Worcester Business Journal

8 Worcester Business Journal | May 24, 2021 | wbjournal.com W orcester, like cities around the rest of the country, is in the midst of a cultural reckoning. Bolstered by grassroots organizing, human service nonprofits and other concerned citizens, city leadership and stakeholders are engaging residents in conversations about an array of deep- seeded inequities, many centered around and rooted in all of the ways systemic racism is woven into the fabric of everyday life in Central Massachusetts. In the past year, these conversations have centered around issues like police Racial discrimination in mortgage lending has created communities within Worcester where residents are le behind economic and educational achievements One city, different neighborhoods brutality against the city's Black and Hispanic communities, as well as racial inequities in the city's schools and on the school committee. ese are community- oriented issues: Children typically attend schools closest to them based on district mapping, and neighborhoods of color around the U.S. are demonstrably and statistically over-policed. A 2019 Pew survey found, for example, Black adults were five times more likely than white adults to report they were unfairly stopped by police because of their race or ethnicity. And a 2016 Guardian database tracking people killed by police in the U.S. found 6.6 Black people per million were killed, compared to 2.9 for white people. at number was significantly higher for Native Americans, who were killed by police at a rate of 10.13 per million people. And those, of course, are just two data sets. ese types of racial injustices become community-oriented in more tangible, spatially-oriented ways when residential segregation is taken into consideration, particularly in homeownership between Worcester's white and non-white residents. In that way, the community issue is literally concrete. Since December, the Worcester Business Journal and the Worcester Regional Research Bureau have been jointly investigating racial discrimination in Greater Worcester on one of the key aspects of the American Dream: homeownership, which is one of the main ways to build wealth over generations. e WRRB-WBJ findings, using Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data in conjunction with U.S. Census Bureau statistics, confirmed what is easily anecdotally observable: e city of Worcester suffers from racial segregation on its northeast/southwest axis. In some of the city's wealthiest, northwestern census tracts, owner-occupied houses are more than 90% white, compared to several pockets on the city's east side, where that drops as low as 60% or less. A separate April report from Worcester's Department of Economic Development, compiled by the Central Massachusetts Regional Planning Commission and Barrett Planning Group of Plymouth, further found in 2017, non-white racial groups were denied conventional mortgage loans at rates sometimes twice as high as white applicants. While white mortgage applicants were denied at a rate of 7.9%, Black or African American applicants were denied at rates of 14.5%. e same data, when broken down by ethnicity, showed that Hispanic or Latino applicants were denied at a rate of 16.48%, while the white applicant denial PHOTO/MATT WRIGHT Rich dreams, poor dreams Racial discrimination in mortgage lending and home ownership – a key aspect in building wealth in America – creates neighborhoods of have's and have-not's in Greater Worcester, where educational success and economic development are harder to achieve. Part 1 of this joint five-month investigation between Worcester Business Journal and the Worcester Regional Research Bureau explores how this discrimination has led to unequal school environments and worries about gentrification in Worcester's poor, but up-and-coming, neighborhoods. Read the entire WRRB report on www.wrrb.org. WBJ and WRRB have put out this joint digital edition for all this research and are conducting a webinar event exploring potential solutions to these problems. For details on the webinar in the coming weeks, visit WBJournal.com. Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander ................. 60% Black or African American ......... 15.53% American Indian/Alaska Native ....................................... 11.11% Asian .......................................... 8.06% White .......................................... 7.86% 2 or more minority races ................ 25% Joint (white/minority race) .......... 8.84% Mortgages denied in Worcester An April report from the City of Worcester showed how mortgages were denied, by race, in the city in 2017. Source: Home Mortgage Disclosure Act via City of Worcester Race of mortgage applicant Denial rate BY MONICA BUSCH Worcester Business Journal Staff Writer Ramon Borges-Mendez, associate professor of community development and planning at Clark University, stands in Worcester's Main South neighborhood.

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