NAACP Takes Lending Industry to Court

by Leigh Graham

Published March 14, 2009 @ 06:59AM PT

From RaceWire:

The NAACP has taken on lending industry behemoths in two class-action lawsuits against Wells Fargo and HSBC. The complaints, brought on behalf of Black Americans who have been victims of discriminatory lending, target: numerous mortgage lenders who are engaged in institutionalized, systematic racism in connection with its members’ purchase of residential mortgage loans. The pervasiveness of this discrimination has been documented in numerous empirical studies that all confirm that African-Americans are substantially more likely to receive higher-rate residential mortgage loans than Caucasian borrowers with the same qualifications….

Further into the post advocates who have been organizing against the widespread predatory and abusive lending that happens disproportionately in communities of color point out what is long missed about the current housing crisis: that it is not just about fighting back against economic inequality but racial inequality as well:

"We think that this whole situation really builds the case that racial justice benefits us all. In the 1990s, when these predatory loans started hitting communities of color, which is where it really started, if we would have said, 'Hey, this isn't working for all of us, we have to stop it, we have to outlaw this... put these brokers in jail'--the economy wouldn't have melted down, we wouldn't have had this foreclosure crisis, we wouldn't have needed a stimulus bill. But people looked the other way and only got interested once their mutual funds started to get hit.”

I was at a conference yesterday on housing where the Treasurer of Gennessee County, MI (home of Flint) expressed something similar: that suddenly we have a national housing crisis grabbing people's attention, yet in cities like Flint this kind of economic death has been happening for years, decades.   In some ways, it seems that once the speculator markets like Phoenix, Las Vegas, etc. started to collapse, we finally started paying attention.

Another panelist yesterday is a Venezuelan former banker who now runs a foreclosure counseling program in East Boston, a mostly Latin@ neighborhood.  She said starting last fall, her clients went from those who couldn't support their rapacious subprime loans to those with good loans who'd lost their jobs.  She doesn't advertise her program, because she already has more clients than she has funding to serve.

(Slideshow from the Foreclosure Photo Project)