Abstract
Since the first case of racial housing discrimination was documented in 1855, Massachusetts has had a history of widespread institutionalized practices and policies such as racially restrictive covenants and redlining that have directly disadvantaged minorities from purchasing, owning, or obtaining a mortgage for family homes. My thesis looks at conforming first-lien conventional mortgages sourced from HMDA data from 2018 to 2020 and uses summary statistics and regression analysis to examine whether current Massachusetts mortgage lending practices continue to discriminate against Black applicants. My results indicate that relative to an equivalent White applicant, even when accounting for external credit variables, Black borrowers pay on average a 6 basis points higher rate spread and are just 55% as likely to be accepted for a mortgage.