CRL in the News

Nikitra Bailey, executive vice-president with CRL added, “While families and communities struggle to recover from their tremendous lost wealth, no community should be left behind. All Americans deserve to be part of the nation’s financial recovery. . . .Without that access, the nation’s wealth gap will only grow wider.”

Just as we are beginning to see signs of recovery in housing, federal regulators are considering a policy that could threaten economic progress and financial opportunities for middle-class families. This policy would require a 10 percent or other minimum down payment on home loans before the federal government will label them “safe” as “qualified residential mortgages.”

In a 2007 piece for the NAACP aptly titled “Financial Apartheid,” Nikitra S. Bailey of the Center for Responsible Lending painstakingly documented how the subprime mortgage crisis and the return of predatory lending practices affected communities of color.

Only a few years ago, the scarcity of credit was a problem for women, low-income Americans, and borrowers in communities of color. Today, because of advances in technology and changes in the marketplace, many in these same populations are bombarded with offers from subprime mortgage lenders, check cashers, payday lenders, and other fringe bankers. Credit in the United States is now more widely available than ever before. Yet this expansion has been accompanied by a sharp rise in predatory lending, which undermines the economic benefits of home ownership and helps perpetuate the widening wealth