Research Reports
Reflections on Traditional American Indian Ways, 1998
Threats to Tribal Sovereignty, 1998
Traditional American Indian Leadership: A Comparison with U.S. Governance, 1997
Executive Summary
This research project was a collaborative effort between the American Indian Research and Policy Institute (AIRPI), the Roy Wilkins Center for Human Relations and Social Justice at the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs and the Center for Urban and Regional Affairs (CURA) at the University of Minnesota.
The project is not intended to be a beginning or an end for defining American Indian experiences with housing and home ownership, rather it is an opportunity for policy makers, scholars, and the larger community to grasp a people's reality.
The idea of American Indian home ownership is related to the concept of urbanization of American Indians. Ownership of a house and the phenomenon of urbanization represents a time in the lives of American Indians for which they were really not prepared. They had never experienced anything like this before. Throughout history, American Indians lived a nomadic lifestyle moving where food and shelter were available. In the twentieth century, during and after the onset of urbanization, they continued moving to where food and shelter were available.
However, a new twist was added. It now became clear to American Indians that it takes money to provide food and shelter. To obtain money one has to have employment; and employment was scarce on the reservation. The need for money thus contributed to the urbanization phenomenon and brought forth the need for housing and later the concept of home ownership.
In mainstream America, an understanding exists about the natural, logical flow of job, money, and home ownership. However, no transitory flow of logic exists for Indian features within the context of cultural, spiritual, and traditional ties to the land, family, and community. AIRPI approached this project based on the concept of discovering what we should know as American Indians and about the experience of American Indians as told by the community members themselves.
Specifically, we ask the questions: 1) given the emphasis on home ownership, what is the situation for American Indians, and 2) are American Indian applicants rejected for home loans at a higher rate than white applicants and can this be explained? Analyzing the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) data for 1990, and 1992 Census data provides some of the answers to these questions.
In addition, we hypothesized that there may be more explanation to the home ownership rates and mortgage lending decision outcomes for American Indians that can be provided through the analysis of the HMDA data. Thus, this project gathered broader information regarding home ownership and mortgage lending in the Twin Cities Indian community through conversations and interviews.
The additional questions we attempted to address include: Are there cultural barriers in addition to economic barriers for achieving home ownership? Has the legacy of U.S. Indian policies and urbanization impacted housing patterns and the current continuum of housing needs for American Indians in the Twin Cities urban area? If so, how?
Responses:
- Understanding the components and process for home ownership was a challenge for Indian people leaving the reservations during the early period of urbanization.
- Home may not always mean an individual house that someone purchases and "owns." A place to call home can mean Indian Country, a particular neighborhood, or the reservation for example.
- Even though many American Indians live, work, and perhaps were born in an urban area, there remains strong ties to extended families living on the reservation and to the reservation itself.
- Many Indian community members and housing providers noted that home ownership could possibly complement cultural needs of Indian people. Home ownership can include family or generational housing.
- In 1990, there were approximately 7,000 American Indian households with incomes below $15,000. These households would have a difficult time accessing home ownership in the conventional lending market. This is almost half of all American Indian households in the state.
- For American Indians in Minnesota, the HMDA dataset had 523 loan applications in 1992. The mean (or average) income for American Indian applicants was $52,470. The average amount for loans requested by Indian applicants was $65,580. The reject rate for American Indian applications in Minnesota was 11.3 percent. For whites, the reject rate was approximately 7.5 percent.
- There were five loan applications made in the lowest income census tracts. Four of those loans fell into census tracts with greater than 50 percent people of color. An additional seven loan applications came from census tracts with median incomes between $15,960 and $23,940 and which are greater than 50 percent nonwhite.
- The primary reasons for the rejection of loan applications for American Indians were high personal debt-to-income ratios and bad credit records; 19.2 percent and 30.8 percent were denied for these reasons, respectively.
This research project was a collaborative effort between the American Indian Research and Policy Institute (AIRPI), the Roy Wilkins Center for Human Relations and Social Justice at the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, and the Center for Urban and Regional Affairs (CURA). The Wilkins Center approached AIRPI with findings generated from a study on mortgage lending discrimination in the Upper Midwest. These general findings were discussed with AIRPI, and a decision was made to move forward with a collaborative project in order to seek a fuller interpretation of the data with respect to American Indians and to enrich the quantitative analysis with more qualitative information gathered through conversations with members of the Twin Cities American Indian community.
American Indians have long been the target of research. Researchers simply wanted to say, "we have researched American Indians," as though researching Indians was a conquest. Researchers have also put Indians into the framework of European experiences. Thus, there are parallels that are made that may not make sense from an Indian perspective. In addition, much of the research conducted on American Indians stems from the early nineteenth century and has been interpreted by anthropologists. These first commentaries or "discoveries" of Indian people tend to be the most widely-cited descriptions of American Indian life in the canon and remain an influence on how present day scholars base their research. Very little new information pertaining to the experiences of American Indians has been added from the 20th century.
Unlike purely academic research, which is undertaken based on the researcher's curiosity, this research project was generated in cooperation with the Indian community. It is hoped that this project demonstrates a new model for balancing empirical policy analysis and culturally appropriate research methodologies. In an attempt to generate authentic, reality-based research for and by American Indians, it is critically important to include the community's rich cultural background in order to form a solid basis for the framework of this research project. Through reality-based research, an improved understanding of the unique legacy that Indians bring to the American situation is possible. Moreover, responses to the current plight of many Indians in need can be crafted on the basis of the realities of their situation, with respect for their history, culture, and spirituality which are so important to an effective response.
This project is not intended to be a beginning or an end for defining American Indian experiences with housing and home ownership, rather it is an opportunity for policy-makers, scholars, and the larger community to grasp a people's reality and to begin to understand a people based on events surrounding their reality in the 20th century, not the romanticism of American Indian life as seen through the lens of the 19th century.
Significant attention has been focused on increasing home ownership in low and moderate income communities and communities of color around the country. Laws have been passed to spur banks and other lenders to provide credit and loans within communities that have historically been "passed over" based on the notion that the people living in these communities possess poor credit, high foreclosure rates, and insufficient income to become home owners.
Because many of the lending decisions were based on such perceptions of low and moderate income people and people of color, these decisions were defined as discriminatory and overt practices stemming from those perceptions (i.e. red-lining, "steering," etc. 1) were outlawed. The Home Mortgage Disclosure Act of 1975 (HMDA) and the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 (CRA) were the first attempts to prohibit discriminatory activities within the mortgage lending process.
Since the passage of these laws, improvements have been made to data collection under HMDA in order to examine the practices of the federally regulated lenders covered by these laws. Researchers, policy makers, and community activists have engaged in analysis of the annual HMDA data which provides descriptions about the loan and the applicant. The data include information about each loan by amount, type, location, lender, the outcome of the lending decision and so on. Information about the individual applicant is also gathered by income, gender, and race. However, it should be noted that this data collection is provided only for metropolitan statistical areas (MSA's) as defined by the U.S. Census.
The questions much of the previous research attempts to answer include: are minority applicants rejected for home loans at a higher rate than white applicants and can this be explained? The HMDA data allows researchers to compare equally qualified applicants across races and neighborhoods as a way to examine the outcomes of the lending decision.
Analysis of the HMDA data for the Twin Cities American Indian community has been provided through the course of this project. However, we attempted to take this empirical analysis a step further. We hypothesized that there may be more explanation to the home ownership rates and mortgage lending decision outcomes for American Indians that can be provided through the analysis of the HMDA data. Thus, this project gathered broader information regarding home ownership and mortgage lending in the Twin Cities Indian community through conversations and interviews. The questions we attempted to address include: Are there cultural barriers in addition to economic barriers for achieving home ownership? Has the legacy of U.S. Indian policies and urbanization impacted housing patterns and the current continuum of housing needs for American Indians in the Twin Cities urban area? If so, how?
1. Common practices for some realtors and mortgage lenders were to draw "red lines" on maps around areas that they would not lend to and or to "steer" a minority home seeker away from predominately white neighborhoods and toward predominately minority areas.
The
Well-Being of American Indian Children in Minnesota: Economic Conditions,
1994
top | Projects
| Research | Publications
| Links | About Us
| Contact Us | Home
© Copyright 2002, American Indian Policy Center. All Rights
Reserved.
1463 Hewitt Avenue • St. Paul, MN 55104 • tel: 651-644-1728
aipc@cpinternet.com
Last updated:
Tuesday November 1, 2005