the pandemic made it harder for many americans to qualify for mortgages but it hit middleto lowincome minority borrowers harder than most that’s the finding from a report by morgan stanley which analyzed homeownership in 2020 as covid19 swept the nation and shuttered swathes of the economy the bank found that for minority borrowers with the lowest credit ratings and black and hispanic borrowers in the middlecredit tier mortgage denial rates increased compared with the year earlier for comparable white borrowers those rates fell in the same period