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SAN DIEGO — Despite the rise in home ownership across the country, blacks and Latinos were nearly twice as likely to be turned down for mortgage loans than whites, according to a study released Thursday. 

Discrimination based on ethnicity or income, known as redlining, in the mortgage industry is just bad as it has ever been, according to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN. 

“The banks have said, ’The numbers are changing, there’s less discrimination than before,’ but this study shows that that’s not really the case,” Rebekah Kebede, a spokeswoman for ACORN’s Sacramento office, said in a telephone interview. 

“People need to call them on what they’re doing. People need to say ’We know that you are discriminating, we notice,”’ Kebede said. 

Nationwide in 1999, blacks were denied mortgages 54 percent of the time, while Latinos were denied 39 percent of the time and whites were denied mortgages 27 percent of the time, the study said. 

ACORN analyzed data from the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council about the lending activity of more than 7,800 institutions covered under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act. These lending agencies have more than $30 million in assets or make a substantial number of home loans annually. 

Overall, more loans from all ethnic groups were granted in 1999 as compared to previous years but there was no significant improvement in the number of loans to ethnic minorities, ACORN officials said. 

“About 95 percent of the increase in loans to minorities were increases in higher cost, subprime loans, or lenders giving loans to minorities with higher interest rates than conventional loans,” Kebede said. “That’s not really an improvement at all.” 

Banking industry executives said the numbers were deceiving. 

“I think there are dramatic improvements,” said James Ballentine, director of the Center for Community Development at the American Banking Association. “This is a very competitive market and lenders are reaching out more than ever to everyone.” 

Many lenders have programs to reach all potential home owners, such as educational seminars to teach people how to improve their credit in order to qualify for loans, he said. 

The ACORN study fails to recognize that with more mortgage applications being received by lenders, there will be more rejections, Ballentine said. 

Loans are generally approved based on the ratio of income to debt and the value of the property for sale, which the study did not examine, he said. 

“It’s also difficult to look at the study and determine the debt levels and credit histories of the people who applied and were denied,” Ballentine said. 

The Home Mortgage Disclosure Act statistics report only the ethnicity, gender and income of those who applied for mortgages and the percentage of loans granted and denied. 

The ACORN report also noted that: 

— Upper-level income blacks were turned down for loans 2.63 times more often than upper-level whites; 

— Upper-level income Latinos were more likely to be denied loans than middle-income whites; 

— In Brockton, Mass., while blacks make up 7.3 percent of the overall population, they also were granted 5.1 percent of the loans; and 

— For Latinos in Miami, Atlanta and Memphis, their loan acceptance rates were the same or only slightly less than their percentage of the overall population. 

Asian Americans were not included because their loan acceptance rates closely resemble those of white applicants.