NCRC

In a draft comment not yet submitted but provided to CQ Roll Call, the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, a pro-consumer group, said it finds the question about online bank deposits “puzzling” because Justice doesn’t currently consider these deposits. It recommends that the department improve its data on those deposits, such as requiring them to be “geocoded,” before including them in DOJ analyses.

But Jesse Van Tol, CEO of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, said that he has heard from borrowers that lenders are beginning to request that their customers start repaying loans.

“I’ve seen … lenders starting to batten down the hatches and start to push for repayment as possible, maybe less flexibility or less of an open mind about flexibility,” Van Tol said. “I don’t know if that is being driven by a concern over credit losses. I think people know how bad this can get and creditors want to avoid being the ones caught on the short end of the stick.”

Lending practices have long favorited white business owners. In a study about discriminatory banking practices, the National Community Reinvestment Coalition found that black and Hispanic men who applied for loans faced more scrutiny than their white counterparts, despite having stronger applications. This is backed up by statistics from the US Federal Reserve. Their data shows that banks are twice as likely to reject loan applications from black business owners. Black borrowers also have more difficulty obtaining personal and homeowner loans.

As a result, representatives from HousingNOLA and HousingLOUISIANA – along with partner housing advocacy groups like Enterprise, the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, and the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority – are calling on elected officials and other community leaders to take several steps toward heading off the foreboding mortgage foreclosure situation and help Louisiana homeowners.

A study by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition found that Philadelphia was one of seven cities that collectively account for nearly half of the gentrification in the entire nation. Out of these, Philadelphia had some of the highest rates of Black displacement.

“This is something that thought leaders, Black leaders, like Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and W.E.B. DuBois—all of them have talked about this concept. It’s what led to black Wall Street,” said Sabrina Terry, the director of strategy and development at the National Community Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC).

That law is “the thumb on the scale that gets banks to take a second look at the kind of financing these communities need,” said Gerron Levi?, senior director of government affairs for the National Community Reinvestment Coalition.

A study from the National Community Reinvestment Coalition that examined PPP loan applications captured specific examples of these biases. In some instances, it found that Black business owners with a comparable financial profile as white ones were less likely to be told that they met the qualifications needed for a loan.

The CRA followed the 1968 Fair Housing Act in (theoretically) ending redlining and encouraging banks to extend credit to low- and moderate-income (LMI) neighborhoods. Rather than establish another expensive federal program, “the genius of the CRA is that it was designed from its inception to tap into the financial might of the banking industry,” the National Community Reinvestment Coalition writes.

According to the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, “Neighborhoods considered high risk or “Hazardous” were often “redlined” by lending institutions, denying them access to capital investment which could improve the housing and economic opportunity of residents…HOLC examiners consulted with local bank loan officers, city officials, appraisers, and realtors to create “Residential Security” maps of cities.