Fred Steed has a six-figure income as a top official with the Montgomery County health district. The 66-year-old African-American director of community health has a wife with a good job at a local hospital. He has an 820 credit score. He owns the 1,344-square-foot home in West Dayton where he grew up.

What he doesn't have and can't get: a $35,000 refinance loan.

Steed is one of hundreds of upper-income blacks to be denied loans in the Dayton, Ohio region. A statistical analysis by the Dayton Daily News found that in 2008, upper-income blacks in the ...

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Often in computer-assisted reporting we can envision the perfect database to answer the burning questions of our days. We see what it should contain and how it should be constructed. We even visualize what our results will show. More often than not, what data we find have, shall we say, challenges. And someone may have collected them for a purpose other than what we intend. Such is the case of the dataset from the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, otherwise known to CAR journalists as HMDA. I was approached this past fall by Bill Buzenberg, executive director of The Center for ... Read more ...

It began with an email while I was on vacation. “Not to distract you,” my boss wrote, “but wanted to pass along that when you get back, you’re going to be taking on a … massive nationwide subprime data crunch.” At first, I wondered what I had done to deserve such a chore. It should have been obvious: Five months earlier, I had abandoned my job for a week to attend a CAR Boot Camp, where I muddled through the lessons, returned to work bragging about how much I had learned, but then did little to show I had spent ...

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