Mortgage discrimination or mortgage lending discrimination is the practice of banks, governments or other lending institutions denying loans to one or more groups of people primarily on the basis of race, ethnic origin, sex or religion. Instances of mortgage discrimination occurred in United States inner city neighborhoods from the 1930s and there is evidence that the practice continues to a degree in the United States today. In the United States, banks practiced redlining or denial of financial services including banking or insurance to residents of areas based upon the racial or ethnic composition of those areas, either directly or through selectively raising prices. Prior to the passage of the 1974 Equal Credit Opportunity Act and Housing and Community Development Act, lenders and the U.S. federal government frequently and explicitly discriminated against female mortgage loan applicants. Background African Americans and other minorities found it nearly impossible to secure mortgages for property located in redlined parking zones. The systematic denial of loans was a major contributor to the urban decay that plagued many American cities during this time period. Minorities who tried to buy homes continued to face direct discrimination from lending institutions into the late 1990s. The disparities are not simply due to differences in creditworthiness. With other factors held constant, rejection rates for Black and Hispanic applicants was about 1.6 times that for Whites in 1995. Fairness in lending was improved by the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, passed in 1975. It requires banks to disclose their lending practices in the communities they serve. In the 1970s, the private sector fight against mortgage discrimination began to be led by community development banks, such as ShoreBank in Chicago. Contemporary Several class action mortgage discrimination claims have been filed against lenders across the country, alleging that those lenders disproportionately targeted minorities for high cost, high risk subprime lending, which has resulted in disproportionately higher rates of default and foreclosure for minority African American and Hispanic borrowers. FHA loans, a federal mortgage program, went to the white majority and reached few minorities. In a study done in Syracuse, between 1996 and 2000, of the 2,169 FHA loans issued only 29 or 1.3 percent went to predominantly minority neighborhoods compared with 1,694 or 78.1 percent that went to white neighborhoods. Mortgage discrimination played a significant part in the real estate bubble that popped during the later part of 2008, it was found that minorities were