The recession’s end is not yet in sight. Foreclosures and evictions continue to empty communities and unemployment remains high. Nor are the recession’s most devastating consequences evenly distributed–communities of color continue to bear the heaviest weight. In May 2009, the Applied Research Center, ColorLines’ publisher, released Race and Recession, a report on racial disparities in the recession and its longterm impact on communities of color. More than a year later, we revisit one of the communities we profiled.

Foreclosure Losses Still Mounting
Seth Freed Wessler revisits a northwest Detroit community we originally profiled in Race and Recession and finds little has changed. Nationally, President Obama’s foreclosure prevention program has done little to slow the pace of loss in communities of color.

The Original Race and Recession Report
Race and Recession: How Inequity Rigged the Economy and How to Change the Rules tells the stories of people of color who are disproportionately affected by the recession. While all Americans worry about economic insecurity during this crisis, its most damaging effects have been unevenly distributed. People of color are unemployed, hungry, homeless and without healthcare at alarming rates. Many have already fallen through the widening cracks in the social safety net, and countless more are about to go under. Race and Recession uncovers root causes of longterm racial inequities that fed the economic crisis and proposes structural solutions to change a system that threatens everybody’s future.

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