In response to the Trump administration’s attempt to vacate the Townstone Financial settlement and return the $105,000 fine levied to resolve it, the National Community Reinvestment Coalition released the following statement from President and CEO Jesse Van Tol.
It is absurd to walk away from a positive settlement in a cut-and-dried case of openly racist practices from a mortgage lender. And it is disturbing and disgusting to see Director Vought pretend that the case was brought “with zero evidence.
When your CEO goes on his company radio show and slanders Black neighborhoods as “scary” “jungles” that are “packed [with] people from all over the world” who participate in “hoodlum weekends,” your company is being very clear: There are places they won’t lend, and the reason is that those places have lots of non-White people living in them.
We know a company that markets itself through such shockingly open racism is determined to discourage Black customers from even calling.
Townstone got what it wanted: Compared to other lenders serving the area, the company received far fewer applications from Black borrowers.
Pretending this was anything other than gutter racism is ugly.
And using the power of the American people’s government to also hand money back to the man who wielded his financial power in such disgraceful fashion is a stain on us all.
For more background on the Townstone case, see here.
For more coverage of the Trump administration’s handling of the settlement, see here.
