In the News

The plaintiffs are the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, Montana Fair Housing, Texas Low Income Housing Information Service, the City of Toledo, Ohio, Empire Justice Center and Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development.

In contrast, the large swaths of red-graded “hazardous” areas in Long Beach contained oil fields and Black, and Latinx populations. Parts of these areas are currently low-to-middle class and majority populated by BIPOC residents, a historical trend mirroring research by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC).

In 2018, the NCRC published a report documenting the lasting-effects of redlining in the country.

According to a National Community Reinvestment Coalition study released in June, San Francisco’s neighborhoods are the fastest-gentrifying areas in the entire country.

“This is customer acquisition,” said Jesse Van Tol, chief executive officer of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition. “What’s problematic about that is, if you have nonbank servicers going after PPP loans, these are almost by definition businesses in distress. And those may be businesses that are vulnerable to be targeted for high-cost financing products in the future.”

An investigation of 17 Washington, D.C.-area lenders, conducted April 27-May 29, found white applicants for PPP loans were treated better than Black applicants 43% of the time, according to the advocacy group National Community Reinvestment Coalition.

Over half of Latino families in the United States are in a financial situation in which they could not cover basic expenses for more than three months in the face of an economic crisis, according to the National Community Reinvestment Coalition.

In 2017, the National Community Reinvestment Coalition found that banks were far more critical in considering small business loans from Black applicants and were less likely to schedule follow-up appointments or offer help completing the loan application. This disparity existed even when Black and white applicants in the study had identical education, age and income.

According to the NCRC, the CFPB’s new rule would exempt “40% of financial institutions that currently report data about their closed-end mortgages from having to do so beginning in 2021.”

People of color have also faced challenges and discrimination in sustaining their small businesses. According to a study by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, Black applicants who applied for Paycheck Protection Program loans were treated poorly or unfairly compared to their White counterparts.

“The CFPB used its rule-making power to undermine data reporting that’s essential for the public to detect and stop discrimination in lending and housing,” Jesse Van Tol, NCRC’s CEO, said in a statement.

Jesse Van Tol, CEO of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, called the new housing rule, “terrible,” adding: “The administration just gutted the rule that enforces fairness in housing, which was and still is the whole point of the Fair Housing Act,” he said. “All of us have an interest in living in fair and desegregated communities. This would be a return to separate but equal and would be among the most overtly racist housing policies in decades. It’s hard to even call it a policy. It doesn’t enforce anything. It hands off any action to local governments, and they can get away with no action. This approach won’t affirmatively further anything other than discrimination.”

CGTN’s Rachelle Akuffo and NCRC’s Dedrick Asante-Muhammad discuss the federal reserve’s impact on racial economic disparity

In fact, Anneliese Lederer, director of fair lending and consumer protection with the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, recently authored a study saying that white and Black applicants were treated differently when applying for loans, including receiving different information from lenders.

Although the practice was banned in 1968, communities deemed “hazardous” by the federal Home Owners’ Loan Corp. from 1935 to 1939 are still much more likely than other areas to be home to lower-income, minority residents, a 2018 study by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition found.

“Our economy and health care system marginalize the economically vulnerable so this recession caused by a health crisis leaves the most economically and health-fragile community members to face the worst of both of these crises,” said Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, chief of race, wealth and community at the National Community Reinvestment Coalition.