Wells Fargo foreclosure pipeline in Los Angeles, Feb 2013

Darker green = more minority

Since the Housing Bubble burst in the Sand States in 2007, I've been pointing out that the Boom/Bust had been in sizable measure an overly optimistic bet on blacks and, especially, Hispanics. And, this fact ought to be remembered when thinking about, say, immigration policy.

Yet, nobody seems to be able to remember any of what just happened, or at least not well enough to notice implications. How often have we been assured that Immigration Is Good for the Economy.

About the only folks who have remembered this pattern, however, have been liberal activists. For example, here is a new report (big PDF) from three "community" groups about homes still in Wells Fargo's foreclosure pipeline in California, all these years later, and how Latinos and African-Americans are hit by far the hardest.

It's fun to imagine that defaulters were rich white people, but, statistically that just isn't true. For example, above is a map of Wells Fargo's foreclosure pipeline in the Los Angeles basin as of last month. The darker the green, the higher the minority percentage in that zip code.

Basically, foreclosures in L.A. remain concentrated in the black & Latino 'hood: South-Central (or as they now officially have rebranded it after the unfortunate incidents of 1992: South Los Angeles).

The question is not, centrally, Who Was to Blame? But can we learn from the past?