London The Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) in the USA is pushing 40 years old, and even in its relatively weakened state, there is no question that joined with the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) it has been for most of its history a huge tool for opening increased financial opportunity to lower income families and …
Tag: community reinvestment act
Predatory Rent-to-Own Scams Hark Back to Discriminatory Schemes
New Orleans In the early days of ACORN in Little Rock in lower income, largely African-American neighborhoods before the 1978 Community Reinvestment Act was passed forbidding racial discrimination in bank lending and outlawing redlining, the stories of families trying to rent-to-own their homes were legion. I read many of these documents carefully and knew families …
Too Much Data in Too Many Hands for Both Good and Evil
New Orleans An observation decades ago always stuck with me. It was a comparison of Americans and people who live elsewhere. The point made by the author, whose name fittingly has long ago left me, is that we have too much information at hand and too little ability to process it. Ironically, that was then, …