The mortgage crisis that brought the economy to its knees seven years ago was especially devastating for black communities, where homeowners who qualified for safe, traditional mortgages were often steered into ruinously priced loans that paid off handsomely for brokers and lenders while leaving borrowers vulnerable to foreclosure. The crisis left many middle-class minority communities strewn with abandoned houses, further widening the already huge wealth gap between African-Americans and whites.

A study published this month in the journal Social Problems lays out how this happened in Baltimore in the run-up to the recession and comes at a time when the banking industry and its friends in Congress are fighting proposed federal rules that would make it much easier to ferret out discrimination and enforce fair-lending laws.

The research, by the sociologists Jacob Rugh, Len Albright and Douglas Massey, focuses on 3,027 loans made in Baltimore from 2000 to 2008 by Wells Fargo, which in 2012 agreed to pay $175 million to settle allegations of predatory lending in Baltimore and elsewhere. The study takes into account credit scores, income, down payments — all of the information that was available to brokers and lenders when these loans were made.

It found that black borrowers in Baltimore, especially those who lived in black neighborhoods, were charged higher rates and were disadvantaged at every point in the borrowing process compared with similarly situated whites. Had black borrowers been treated the same as white borrowers, the authors say, their loan default rate would have been considerably lower. Instead, discrimination harmed individuals and entire neighborhoods.