Subprime fiasco hitting females

BALTIMORE — At Vixxen Hair Salon, the main topic of conversation has always been money. But since August, Anjanette Booker, the owner, has noticed a new focus. "Now it's money and foreclosures," Booker said.

The Vixxen salon, along with the nearby salon Hair Vysions, is one of the informal social centers for the Belair-Edison neighborhood, a community of brick row houses that have in recent years been bought largely by single black women with children.

For each of the last four years, more than half of the foreclosures in this neighborhood have been homes owned primarily by women, according to an analysis of public records by the Reinvestment Fund, a nonprofit community development organization.

The foreclosures threaten the neighborhood's fragile stability. And they highlight a broader dimension of the housing meltdown: subprime mortgages, which are driving the foreclosure rate, have gone disproportionately to women.

Single women have been among the fastest-growing groups of homeowners in recent years, and in Baltimore they accounted for 40 percent of home sales in 2006, twice the national average, according to the National Association of Realtors. Nearly half of these mortgages were subprime, according to the National Community Reinvestment Coalition.

"When I bought my house, it was the American Dream," said Kue McIntyre, 33, a single mother of three who is scrambling to avoid losing her row house, on which she defaulted after losing her job. "Now I need to save it for my boys. If it was just me, OK, I'd have to give up my first home. But it's different when you have it for the kids. When they turn 18, I want this to be theirs."

Subprime mortgages are high-cost loans made to borrowers with low income or credit scores. These loans make up just 13 percent of existing home loans but account for 55 percent of foreclosure starts, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association.

Though women and men have roughly the same credit scores, the Consumer Federation of America found that women were 32 percent more likely to receive subprime loans than men. The disparity existed within every income and ethnic group. Blacks and Latinos are also more likely to get subprime loans than comparable white borrowers.

In another study, the National Community Reinvestment Coalition found that women received 37 percent of high-cost home loans in 2005, compared with just 28 percent of prime loans. Preliminary research by the organization suggests that this gap may have tightened as subprime loans crested in 2006.