Bank of America just launched a zero down payment mortgage in 21 cities

1. provide wealth to it's residents 2. fix crime and blight 3. help alleviate housing affordability crisis

Right now, a troubled area might have housing wealth be 1/4 of a nearby affluent area. But generally, this is simply because of crime and bad schools due to the cycle of poverty. If you're able to quickly alleviate the crime and poverty, suddenly that troubled area is basically as desirable for housing as the rest of the area.

Now, usually, this "gentrification" process has happened slower, over decades, and without the corresponding wealth accrual of its current residents. So it doesn't work out for the current residents and the clash between people is much harsher.

But what if all the wealth that was created when a $300k East Oakland home becomes $1m, was equally shared between investment and residents? Could you pay people (give them some type of community job) and/or make sure everyone has housing equity, to break that cycle, stop the crime, so that everyone wins?

It feels doable if tackled on a large scale, what am I missing?

> The GOP was in the White House when the Housing Bubble was brewed up in 2002–2005. President George W. Bush strongly pushed the finance industry to lend more to nonwhites at his Oct. 15, 2002, White House Conference on Increasing Minority Homeownership. There he told his federal regulators not to worry so much about traditional credit standards regarding down payments and documentation of income because he wanted to see 5.5 million more minority homeowners by 2010. ...

> Angelo Mozilo, CEO of Countrywide Financial...wanted to boost Countrywide’s share of the national mortgage market from 10 percent to 30 percent. He believed he could safely do that by increasing lending to marginal customers, especially Hispanics. ... In 2003, Mozilo, citing Bush’s push for minority home ownership, pledged to a Harvard audience that Countrywide would lend $600 billion to minority and lower-income borrowers by 2010. In 2005, he boosted that promise to one trillion dollars. ... Countrywide went under in 2008. ...

> For example, a 2015 paper by Lin, Liu, and Xie found that in a sample of 18,000 households: The difference in the mortgage delinquency rates between immigrants (15.7%) and natives (4.4%) is significant.

> Similarly, a 2013 paper by Luea, Reichenberger, and Turner revealed 2009 default rates for whites of 3.4 percent, blacks 11.3 percent (3.3 times the white rate), and Hispanics 16 percent (4.7 times the white rate)

> A 2013 paper by Reid featuring data from the fifty largest metro areas for mortgages originated just in 2005 shows that foreclosure rates by 2009 were twice as bad for blacks as whites and almost three times as bad for Hispanics as whites. By 2010, 10.5 percent of Hispanics were in foreclosure versus 4 percent of whites.

> According to Zillow, Hispanic neighborhoods nationally exploded in price by 280 percent from 2000 to 2006 versus about 160 percent for white neighborhoods. Remarkably, by the peak of the Bubble, the median home in a Hispanic neighborhood was worth almost a hundred thousand dollars more than the median home in a white neighborhood. Not surprisingly, the decline in home value from peak to trough was almost twice as severe in Hispanic neighborhoods as in white neighborhoods.

> In summary, immigration was seen as a vast boon to the housing market until it turned out that Hispanics tended not to be able to afford the huge mortgages they had been given. At that point in 2008, housing prices in several high-priced Hispanic-heavy states, such as California and Florida, plummeted, taking down financial institutions like Lehman Brothers, Washington Mutual, and Countrywide Financial. This carnage set off a national recession even in places without a Housing Bubble.

> Santayana famously said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” But what if you haven’t forgotten it because you never had a clue in the first place?