Free Fair Housing Training on July 24th
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Monday, July 17, 2023
Wednesday, July 12, 2023
Fair Housing Enforcement News:
HUD CHARGES CALIFORNIA LANDLORD WITH SEXUAL HARASSMENT & DISCRIMINATION
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has charged the owner, property manager, and maintenance worker of a single-family property in Bakersfield, California, with sexually harassing a female tenant and retaliating against her when she complained about it, in violation of the Fair Housing Act. Read HUD’s Charge. The Act prohibits housing providers from discriminating because of sex, including sexual harassment - unwelcome sexual advances and comments, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical behavior that is sexual in nature.
HUD’s Charge of Discrimination alleges that the maintenance worker harassed the tenant because of her sex, including daily sending her graphic sexual text messages and groping her in her home. After the tenant told him that the conduct was unwelcome and complained to the property manager, saying she planned to go to the police, the landlord allegedly refused to make critical repairs to her heating appliance, leaving her without heat and gas for a month. The tenant's daughter fell ill from the lack of heat. As the tenant was vacating her home, the landlord changed the lock on her door to prevent her from getting her belongings and refused to return her security deposit.
A U. S. Administrative Law Judge will hear HUD’s charge unless any party elects to have the case heard in federal district court. If an administrative law judge finds, after a hearing, that discrimination has occurred, the judge may award damages to the tenant for losses as a result of the discrimination. The judge may also order injunctive relief and other equitable relief, to deter further discrimination, as well as payment of attorney fees. The judge also may impose civil penalties. If the federal court hears the case, the judge may also award punitive damages.
People who believe they are the victims of housing discrimination should contact HUD at (800) 669-9777 (voice) 800-927-9275 (TTY) or the Department of Justice at (800) 896-7743 or 202-514-4713. Additional information is available at www.hud.gov/fairhousing and www.justice.gov.
Free Civil Rights Training on Service Dogs
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Monday, July 10, 2023
Update on Previous Fair Lending Post:
Advocates Urge Maryland to Adopt a State CRA Law to Increase Racial Equity & Reinvestment
The following is a summary of a whitepaper by Josh Silver of the National Community Reinvestment Corporation (NCRC) entitled "A Maryland CRA Law Would Marshall Considerable Resources for Increasing Racial Equity and Reinvestment." In this article, Silver presents reasons why Maryland should adopt its own state Community Reinvestment Act (CRA). This article was referenced in the June 23, 2023 NCRC Just News. Download the whitepaper.
Economic Action Maryland has released a Policy Brief that advocated a Maryland CRA Law. Economic Action Maryland, the NCRC, and other housing advocates plan to push for the legislature to pass a bill in the 2024 Session. Del. Melissa Wells (D-Baltimore City) introduced legislation this year to propose a state-level community reinvestment act, but withdrew it.
The Major Points of the Whitepaper & Policy Brief
(1) A Maryland CRA law would apply to banks and credit unions with about $46 billion in assets. It would cover mortgage companies that made more than 68,000 loans in three years. The assets and lending activity are considerable resources that should have a CRA obligation for reinvesting in underserved neighborhoods.
(2) A state CRA law would help narrow racial and equity gaps in lending. In Baltimore, for example, 33% of recent loans went to African Americans whereas they constituted 62% of the population.
(3) State law can plug gaps in the federal law. The federal CRA applies to banks, whereas other state laws in Massachusetts and Illinois also apply to mortgage companies and credit unions.
Impact of a Maryland CRA Law
A state CRA law would apply CRA to institutions with tens of billions of dollars which offer tens of thousands of loans. State-chartered banks have about $38 billion in assets and state-chartered credit unions have nearly $8 billion in assets. The top ten independent mortgage companies issued almost 68,000 home purchase loans in Maryland during 2018-2020.
Applying CRA to institutions with these large resources would channel significant increases in loans and investments to neglected communities in Maryland. A state CRA law is needed to address sizable racial and income disparities in access to loans. In all of Maryland, lenders made 20% of their single-family loans to African Americans in 2018-2020 while 29% of the population was African American. The gap is even wider in Baltimore, which is 62% Black but where only 33% of loans went to African American borrowers.
While some gaps have narrowed slightly, underserved communities continue to suffer. For the whole state, lending institutions made 32% of their loans to low- and moderate-income (LMI) borrowers during 2018-2020 while 31.6% of the population was LMI. A significant disparity is in Baltimore where LMI borrowers received 58% of the loans but were 73% of the residents.
A state law would complement rather than duplicate federal law, as the experience of other state CRA laws have demonstrated. It can address needs and neighborhoods not explicitly addressed by the federal CRA. A state law could authorize Maryland’s Commissioner of Financial Regulation to conduct separate exams for individual counties. This would enable examiners to assess performance more rigorously in Baltimore and underserved rural counties. In contrast, federal CRA exams usually rate performance on a metropolitan level that hides poor performance, which most often occurs in the underserved counties. In addition, a CRA law could require the examiners to assess the sustainability of lending by considering default and delinquency rates. This is very important for underserved communities and is frequently overlooked by federal CRA exams.
A Maryland state law could contain provisions designed to counter CRA ratings inflation and that would motivate improvements in performance to communities of color. On a federal level, the pass rate of banks on their CRA exams is 98%. A state law should counter this inflation by introducing a fifth rating and by requiring examination of performance in underserved neighborhoods, which are disproportionately communities of color. By law, banks that fail their exams cannot receive deposits from a state agency. The Commissioner could also adjust fees based on ratings received.
Studies have shown that the federal CRA has increased lending and banking services in modest income communities. A state CRA law would expand and widen this. The gains in wealth from a rigorously enforced CRA, driven by homeownership and small business ownership, would benefit Maryland through higher gross domestic output, higher tax revenues, and reduced dependence on the state safety net.
Sources:
Read the June 13, 2023 NCRC article.
Fair Lending News:
CFPB Releases 2022 Fair Lending Annual Report to Congress
On June 26, 2023, the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau(CFPB) released its Fair Lending Annual Report to Congress, describing its fair lending activities in enforcement and supervision; guidance and rulemaking; interagency coordination; and outreach and education for calendar year 2022.
In 2022, the CFPB’s fair lending work centered on the consumers and communities most affected by unlawful discrimination:
- Working with our federal and state partners to address redlining as well as confronting deep-seated discrimination in the home appraisal industry.
- The CFPB also released several reports shining a light on factors that may influence fair access to credit, including how medical debt affects tens of millions of consumers’ credit profiles, how people in under-resourced rural areas struggle to access financial services, and the challenges faced by justice-involved individuals and families.
- We also issued several rules and guidance documents reaffirming the importance and applicability of fair lending protections for prospective applicants, applicants for credit, and existing account holders. Through our enforcement and examination activity, interpretive rules and advisory opinions, circulars, and other tools, we continue to make clear that fair lending must be a top priority for all financial institutions.
The Fair Lending Annual Report to Congress fulfills the CFPB’s statutory responsibility to, among other things, report annually to Congress on public enforcement actions taken by other agencies with administrative enforcement responsibilities under the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA), and assessments of the extent to which compliance with ECOA has been achieved. It also fulfills the statutory requirement that the CFPB, in consultation with HUD, report annually on the utility of the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act’s requirement that covered lenders itemize certain mortgage loan data.
Through 2023 and beyond, the CFPB will continue to stand up for those consumers and small businesses who are the least resourced to fight back against exploitation.
As noted in the Future of Fair Lending section at the end of the Report, we are focused especially on the increased use of advanced and emerging technologies in financial services. Consumers and small businesses are not well-resourced to fight back against—and may not even know they are subject to—algorithmic bias, digital surveillance and data harvesting, dark patterns, and advanced technologies that are black boxes. The CFPB has increased its expertise in data science and analytics to ensure that we can identify fair lending violations at each stage of the credit lifecycle. And we will continue to take a whole-of-government approach to protect consumers from harmful uses of automated systems marketed as artificial intelligence. As the CFPB reiterated in conjunction with the release of our joint statement with the Department of Justice, Federal Trade Commission, and U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, we will hold creditors and service providers accountable for fully complying with fair lending and other federal consumer financial laws, regardless of the technology they choose to use.
The CFPB also continues to fight against bias in home appraisals and redlining. Families and entire communities are harmed by biased, inaccurate appraisals, as well as geographic discrimination, or redlining. Whether it takes the form of excluding neighborhoods with certain demographics from mainstream credit or targeting them with predatory products, the CFPB is combatting these unlawful practices to achieve meaningfully restorative outcomes for the affected consumers and communities.
The CFPB remains committed to protecting individuals, small businesses, and communities from discrimination, holding institutional and individual bad actors accountable, and ensuring robust and comprehensive remedies for violations of the laws under our jurisdiction. In the years to come, we look forward to advancing our work to ensure a fair, equitable, and nondiscriminatory credit market, with equal economic opportunity for all consumers and their communities.
Book Review:
Just Action: How to Challenge Segregation Enacted Under the Color of Law
by Leah Rothstein and Richard Rothstein
352 pages. W.W. Norton, 2023. Hardcover, $25.00
In his best-selling book The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (W.W. Norton, 2017), Richard Rothstein provided “the most forceful argument ever published on how federal, state, and local governments gave rise to the reinforced neighborhood segregation” (William Julius Wilson). This book discusses specific instances, strategies, and organizations that are successfully working to reduce housing segregation. According to Lisa Rice, president of the National Fair Housing Alliance: Just Action "contains plain, concrete actions we can take to be agents of change in the neighborhoods where we live, moving our nation closer to the ideals upon which it was founded. Just Action is the book America needs for this moment."
Sources:
Thursday, July 6, 2023
Author Discusses "The Lynching of Matthew Williams & the Politics of Racism in the Free State"
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