“I’m sure you’ve heard the saying, when America gets a cold, black America gets the flu,” Atlanta homeowner and real estate worker Robin O’Neil told “Marketplace” recently. She was talking specifically about a problem plaguing some Atlanta neighborhoods more than others: an inability to bounce back from the housing crash. O’Neil says her house is worth less now than when she bought it in 1997, and she’s not alone.

The ways subprime loan peddlers targeted minority homebuyers in the boom years before the crash has been well documented, but looking at the recovery issue in Atlanta, Dan Immergluck decided to apply big data to the metro’s real estate picture.

The professor of city and regional planning at Georgia Tech used Zillow estimates to determine that racial demographics are the primary difference between neighborhoods that have fully recovered and those that haven’t. Majority African-American and Hispanic zip codes are recovering more slowly than majority white zip codes with similar housing stock.

In addition to the problems like widening the wealth divide and homeowners facing foreclosure, the issue trickles down to renters too. As Next City columnist Alexis Stephens reported in September, vulnerable Atlanta neighborhoods have made way for corporate investors to buy up single-family homes and turn them into rental units — with varying degrees of success for the renters.