The greater the number of African-Americans and Latinos living in a Richmond neighborhood, the tougher it is for home buyers in the neighborhood to get a mortgage approved or for existing owners to get their home loans refinanced.

That’s the rule of thumb that prevails among banks and online mortgage lenders, according to a new report from the Richmond-based fair housing watchdog group, Housing Opportunities Made Equal of Virginia.

The report suggests that mortgage lenders, including the five that make the most home loans to city residents, Wells Fargo, SunTrust and Bank of America and online lenders Capital Center and Movement Mortgage, could be flouting federal fair housing laws. Those laws date back nearly 50 years and were put in place to end private and government-enforced housing segregation and longstanding racial disparities in lending.

Lenders deny any return to the practice of redlining or basing lending on where people live. They indicate that credit scores, housing values and other race-neutral factors are at work.

But the HOME report seems to show that racial and ethnic disparities remain a fact of life when it comes to buying or refinancing a home.

“For each percentage point increase in the minority population in a (neighborhood), 12.5 fewer mortgages could expect to be made,” study author Brian Koziol found.

HOME’s findings are based on a review of seven years of reports lenders submitted to the federal government about mortgage applications, approvals and denials that include the race and ethnicity of would-be borrowers.

Mr. Koziol also found that for “each percentage point increase in the number of minority applicants per (neighborhood),” lenders made 46 fewer loans.

The fair housing group reviewed lenders’ Home Mortgage Disclosure Act reports for Jan. 1, 2007, to Dec. 31, 2013. This period largely covers the Great Recession, when the mortgage market collapsed and more than 4,700 Richmond homes went into foreclosure.

As the report notes, by 2013, lending for homes in Richmond had been cut nearly in half compared to 2007, and denials of loans rose as credit was tightened.

Mortgage applications dropped from 15,011 in 2007 to 8,470 in 2013, with refinancing applications falling from 25,994 in 2007 to 11,759 in 2013.

Homeownership levels also dropped among all segments of the population, with only 43 percent of residents now being homeowners in Richmond.

But the hammer of tighter credit hit hardest among African-American and Latino residents, who generally have fewer assets and less wealth, HOME found. As a result, only 36 percent of African-American residents in Richmond own homes currently and only 20 percent of Latino residents do, compared with 54 percent of white residents.

So even as the home market began to heal, the HOME report found that “black applicants, regardless of income, were less likely to receive a home purchase loan” or be approved for refinancing.

Most notably, the data shows that 25 percent more African-American applicants of upper income were rejected for mortgages or refinancing than white applicants with upper incomes, Mr. Koziol stated.

While Richmond has a majority-black population, the report found that white borrowers received the lion’s share of home loans in the city, although the denial rate was up for white people as well.

Still, 48 percent of white applicants were approved for new mortgages, while 13 percent were denied. That’s a sharp contrast with black applicants, 26 percent of whom were approved for home loans and 35 percent who were not. On refinancing applications, 40 percent of white owners were approved while 32 percent were denied. By contrast, only 26 percent of black borrowers were approved while 37 percent of black applicants were denied.

“HOME has been very concerned about the shifts in lending away from minority communities in recent years” as documented in the report, said Heather Crislip, president and CEO of the advocacy group that has championed an end to race-based discrimination in housing in the Richmond area since 1971.

“Homeownership is critical for creating stable neighborhoods and building wealth for families,” Ms. Crislip stated. She expressed hope that the report would bring attention “to the need for greater availability of credit and mortgages to rebuild communities devastated by the foreclosure crisis.”

Lenders do not accept the report’s findings of racial disparities in lending.

“The report does not take into account a number of legitimate, credit-related factors that are part of the lending process,” Wells Fargo spokesman Tom Goyda stated in largely dismissing the report.

“Most notably, when evaluating mortgage denials, the study does not control for an applicant’s ability to repay a loan, as evidenced by documentation of employment, income, assets and past credit performance, as that data is not currently available” in the required reports that Wells Fargo and other lenders submit to meet mandates of the federal Home Mortgage Disclosure Act. The act was passed in 1975 to force lenders to show who got loans and who did not, by race and ethnicity, among other factors.

Mr. Koziol acknowledged that home values in various neighborhoods, as well as the factors Mr. Goyda mentioned, were not taken into account because of a lack of data. He also noted another shortcoming — that his report focused on data for loans on which people self-identified their race or ethnicity. Loans where borrowers did not provide that information account for potentially as much as 65 percent of the loan applications. He also said he did not include reported information on home improvement loans.

For, Mr. Goyda, that’s reason enough to defend Wells Fargo, which he stated was “the top lender in Richmond and nationwide to all racial and ethnic groups, to lower-income consumers and in lower-income neighborhoods” from 2010 to 2013.

In Richmond during that three-year period, Wells Fargo was involved in 2,218 total loans and approved 546 home mortgage loans, 1,472 home refinance loans, well above its closest rival, SunTrust, which approved 445 home mortgage and 724 refinancing loans during the period, or 1,169.

SunTrust spokesman Michael McCoy also dismissed any suggestion the bank redlines neighborhoods. He stated that SunTrust, like other banks, “is in the business of making loans to qualified borrowers without regard to race, sex or geographic location or any other basis prohibited by applicable law. We are working hard to attract qualified borrowers to help more people achieve the dream of home ownership.”

HOME conducted the study of mortgage lending at the request of City Councilwoman Ellen F. Robertson, who also chairs the board of the city’s Affordable Housing Trust Fund she helped create. She also spent more than 15 years leading a housing improvement program in the Highland Park community in North Side.

The 6th District representative, Ms. Robertson said she requested the report to get a picture of the market now that a recovery is underway.

Ms. Robertson said the report backs up what she has been hearing about the high level of mortgage rejection for people seeking to buy homes in the predominantly black neighborhoods she represents.

“I think the report indicates a failure on several fronts,” she stated. “The first is the historic and ongoing disinvestment in many of the city’s neighborhoods. Certainly, failure to enforce the Community Reinvestment Act that requires banks to invest in low- to moderate-income areas is part of the story.

“But as is made clear in the report, mortgage lending is lacking in specific neighborhoods for a multitude of reasons: The cycle of redlining, purposeful exclusion, deliberate concentration of poverty, predatory lending, and foreclosures,” she stated.

“The epidemic has created neighborhoods that remain largely undesirable to potential homeowners.”

She said she plans to speak with banking officers to “explore the prospect of targeted banking products and of increase investment in the city’s Affordable Housing Trust Fund.”

HOME also is recommending that more be done to reduce barriers to buyers, including increasing down-payment assistance and expanding financial education and credit counseling to improve borrowers’ chances of qualifying for home loans. The city has long provided funding for both efforts, with more than 2,000 people assisted since 1990. But the efforts need to be expanded, HOME stated.

The report also recommends that more work be done to introduce new housing models that would provide more affordable options for buyers. One example would be homes that are deed-restricted to remain affordable. Another example would involve community land trusts in which a nonprofit retains the land and the buyer pays just for the house. Other remedies could include expansion of the city’s housing trust fund and development of condo-style homes in which multiple families own units in the same building.

HOME also urges the city to use its zoning powers to encourage development of more affordable housing and to do more to persuade lenders covered by the Community Reinvestment Act to meet the needs of lower-income and minority borrowers.