CRL in the News

And it is doing just what many economists and consumer groups have urged: making credit more widely available. “Not all subprime lending is abusive. It just happened that all of the abuses happened in the subprime space,” said Nikitra Bailey, an executive vice president of the Center for Responsible Lending. “The regulators now have to be really vigilant to make...

“It is concerning that families of color remain underserved in our current mortgage system,” said Nikitra Bailey, executive vice-president with the Center for Responsible Lending (CLR). “Owning a home remains an important building block for families to create economic stability. Thus, the primary and secondary mortgage markets have a responsibility to ensure that all Americans who are qualified can access...

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...