts of the valley are being hit by foreclosures, affecting other demographic groups. But the commissioner said she has no way of knowing what’s true.

“I know what’s been said, but I haven’t seen any data,” she said.

Leticia Bravo, the state minority ombudsman and another panelist, said that about seven of the 10 calls she receives daily about mortgage modification scams are from Hispanics.

“But I can’t speak to the universe of foreclosures and how it affects minorities” in Nevada, Bravo said. “I’m not sure if there is any data on this.”

Bravo, who used to work in Chicago, said that in other states, “there is always a ton of data.”

Putting more information together could help “move forward and avoid this in the future,” she said.

Join the Discussion:

Check this out for a full explanation of our conversion to the LiveFyre commenting system and instructions on how to sign up for an account.

Full comments policy