Old Ways, New Impacts: Race, Residential Patterns, and the Home Foreclosure Crisis in the American South

The full impact of the U.S. housing crisis is still unfolding, with growing evidence that low-income groups and racial minorities have suffered the worst effects of foreclosure. This article addresses the spatial distribution of mortgage foreclosure in a Southern county that is residentially segregated in terms of race and wealth. We collected data manually from legal notices and public access property records between 2008 and 2011 and then used three basic approaches for analysis: visual identification, hot spot detection, and polygon-based spatial autocorrelation. We found that foreclosure activity followed the race–wealth divide by being heavily concentrated in older black neighborhoods, clustered in some white exurban developments, and largely absent from wealthy white areas. The results indicate that blacks and whites experience different patterns of foreclosure and that the housing crisis exacerbates geographical patterns of residential segregation.