Juan Gonzalez thinks the record number of subprime defaults in New York result from what he calls reverse-redlining.

Mayor Bloomberg thinks borrowers also bear blame—

"Yes, people have been borrowing monies that they can't pay back," Bloomberg said. "It's a process that's been going on a long time.

"You can blame the subprime lenders. You can blame the people that borrowed the money without having any reasonable expectation of ever paying it back."

"This is the marketplace at work and people should not try to live beyond their means," he added.

And in our latest featured essay, Howard Husock warns that bills to let lenders off the hook may augur a return to redlining–

Thursday’s Wall Street Journal makes clear that subprime mortgage delinquencies are not just a problem for the bond markets and homeowners—they’re a special problem for cities. The maps and tables of Where Subprime Delinquencies are Getting Worse show that subprime defaults are geographically concentrated and that much of that concentration occurs in cities. In Oakland, 12 percent of all subprimes are delinquent for 60 days or more; in Sacramento, 14 percent, Boston, 15 percent, Minneapolis 16.5 percent and Detroit, 24.6 percent. Any delinquency reflects personal hardship, but such concentration can also mean neighborhood problems. If one’s neighbors are behind on mortgage payments, it’s not likely they will paint or do roof repairs either. Such are the ways neighorhoods—and tax bases—go downhill.

One might call this the “default and delinquency belt” phenomenon. I first saw it several years ago on the near-South Side of Chicago, where a community organizer (not Barack Obama) took me on a tour of the Back of the Yards neighborhood. He’d painstakingly assembled data on mortgage defaults—and could point out which houses on which blocks were in trouble. It wasn’t hard to tell. Some had been abandoned and taken over by drug gangs. Blue collar neighbors understood their life savings, tied up in their homes, to be at risk.

The questions arise, however, as to why such urban delinquency belts, as mapped by Journal, have come to be, and what, if anything can or should be done about them?

Continued here