CRL in the News

The Biden administration is moving to reinstate two key fair housing rules that were rolled back under President Trump, according to notices published this week by the Office of Management and Budget. The Department of Housing and Urban Development is looking to restore a 2013 rule outlining its use of the “disparate impact” legal standard in fair-lending cases and the 2015 “affirmatively furthering fair housing” rule meant to guide local jurisdictions on compliance with the Fair Housing Act.

“There is clear evidence that payday lenders target people of color,” said Marisabel Torres, director of California policy at the Center for Responsible Lending. She told me her organization is troubled by “any idea that mainstream banks are for white communities, while people who have historically struggled for middle-class security are offered predatory, wealth-stripping products.”

Also, the programs to help people who miss payments are better this time around, said Mike Calhoun, who runs the Center for Responsible Lending. “The good news is that those payments are generally added simply to the end of the loan with no additional fees or interest.”

“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.