CRL in the News
It’s been a decade since the financial crisis led to the Great Recession, which cost millions of Americans their jobs, homes, and savings. The “sand states” of Florida, California, Arizona, and Nevada were especially hard hit. At the center of this storm was the foreclosure crisis, the direct result of reckless mortgage lending facilitated by lax regulation.
The Senate bill “would allow for the return of many of the same lending practices that caused the mortgage meltdown,” said Yana Miles, senior legislative counsel for the Center for Responsible Lending, a research and policy group that seeks to curb predatory lending.
“It’s not surprising that this administration is weighing in on the side of industry over students and taxpayers,” Whitney Barkley-Denney, the legislative policy counsel at the Center for Responsible Lending, told Politico. “This is just a different verse of the same song we’ve been hearing over the past year.”
"Once again, the Department of Education has revealed that it is on the side of companies instead of standing by borrowers and their families," Whitney Barkley-Denney, a policy counsel with the Center for Responsible Lending, said in a statement. "Acting at the behest of servicers and their lobbyists denies an opportunity for comment by the 44 million Americans who share the burden of a still-growing $1.4 trillion in student loan debt.
Consumer advocates are highly critical. “It’s not surprising that this administration is weighing in on the side of industry over students and taxpayers,” said Whitney Barkley-Denney, legislative policy counsel at the Center for Responsible Lending, a consumer group. “This is just a different verse of the same song we’ve been hearing over the past year” from the Education Department.
These recent changes are just one piece of a broader trend that has swept across government since Trump took office—a gutting of anti-discrimination measures across the financial services, including mortgages, car loans, payday loans, and more. “This is a pattern we have observed, and it’s fairly alarming,” says Yana Miles, senior legislative counsel at the Center for Responsible Lending. “You have good policy that protects consumers and tries to address discrimination. We’re seeing these rules delayed, picked at, or invalidated.”
HR 3299, the so-called "Madden Fix," would reverse a court decision called Madden vs. Midland, which forbade banks from reselling loans to payday lenders if the loan's interest rate exceeded state limits. Rebecca Borne, senior policy counsel for the Center for Responsible Lending, said this bill would legalize what she called a "rent-a-bank" scheme. "It would permit non-bank predatory lenders to partner with banks, even superficial partnerships, to take advantage of banks' ability to pre-empt state law," she said.
"We know as a nation that homeownership is really important and it's the way that most of us have built our wealth over time," said Nikitra Bailey, an executive vice president with the Center for Responsible lending who oversees the group's coalition building and constituent relations. "When you're not inside the marketplace because of these challenges, then you don't get that opportunity, so you remain on unequal footing. So this racial wealth gap grows over time as opposed to shrinking over time."
In recent days, threats to the nation’s housing finance system have emerged. At the center of the controversy are two key issues: the obligation of mortgage lenders to ensure broad mortgage credit for all credit-worthy borrowers, and secondly, whether the nation will enforce its own laws banning unlawful discrimination.
"We are disappointed that Senators Corker and Warner are threatening to move to a new untested system removing the safeguards that ensure a more inclusive mortgage market and broad liquidity in rural communities and communities of color, and that ensure small bank lenders can compete on equal footing with larger banks," several groups, including the Center for Responsible Lending, said in a joint statement earlier this month.