Problems In Community Development Banking Mortgage Lending Discrimination Reverse Redlining And Home Equity Lending

First published in 1997, this volume features a wealth of contributions discussing mortgage lending discrimination and the role of the FHA, fair lending enforcement and the Decatur case, along with the future of mortgage discrimination research. This key civil rights debate in the wake of the Fair Housing Act 25 years prior is evaluated and clarified through rigorous review of fair lending research, applied projects and enforcement activities to date. It argues forcefully that the right to take out a mortgage to buy a home should be conditioned only upon one’s credit worthiness and not on one’s race or ethnic group.

Federal Fair Lending Laws, enacted in 1968 and 1974, prohibit discrimination in all forms of credit transactions, including consumer and business loans as well as mortgage loans. This report reviews federal efforts to strengthen enforcement of the fair lending laws, discusses the challenges federal regulators face in their efforts to detect discrimination and ensure compliance, and recommends actions to meet some of those challenges. Charts and tables.

This meticulously documented work sets forth the major causes of the greatest asset bubble in world economic history—the American housing bubble, which began in 1940 and collapsed in 2007. In the aftermath of the American housing collapse in 2007, many ask why. The Great American Housing Bubble: The Road to Collapse asks a different and more fundamental question—how the bubble was created in the first place. To answer that question, it examines the causes, both political and economic, of the American housing bubble, created between 1940 and 2007. Those causes encompass everything from federal income tax subsidies for housing to local exclusionary policies, banking, accounting, real estate appraisal, and credit agency rating practices and policies. The book also takes into account the impact of greed, government regulation, speculation, and psychology—including blind faith in investment advisors—on the creation of the greatest asset bubble in the economic history of the world. The author takes a comparative historical approach, examining the current crisis in the light of notorious bubbles of the past. In the end, he concludes that the events precipitating the most recent collapse can be traced, at least in part, not to too little government regulation, but to too much.

A deep and thought-provoking examination of crisis politics and their implications for power and marginalization in the United States. From the climate crisis to the opioid crisis to the Coronavirus crisis, the language of crisis is everywhere around us and ubiquitous in contemporary American politics and policymaking. But for every problem that political actors describe as a crisis, there are myriad other equally serious ones that are not described in this way. Why has the term crisis been associated with some problems but not others? What has crisis come to mean, and what work does it do? In When Bad Things Happen to Privileged People, Dara Z. Strolovitch brings a critical eye to the taken-for-granted political vernacular of crisis. Using systematic analyses to trace the evolution of the use of the term crisis by both political elites and outsiders, Strolovitch unpacks the idea of “crisis” in contemporary politics and demonstrates that crisis is itself an operation of politics. She shows that racial justice activists innovated the language of crisis in an effort to transform racism from something understood as natural and intractable and to cast it instead as a policy problem that could be remedied. Dominant political actors later seized on the language of crisis to compel the use of state power, but often in ways that compounded rather than alleviated inequality and injustice. In this eye-opening and important book, Strolovitch demonstrates that understanding crisis politics is key to understanding the politics of racial, gender, and class inequalities in the early twenty-first century.