HUD Homes / VA Homes News

HUD Secretary Alfonso Jackson was in Chicago on Tuesday to present the city with $49 million to help end homelessness.

Jackson said the Bush Administration will be providing $49 million to help support programs for the homeless, and the money will help fund initatives for things like substance abuse, job training, mental illness and veterans affairs.

The City has added 2,500 units of permanent housing for the homeless since 2003, but Jackson admits that there's a lot more than can be done.

About 1/3 of America's mortgage foreclosures probably could have been averted if black and Hispanic home buyers hadn’t been so scared to borrow from banks, HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson said today.

With memories of the discrimination that happened during the 1950’s and 1960’s, many minorities were fearful that they would be denied a loans, and thus they steered away of banks, and the traditional home financing route, Jackson said.

Instead, they went to mortgage insurance companies, which are unregulated, and mortgage brokers, who have some degree of regulation, but not as much as banks.

Jackson told the Chicago Sun-Times that, "We’ve got to get to the point—and a lot of times people don’t want to talk about this — where blacks and Hispanics go to banks and stop being afraid. … There’s always been a taint of suspicion that banks would not make the loans. Maybe back in the ‘50’s and ‘60’s, that was true. We know we had great redlining at that point in time. That’s not the case today. The Truth in Lending Act, the Community Re-Investment Act — make it clear banks have an obligation to work with low- and moderate income people.”

Chicago had about 14,000 foreclosures in 2007, up from 10,000 in 2006.

Blacks of all income levels in Chicago were more than twice as likely as whites to receive the subprime and ballooning adjustable rate mortgages that can be a prelude to foreclosures.

Jackson was in Chicago to deliver a Bush administration grant of $49 Million to help the city combat homelessness.

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