ACORN and the Community Reinvestment Act

Considering the damage sub-prime mortgage has done over and over to all of us, its worth looking at Acorn's role in the housing disaster:

Acorn found its way into the mortgage business through the Community Reinvestment Act, the 1977 legislation that community groups have used as a cudgel to force lenders to lower their mortgage underwriting standards in order to make more loans in low-income communities. Often the groups, after making protests under CRA, were then rewarded by banks with contracts to act as mortgage counselors in low-income areas in return for dropping their protests against the banks. In one particularly lucrative deal, 14 major banks eager to put CRA protests behind them in 1993 signed an agreement to have Acorn administer a $55 million, 11-city lending program. It was precisely such agreements that helped turn Acorn from a network of small local groups into a national player. And Acorn hasn't been alone. A U.S. senate subcommittee once estimated that CRA-related deals between banks and community groups have pumped nearly $10 billion into the nonprofit sector.

Given the economic fallout from the long efforts by advocacy groups to water down mortgage lending standards, as well as the controversy surrounding Acorn's mortgage counseling methods, you would imagine that politicians in Washington would be eager to narrow the scope of the CRA and reduce the leverage that community groups wield under it. But to the contrary, Washington is actually looking to expand the CRA once again.

I remember listening to Jesse Jackson (Not an Acorn man mind you) talk about the need for "SILVER RIGHTS" after achieving Civil Rights. Its this type of populist shakedowns where small groups can essentially milk business and government to enrich and empower themselves.

Congress passed CRA in 1977 as legislation designed to prompt banks to lend more in lower income areas which advocates claimed were being ignored. Gradually over time community groups learned they could use the law as leverage to negotiate new inner-city lending programs with banks based on lower underwriting standards, which the groups demanded when banks complained that one reason they weren't doing more lending in some neighborhoods was because few applicants in those areas qualified for loans under traditional criteria.

Acorn led the way in this movement. In 1986, for instance, it protested a potential acquisition by Louisiana Bancshares, a Southern institution, until the bank agreed to new, "flexible credit and underwriting standards" for minority borrowers which included counting public assistance and food stamps as income in mortgage applications.

Acorn also put pressure on the two quasi-government purchasers of mortgages, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, to lower their standards, complaining that they were "strictly by-the-book interpreters" who stood in the way of new lending programs. Under pressure both organizations committed to backing billions of dollars in affordable housing loans under so-called "alternative qualifying" programs which approved loans to individuals who didn't qualify under traditional standards, including those who agreed to go to mortgage counseling classes run by community groups like Acorn.

The threat of CRA proved an effective tool in gathering non-bank lenders into this affordable lending maelstrom, too. In late 1993 President Clinton's Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Henry Cisneros, announced a plan to boost homeownership in the U.S. through a series of government initiatives, including having government subsidize mortgages that required no down payments. To produce more of these new, riskier loans Cisneros proposed expanding CRA to cover mortgage lenders and other financial institutions that were not chartered banks. In Congress Rep. Maxine Waters dubbed mortgage companies "egregious redliners" who needed to be corralled by CRA.

Maxine Waters, the women who helped steer TARP money to a bank that gave her family a huge windfall and had been disgusting racial demagogue. Anyway its clear banks found it easier to pay off these groups rather then deal with the bad PR and protests.Of course we all suffered for this. And how much damage did this cause:

The Fed told lenders, for instance, that applicants with poor credit histories, a problem which plagued many would-be urban borrowers, could still be good loan risks if they agreed to mortgage counseling, even though there was no evidence that counseling programs prevented defaults. The Fed also told banks to consider junking their traditional income requirements in favor of lending with much higher ratios of income to mortgage payments, and to consider nontraditional sources of income as qualifying earnings, including unemployment benefits, even though by definition they are temporary and don't last nearly as long as the term of a mortgage.

Some of the recommendations by the Boston Fed and other groups led directly to new mortgage products that engendered the greatest abuses during the housing bubble. The Boston Fed, for instance, urged lenders to allow borrowers who didn't have enough money for down payments and closing costs to accept gifts and grants from charities and nonprofits. That spurred nonprofit groups to solicit donations from builders with houses to sell, which the nonprofits turned around and gave to low-income buyers to use as down payments on homes purchased from the participating builders. Heavily criticized by the IRS as a tax scam and by the Government Accountability Office for their high rates of default, such programs were eventually banned by the Federal Housing Administration, but not until 2007, when the housing bubble was already upon us.

And we all fell down.