In the News

“Along with the banking industry, we and our members across the nation share the desire to modernize CRA,” Van Tol said in a statement. “However, the Trump administration seems determined to radically overhaul and water down the compliance system by introducing a numerical measure of performance that has been widely criticized, by bankers as well as community advocates, as overly simplistic.”

Between 2012 and 2017, banks spent an average of $78 billion a year on community development lending and $55 billion a year on small-business loans in low- and moderate-income neighborhoods that fall under the law, according to the National Community Reinvestment Coalition.

“The Trump administration seems determined to radically overhaul and water down the compliance system by introducing a numerical measure of performance that has been widely criticized, by bankers as well as community advocates, as overly simplistic,” said Jesse Van Tol, CEO of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition.

“This is a major transformation of the law. It upends how the CRA works,” said Jesse Van Tol, chief executive of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition.

“I’m very concerned that this proposal shifts the focus of CRA from making mortgage loans and small-business loans to lower-income people to a range of finance activities that are higher profit margin,” said Jesse Van Tol, the chief executive of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, a nonprofit that seeks to help poor communities build wealth.

“The OCC’s approach to this has been to barrel in without building consensus first on how to proceed,” said Jesse Van Tol, CEO of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition. He raised the possibility that the FDIC’s support could be contingent on some kind of carve-out for smaller banks. “It will be telling if the FDIC signs on with a clause to let their banks opt out. Talk about a vote of confidence.”

Last year, the National Community Reinvestment Coalition released a report showing that neighborhoods singled out as hazardous by redlining are much more likely to struggle today than those that were not on the list.

More than half of low- and moderate-income older adults don’t have an adequate amount of short-term emergency savings, according to a recent report by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition.

A 2006 study from the National Community Reinvestment Coalition found that joint male and female borrowers “enjoyed more favorable outcomes than either male and female borrowers” on their own. What’s more, NCRC found that individual borrowers were more likely to end up in pricier subprime loans than joint borrowers.

“The timing of this proposal seems to be driven by political considerations, not substantive ones,” said Jesse Van Tol, chief executive of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition. The OCC’s approach, he said, may boil down CRA to a “dollar volume metric, easily accomplished by making high dollar loans and investments.”

According to a study by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, about 40% of the District’s lower-income neighborhoods experienced gentrification between 2000 and 2013, giving the city the greatest “intensity of gentrification” of any in the country.

This past June, the U.S. Congress opened a hearing to consider a bill that would create a commission to explore options for reparations for the descendants of enslaved people. Central to this conversation is the question of what is owed to African Americans, and what reparations would look like.

Since the turn of the century, more than 20,000 Black D.C. residents had been displaced, a March study from the National Community Reinvestment Coalition found. The District leads several U.S. cities in this arena because housing values have outpaced the median incomes. In 2009, amid a recession, the District experienced more than 4,000 foreclosures. Several hundred people since then have also filed for bankruptcy.

Done in partnership with the National Community Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC), Bone and his colleagues, which include Jerome Williams of Rutgers University and Glenn Christensen of Brigham Young University, have studied 10 years of data on the financial lending landscape for minorities and women.

A new report by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition said: “Unfortunately, most cases of financial exploitation are unreported by financial institutions.”