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The City of Philadelphia has filed suit in U.S. District Court against banking giant Wells Fargo, alleging discriminatory practices in its mortgage business.
The suit alleges that Wells Fargo, which gives out more mortgages than any other lender in Philadelphia, disproportionately recommended and sold more high-risk mortgages to black and Latino borrowers than whites, even when the minority borrowers had credit scores that would have qualified them for safer loans, the Philadelphia Inquirer reports.
The city alleges the bank sold more than 1,000 unnecessarily expensive, high-interest loans to prospective black and Latino homeowners since 2004, with full knowledge that they were unlikely to be able to repay them. Wells Fargo allegedly was three times as likely to offer such loans to people of color than to whites with the same credit score.
The city cited a recent Supreme Court decision between Wells Fargo and the City of Miami in its decision to file, saying that the bank's lending practices were directly responsible for foreclosures that meant unpaid taxes to the city and violations of the Fair Housing Act. A spokesman for Wells Fargo cited the same decision in denying the merits of the suit, quoting Justice Stephen Breyer's opinion that banks "cannot be held responsible for harm they didn't cause."
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