Mortgage Lending

Home ownership has been the primary means for most American families to build and pass on inter-generational wealth. However, government-sanctioned racial discrimination in housing and mortgage finance markets robbed many families of this opportunity, and today’s racial homeownership gap is barely changed from the levels of more than 50 years ago. Closing the homeownership gap is essential to closing the racial wealth gap.  Additionally, predatory mortgage lending practices drained trillions in wealth from families, especially Black, Latino, low wealth and low-income Americans. CRL successfully advocated for the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which has made the mortgage market far safer for consumers. CRL is building on this progress by working to ensure that all credit-worthy borrowers have access to fair, affordable, and sustainable mortgages. And that policy makers and market participants develop solutions that are appropriate to respond to the scale of this housing crisis. 

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A Smarter Qualified Mortgage Can Benefit Borrowers, Taxpayers, and the Economy

A Smarter Qualified Mortgage Can Benefit Borrowers, Taxpayers, and the Economy

In the Dodd-Frank Act, Congress required lenders to make a reasonable and good faith determination that the borrower has the ability to repay a mortgage loan (ATR) before the loan is made. It also created a category of loans, called Qualified Mortgages, or QM, that are presumed to comply with the ATR requirement given product and borrower credit characteristics that...
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Research
Mortgage Lending

Testimony: A Review of the State of and Barriers to Minority Homeownership

Testimony: A Review of the State of and Barriers to Minority Homeownership

Homeownership is the primary way that most middle-class families build wealth and achieve economic stability. Wide access to credit is critical for building family wealth, closing the racial wealth gap, and for the housing market overall, which in turn, contributes significantly to our overall economy. Today, the opportunity to purchase, maintain and refinance a home has not reached significant portions...
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Testimony
Mortgage Lending

Testimony: Ensuring Access to Safe and Affordable Mortgage Loans for All Creditworthy Borrowers

Testimony: Ensuring Access to Safe and Affordable Mortgage Loans for All Creditworthy Borrowers

Our Housing Finance System and the GSEs provide essential services to families and lenders across the country. Rural borrowers, small lenders and lower wealth borrowers particularly benefit from these services because the GSEs provide access to a national market, making home loans more affordable overall. The GSEs, though, had critical flaws leading up to the crisis. Since then, fundamental reforms...
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Testimony
Mortgage Lending

A Home is More Than a House

A Home is More Than a House

A home is more than just where families come at the end of the day—it is also where children are raised and memories are created. Homeownership is the primary way families of modest means build wealth, which can be passed on to the next generation. In recent years, most mortgages approved for lower wealth families and consumers of color were...
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Research
Mortgage Lending

Comments on Enterprise Capital Requirements FHFA RIN 2590-AA95

Comments on Enterprise Capital Requirements FHFA RIN 2590-AA95

Download the full text of the comment. In determining the capital standards for the GSEs, it is first critical to remember the primary drivers of the 2008 financial crisis and how those conditions have changed, affecting both the likelihood and severity of a future crisis. Next, the assumptions and mechanics of setting the capital regime must be closely examined in...
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Comment Letter
Mortgage Lending

Comment: OCC Should Not Weaken Community Reinvestment Act

Comment: OCC Should Not Weaken Community Reinvestment Act

Today, the Center for Responsible Lending, Americans for Financial Reform, and other leading national labor, civil rights, consumer advocacy, fair housing, and legal services organizations responded in a joint comment to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency’s (OCC) Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPR) on how the agency should update Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) procedures. The groups pressed...
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Comment Letter
Consumer Finance Mortgage Lending

Comment to the OCC in Strong Support for Effective Enforcement of the Community Reinvestment Act

Comment to the OCC in Strong Support for Effective Enforcement of the Community Reinvestment Act

These comments are submitted on behalf of the National Fair Housing Alliance (NFHA) and the Center for Responsible Lending (CRL) to express our organization’s strong support for effective enforcement of the Community Reinvestment Act, and our concern about the approach proposed by the OCC in the above-referenced Federal Register notice, dated September 5, 2018, entitled “Reforming the Community Reinvestment Act...
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Comment Letter
Mortgage Lending

Testimony: The GSEs and Ginnie Mae Provide Important Access to Mortgage Credit in Underserved Communities

Testimony: The GSEs and Ginnie Mae Provide Important Access to Mortgage Credit in Underserved Communities

Both the GSEs and Ginnie Mae continue to provide critical mortgage capital to underserved communities. The GSEs purchased more than two million homes and refinance mortgage loans in 2015, including almost half a million loans to low- and moderate-income borrowers, nearly 400,000 loans to borrowers of color and over 300,000 loans to borrowers living in rural areas. At the same...
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Testimony
Mortgage Lending

Lessons from the financial crisis: The central importance of a sustainable, affordable and inclusive housing market

Lessons from the financial crisis: The central importance of a sustainable, affordable and inclusive housing market

On this tenth anniversary of the financial crisis, there have been many retrospectives on the US government’s response to that catastrophe, with more to come. The commentary to date has largely focused on the extraordinary measures taken to prevent a much deeper collapse of the American and global economies. Measures were implemented to address the immediate crisis and reduce the...
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Research
Mortgage Lending

Opposition to S. 2155, the So-Called “Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act”

Opposition to S. 2155, the So-Called “Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act”

The undersigned organizations write to express our opposition to S. 2155, the so-called “Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act,” and urge you to oppose this harmful legislation. As you know, S. 2155 passed in the Senate on March 14th. The bill already contains destructive policies that roll back or eliminate essential protections put in place by the Dodd-Frank...
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Letters to Congress
Mortgage Lending
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