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Legislators, Regulators Call for Additional Scrutiny of Mortgage-Lending Industry After Markup Investigation Finds Disparities
Minnesota attorney general warns lenders: Don’t be surprised if you’re investigated
Emmanuel Martinez
Investigative Data Journalist
Emmanuel Martinez was a data reporter for The Markup. He left in April 2022. For the previous six years, he worked in the same position for the investigative news outlet and public radio show Reveal in the San Francisco Bay Area, using data, statistics, and programming to tell stories. His most recent work examined access to homeownership and mortgage discrimination, where he analyzed 31 million housing records to prove that people of color were being routinely denied mortgages in 61 major U.S. metro areas. Emmanuel has also worked on a tool to help match unidentified bodies with missing persons’ reports, reported on why wildfires in the West are growing larger and sparking closer to homes, and dug into water shortages in California’s Central Valley, which produces a quarter of the nation’s food.
His work has garnered awards such as The Alfred I. duPont Columbia University Award, The George Foster Peabody Award, and The Selden Ring Award for Investigative Reporting. In 2019, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
A graduate of UC Irvine, Emmanuel received his master’s degree from the University of Southern California, where he studied radio and data journalism. He interned at KPCC, the Los Angeles NPR station.
Prediction: Bias
Crime Prediction Software Promised to Be Free of Biases. New Data Shows It Perpetuates Them
Millions of crime predictions left on an unsecured server show PredPol mostly avoided Whiter neighborhoods, targeted Black and Latino neighborhoods
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Markup Investigation Cited by Officials in Announcing New Mortgage Discrimination Enforcement
The multi-agency effort will target redlining—including digital redlining through black-box algorithms
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The Secret Bias Hidden in Mortgage-Approval Algorithms
Even accounting for factors lenders said would explain disparities, people of color are denied mortgages at significantly higher rates than White people
Show Your WorkDenied
How We Investigated Racial Disparities in Federal Mortgage Data
Even after including factors the mortgage industry said explain differences, lenders are still more likely to deny people of color than White people under similar financial circumstances
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Dozens of Mortgage Lenders Showed Significant Disparities. Here Are the Worst
Mortgage companies affiliated with the nation’s three largest home builders were at least twice as likely to deny applicants of color as similar White borrowers
The BreakdownCoronavirus
Is the U.S. Government’s Lifeline Service Really a Lifeline?
Poorly marketed and under-resourced, it’s not always serving the poor
Coronavirus
Can You Get a Coronavirus Test? It May Depend on Where You Live
Five scenarios that show the differences in states’ testing algorithms
Show Your WorkCoronavirus
How We Analyzed States’ Coronavirus Testing Plans
The BreakdownCoronavirus
How Many Americans Lack High-Speed Internet?
The COVID-19 crisis highlights the costs of the U.S. digital divide