Professor Lynne Dearborn Works for Better Communities

By Meghan Dufresne, News Editor

Assistant Professor Lynne Dearborn’s teaching and research focus on social, cultural, and community design issues in architecture. Her courses introduce students to a range of critical studies that consider the social, political, and economic contexts within which architects practice. Her teaching is often interdisciplinary, connecting ideas from urban planning, landscape architecture, architecture, and community development. Her design studios address real-world conditions and often work with non-profit community development groups and governmental agencies. In 2004, she received the AIA Education Honor Award for an interdisciplinary design studio she co-taught in spring 2003 with Stacy Harwood, Assistant Professor of Urban and Regional Planning, and Laura J. Lawson, Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture.

Targeting Predatory Lenders

Professor Dearborn is currently conducting a study of predatory lending processes and outcomes in several minority communities in the Midwest. Predatory lending is an illegal practice in which unscrupulous lenders issue mortgages with extremely high interest rates to vulnerable individuals who are often forced into foreclosure. Victims often are unaware of their rights and end up with sub-standard housing and enormous debts.

Inequitable access to credit is centuries-old problem, with roots in the historical patterns of racial discrimination in the United States. The situation was institutionalized in the 1930s through the practice of redlining, when lenders denied loans to individuals in minority neighborhoods deemed to be financially risky. Congress attempted to put an end to the practice of redlining with the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, however in many ways, discriminatory housing practices continue. In the 1990s, many lenders began to market subprime loans to the very same minority areas that had historically been redlined; the practice has been referred to as “reverse redlining.” Subprime loans are typically issued to individuals with blemished or limited credit histories. The loans carry a higher rate of interest and less favorable conditions than prime loans to compensate for increased credit risk. To date, no uniform national guidelines have been implemented to prevent lenders and brokers from employing predatory tactics when issuing subprime mortgages and loans. Unfortunately, an increasing number of unscrupulous lenders tend to target subprime lending efforts at vulnerable individuals in predominantly low-income and minority communities. Additionally, a number of lenders involved in subprime lending place illegal or coercive clauses in their mortgage documents. Some states have introduced laws to curb such practices, but often the individuals involved are unaware of their rights and unable to obtain legal assistance.

While subprime lending has provided much needed financial stimuli and spurred redevelopment and homeownership in some low-income neighborhoods, it has also devastated a number of communities. Often, predatory lenders artificially inflate the sale price of older homes by concealing significant problems; by inflating the price, lenders are able to issue even bigger mortgages. For homeowners with limited incomes and resources, it is often impossible to fix these serious maintenance problems when they are discovered. When borrowers become trapped with uninhabitable homes and mortgages that were made without regard for their ability to make the necessary payments, a downward spiral of guilt, debt, foreclosure, and bankruptcy begins.

Professor Dearborn’s current study is focusing on predatory lending practices and housing quality outcomes in St. Clair County, Illinois. To date, her work has identified several significant aspects of predatory lending in St. Clair County: first, a direct relationship between the sharp rise in foreclosures between 1996 and 2000, and the presence of predatory loan characteristics; second, a direct correlation between race and foreclosures as a result of predatory lending.

Working with the Land of Lincoln Legal Assistance Foundation in East St. Louis, Illinois, Dearborn has been documenting and reporting code violations and housing quality deficits as part of a predatory lending class action lawsuit. She hopes the lawsuit will provide the victims of predatory lending practices with the means to improve the quality of their housing and will discourage future lenders from targeting this community and similar communities throughout the state. The St. Clair County Intergovernmental Grants Department and the University of Illinois’s East St. Louis Action Research Project (ESLARP) funded this research.

According to Dearborn, it is easy to locate vulnerable targets for predatory loans by reviewing census information and having knowledge of an area. She found that many people who had been taken advantage of in this way were elderly persons and single mothers. Based on these findings, Dearborn is developing ways to educate potential homeowners about the dangers of predatory lending practices.

She recently received a grant and fellowship to extend her study to four Native American communities in the Midwest where predatory lending has also been identified as a significant problem. Her work on this study will begin this summer. Predatory lending is an increasingly serious problem among Native Americans since many have access to only a limited number of banks. On this project, she will be working in collaboration with researchers from the Building Research Council who have studied indoor air quality, mold, mildew, and insect infestation at Native American reservations across the country. This new study will look specifically at owner-occupied houses, and will be carried out with assistance from the Office of Native American Programs at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

Engaging Her Studios, Engaging the Community

This semester, Dearborn’s graduate design studio is exploring ways to design of healthy residential communities. The syllabus challenges students to address physical, economic, environmental, social, and psychological health concerns in their designs. At the beginning of the semester the entire studio visited a sustainable housing development built by the Pokegan Band of the Potawatami in Dowagiac, Michigan. Next, students spent several weeks researching sustainable site planning, sustainable building materials and practices, and indoor air quality. Currently, half of the studio is working on a development proposal for the City of Urbana at a site on Kerr Avenue. Many of the other students are working on a proposal for housing for young professionals at the site of the former Burnham Hospital on Springfield Avenue between Locust and First Streets in Champaign.

Through the East St. Louis Action Research Project (ESLARP), Dearborn is currently involved in several design-build projects with community partners in East St. Louis, Illinois. One project involves converting a house into a domestic violence shelter; another involves working with a neighborhood organization to turn an abandoned school into a youth facility. She believes ESLARP is an incredibly valuable opportunity for architecture students to gain practical experience with building and construction issues while providing much-needed assistance to one of the poorest communities in Illinois.

Dearborn is also working to engage architecture students in addressing housing issues in the Champaign-Urbana community. She is currently working to organize a collaborative project with Eades Street Housing Corporation in Champaign. In addition, she is working with four graduate students on an urban development and housing project in Peoria with the Peoria Housing Authority. The team is working on a proposal for a development of mixed-use buildings and mixed-income housing within a sustainable development framework along the riverfront in Peoria.

Through her research and teaching, Dearborn brings exciting new perspectives on housing, community design, and cultural sensitivity to the School of Architecture. Her passion for the subject is inspiring for students who enroll in her studio and seminars. Dearborn believes that service learning through programs like ESLARP is an important experience that all college students should participate in; through her predatory lending studies, Dearborn applies her scholarship to helping communities throughout the state.