CRL in the News

“The focus at the outset was on speed, and it came at the expense of equity,” said Ashley Harrington, the federal advocacy director at the Center for Responsible Lending. In the program’s final weeks — it is scheduled to stop taking applications on May 31 — President Biden’s administration has tried to alter its trajectory with rule changes intended to funnel more money toward women- and minority-led businesses, especially those with only a handful of employees.

Testifying on behalf of the Center for Responsible Lending, Nikitra Bailey, Executive Vice President recounted the legacy of federal housing policies whose sum created today’s financial inequities.

“We absolutely need those changes,” said Ashley Harrington, the federal advocacy director at the Center for Responsible Lending. In December, Congress made retroactive changes to Paycheck Protection Program loans for farmers that allowed those borrowers to recalculate and increase previously finalized loans.

“The current economic crisis has added crushing debt onto the backs of Americans who can least afford it, which is disproportionately Black, Latino, and Native American communities,” observed Lisa Stifler, the Center for Responsible Lending’s Director of State Policy. “Payday and other high-cost, predatory loans make this situation even worse. Strong loan interest rate caps on the state and federal levels are essential to lifting the burden of debt that so many people have been forced to live with.”

Student debt in this country now exceeds credit card debt at $1.7 trillion of debt held by 44 million people. Calls are mounting for President Biden to fulfill a campaign promise to tackle this issue. Ashley Harrington, the Federal Advocacy Director of the Center for Responsible Lending (CRL), explains how student debt disproportionately impacts communities of color, particularly Black Americans.

Consumer advocates are very alarmed by the underlying power imbalance between wage-access providers and the low-income workers they serve, exposing once again Silicon Valley’s penchant for dressing up in utopian visions the dystopian brutality of its desire to make money. “If you think about someone working at Walmart, Target, someone like that,” says Keith Corbett, of the Center for Responsible Lending, “their pay is going to maybe be $150 to $200 for a week. They’re desperate for their money, so they’re willing to give up some. But what they’re going to find is when payday comes, the money

Los hispanos y afroamericanos enfrentan múltiples barreras raciales para acceder a préstamos hipotecarios y tener vivienda propia. La situación -lejos de mejorar- empeoró, advirtió el Centro para Préstamos Responsables.

This is causing frustration for people helping small business owners prepare to apply, like Rochelle Sparko, the director of North Carolina Policy at the Center for Responsible Lending. She says this could end up hurting the businesses the changes intended to help. In reality, she says there isn’t really a two-week window dedicated to the smallest businesses. More like 7 to 9 days.

Before the pandemic, some 800,000 self-employed people were behind on their student loans, according to a recent report by the Center for Responsible Lending. And some 500,000 people of color may have been shut out of PPP help because of the exclusion of struggling student loan borrowers.

To help consumers put these recent changes into perspective, the Center for Responsible Lending analyzed the average APR for a $300 loan in each state based on a 14-day loan term. Generally, payday lenders levy a “finance charge” for each loan, which includes service fees and interest, so many times consumers don’t always know exactly how much interest they’re paying.