Forbes, April 27, 2018: Mortgage lending to poor under attack and blacks, hispanics priced out of housing markets
Reports that the Trump administration planned a big revision to the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act came out in January. The CRA is a long-standing attempt to push back against lender redlining of minority neighborhoods and a lack of equal mortgage lending to equivalent borrowers.
Now there’s news from the Wall Street Journal that the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), one of the major bank regulatory bodies, has suggested a major change in lending rules that help the poor. It’s a continuing pattern of an attempt to roll back regulations in an area that, as history has shown, badly needs them.
A change in lending rules to make business easier and more attractive for bankers at the potential loss of minority and lower-income communities would only exacerbate wealth inequality and home ownership.
