Alyssa Wiltse-Ahmad

Uriah Cachora recently moved into a newly created position at Enterprise Bank and Trust. Her title is Assistant Vice President for Community Development and her mission is community outreach and education.

Brainard’s ideas could shift the conversation around the Community Reinvestment Act, said Jesse Van Tol, chief executive of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition.

When the proposed changes were first announced, the National Community Reinvestment Coalition estimated they could result in the loss of up to $16 billion in small business lending to low- and moderate-income areas over five years.

“As written, this proposal is bad enough to warrant overturning in whatever way possible,” said Jesse Van Tol, CEO of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition. “If the Democrats win big in 2020,” such a move “will be relatively high on the regulatory agenda if the proposed changes are finalized.”

“This is issue No. 1,” said Jesse Van Tol, who heads the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, a collection of more than 600 groups that pressure banks to invest more in underserved communities. “We’re rallying everyone who cares about civil rights, affordable housing, community development and basic fairness to oppose these rules, and we aren’t alone.”

Often when Dedrick Asante-Muhammad gives a talk about race and economics, it’s to audiences who might not have a base level of understanding. That was not his audience at the region’s first St. Louis Racial Equity Summit, he said, so he decided to be more clear with his language.

As Ed Gorman of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition pointed out not long ago, “CDFIs, just judged by the total capital being invested, are a remarkable success over the last 25 years, but I think everybody knows we could all do better.”

Experienced groups adept at applying the CRA in a positive way, such as the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, have objected to the proposed changes.

Income inequality linked to gun violence, but unequal distribution of resources isn’t an accident. According to a study published last year by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, three out of four neighborhoods that were redlined in the United States decades ago continue to struggle economically.

A group of community reinvestment groups, including the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, said in a joint statement last week that the proposal “utterly fails to achieve what were supposed to be the primary objectives of rule changes: greater clarity for lenders and better results for low- and moderate-income communities and people of color.”

Additionally, the National Community Reinvestment Coalition’s recent study ranked DC as America’s most gentrified city, and commercial property owners are shifting property tax burden increases to tenants.

As the National Community Reinvestment Coalition noted in its comment letter, “[t]he lack of change implies that the NCUA is not keeping pace with the growing number of large credit unions and the changing dynamic of the industry that it regulates.” Once again, I couldn’t agree more.  

“Along with the banking industry, we and our members across the nation share the desire to modernize CRA,” Van Tol said in a statement. “However, the Trump administration seems determined to radically overhaul and water down the compliance system by introducing a numerical measure of performance that has been widely criticized, by bankers as well as community advocates, as overly simplistic.”