In the News

Jason Richardson is research director with the National Community Reinvestment Coalition. They recently released a study conducted with the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and the University of Richmond. It analyzed historic redlining maps from communities across the U.S. and compared them with health outcomes in those areas today.What they found was a disturbing pattern.

More than half of Latino families live one crisis away from financial disaster and wouldn’t be able to cover basic expenses for three months in the event of an economic burden, according to the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, a nonprofit targeting discrimination in lending, housing and business practices.

“If we would have had three to four years of data, I bet the disparity in lending to women- and minority-owned businesses would have been narrower,” said Josh Silver, a senior policy adviser at the National Community Reinvestment Coalition. The CFPB is moving forward with this rulemaking after a settlement reached last year with the California Reinvestment Coalition, part of the NCRC network.

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 National Community Reinvestment Coalition found Black business owners had a tougher time securing loans at banks and faced bias their white counterparts did not, reports The New York Times.

The National Community Reinvestment Coalition took aim at the final rule as an attack by the Trump Administration on the Fair Housing Act, noting that the rule places an “impossible burden” on plaintiffs in disparate impact cases before discovery can even begin.

People living in formerly redlined neighborhoods are more susceptible to having COVID-19 complications, according to a new study by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition.

Nearly every ZIP code in the United States is served by a post office, which adds up to more than 30,000 branches nationwide. Those branches could fill the gap for banking services that can’t be conducted online, like cash handling for small businesses, Von Tol says.

A study conducted by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition in July found that Black business owners had a harder time securing coronavirus financial relief than white business owners.

“It was possible that some banks did do it, but most banks didn’t add that into the PPP loans,” said Dedrick Asante?Muhammad, Chief of Race at the National Community Reinvestment Coalition. “They were all scrambling to understand and collect.”

The Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit recently called the PPP data “mostly worthless.”

One example of what’s so profoundly wrong with our system comes through analyses of the PPP loan process. The National Community Reinvestment Coalition sent Black and white testers to banks to talk about securing PPP loans for their small businesses. The Black applicants were deliberately given sample profiles that were financially stronger than the white testers. Nonetheless 43% of the time, the white tester received preferential treatment.

A study released last month by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, a lending, housing and business group, found Black potential buyers faced considerable bias at banks where they applied for PPP loans.

Between 2000 and 2013, more than 135,000 residents were displaced from their homes in 230 neighborhoods across the country, according to the National Community Reinvestment Coalition. The majority of these residents, NCRC says, were Black and Hispanic.

In Lancaster County, people of color are more likely to be denied a home loan, based on a 2019 National Community Reinvestment Coalition study of Lancaster County mortgage data.

Consumer Action joined nearly three dozen consumer, civil rights, community, housing and privacy groups [including NCRC] in urging the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) to reconsider its decision to bury the narratives of consumer complaints, making it much harder for non-experts to find this essential material in its consumer complaint database.