From Foreclosure to Fair Lending: Advocacy, Organizing, Occupy, and the Pursuit of Equitable Credit

349 Pages·2013·3.5 MB·English

by  Chester Hartman

Praise for From Foreclosure to Fair Lending:
“Realizing the objectives of the 1968 Fair Housing Act has long been considered
one of the most critical pieces of unfinished business of the civil rights
movement. From Foreclosure to Fair Lending shows us what needs to be done
to achieve those goals. Hartman and Squires have assembled the nation’s leading
fair housing advocates and scholars. Given the continuing fallout of the
foreclosure debacle, the timing could not be better for this book.”
—Ben Jealous, President, NAACP
“Occupy Wall Street’s biggest success was its impact on the national
conversation. But now, many voices ask, what’s next? This book offers some
important answers. In From Foreclosure to Fair Lending, leading experts and
activists in housing and lending practices reflect on how the Occupy spirit
revives the historic civil rights and grassroots organizing movements to take on
new challenges in a new century.”
—Clarence Page, Pulitzer Prize-winning
syndicated columnist for the Chicago Tribune
“Housing policies and practices are at the center of the ongoing economic crisis
in the United States, and the consequences in lost homes and lost savings have
been devastating for many Americans. This collection gives us the essential
background to understand these developments and to support the struggle for
social justice in housing that is emerging.”
—Frances Fox Piven,
City University of New York Graduate School
“Our nation is at a crossroads precipitated by the lending and foreclosure crisis
that has the potential of erasing the gains of forty-five years of fair housing/fair
lending enforcement. Traditional responses to the current challenges may be
reaching the limits of their effectiveness. From Foreclosure to Fair Lending
demonstrates another way.”
—Michael P. Seng, Co-Executive Director,
The John Marshall Law School Fair Housing
Legal Support Center and Clinic
From Foreclosure
TO Fair Lending

Copyright 2013 by Chester Hartman and Gregory D. Squires. All rights reserved.
See chapter and image credits for usage authorization and copyright of individual contributions.
Except for brief portions quoted for purposes of review, no part of this book may be reprinted, reproduced
or utilized in any medium now known or hereafter invented without permission in writing from the
publisher.
Published in the United States by
New Village Press
@ Centre for Social Innovation
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[email protected]
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New Village Press is a public-benefit, not-for-profit publishing venture of Architects/Designers/Planners for
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forests globally and advancing best practices within the book and paper industries. The printing papers used
in this book are 100% recycled fiber, acid-free (Process Chlorine Free), and have been certified with the
Forest Stewardship Council (FSC).
eBook 978-1-61332-014-3
ISBN
Publication Date: October 2013
FIRST EDITION
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
From foreclosure to fair lending : advocacy, organizing, occupy, and the pursuit of equitable credit / edited
by Chester Hartman and Gregory D. Squires. — First edition.
pages cm
Summary: “Twenty-four well-known fair housing and fair lending activists and organizers examine the
implications of the new wave of fair housing activism generated by Occupy Wall Street protests and the
many successes achieved in fair housing and fair lending over the years. The book reveals the limitations of
advocacy efforts and the challenges that remain. Best directions for future action are brought to light by
staff of fair housing organizations, fair housing attorneys, community and labor organizers, and scholars
who have researched social justice organizing and advocacy movements. The book is written for general
interest and academic audiences. Contributors address the foreclosure crisis, access to credit in a changing
marketplace, and the immoral hazards of big banks. They examine opportunities in collective bargaining
available to homeowners and how low-income and minority households were denied access to historically
low home prices and interest rates. Authors question the effectiveness of litigation to uphold the Fair
Housing Act’s promise of nondiscriminatory home loans and ask how the Consumer Financial Protection
Bureau is assuring fair lending. They also look at where immigrants stand, housing as a human right, and
methods for building a movement. Chester Hartman is an urban planner, academic, author of more than
twenty books, and director of research for the Poverty & Race Research Action Council. Gregory Squires is
a professor of sociology and public policy and public administration at George Washington University and
advisor to the John Marshall Law School Fair Housing Legal Support Center.”— Provided by publisher.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Housing—United States. 2. Housing policy—Citizen participation. 3. Mortgage loans—United States.
4. Economic policy—United States—Citizen participation. 5. Occupy movement—United States. I.
Hartman, Chester W. II. Squires, Gregory D..
HD7293.F756 2013
332.7’20973—dc23
2013023686
Front cover design by Lynne Elizabeth
Cover photograph by Brennan Cavanaugh
Interior design and composition by Leigh McLellan Design
Contents
FOREWORD
Undoing the Bitter Legacy of Segregation and Discrimination
Douglas S. Massey
1 INTRODUCTION
Occupy Wall Street: A New Wave of Fair Housing Activism?
Gregory D. Squires and Chester Hartman
The Activists
2 The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same: Race, Risk,
and Access to Credit in a Changing Market
Debby Goldberg and Lisa Rice
3 Onward and Upward: The Fight to Ensure Equal Access to Credit via the
Federal Housing Administration
David Berenbaum and Katrina S. Forrest
4 Five Lessons Offered by but Not Learned from the Recent Collapse of
the US Economy and the Housing Market
James H. Carr and Katrin B. Anacker
5 Opportunity Lost: How Low-Income and Minority Households Were
Denied Access to Historically Low Home Prices and Interest Rates
M William Sermons
6 Finding a Home for the Occupy Movement: Lessons from the Baltimore
and Memphis Wells Fargo Litigation
John P. Relman
7 A Tale of Two Recoveries: Discrimination in the Maintenance and
Marketing of REO Properties in African American and Latino
Neighborhoods across America
Shanti Abedin and Shanna L. Smith
The Organizers
8 Building the Power to Win the Battle of Big Ideas and Advance a Long-
Term Agenda
George Goehl and Sandra Hinson
9 Forcing Banks to the Bargaining Table: Renegotiating Wall Street’s
Relationship with Our Communities
Stephen Lerner and Saqib Bhatti
10 Housing as a Human Right: Where Do Immigrants Stand?
Janis Bowdler, Donald L. Kahl, and José A. Garcia
The Scholars
11 The Limits of Litigation in Fulfilling the Fair Housing Act’s Promise of
Nondiscriminatory Home Loans
Robert G. Schwemm
12 Housing, Race, and Opportunity
john a. powell
13 Winning Battles and Losing the War: The Progressive Advocacy World
Mike Miller
14 Building a Movement for Fair Lending, Foreclosure Relief, and Financial
Reform
Peter Dreier
CONTRIBUTORS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INDEX
FOREWORD
Undoing the Bitter Legacy of Segregation and Discrimination
Douglas S. Massey
I
N THE FIRST DECADES of the twentieth century, the United States transformed
itself into a racially segregated society in which black and white citizens
occupied separate and vastly unequal segments of the urban landscape. As
African Americans moved out of the rural South en masse to take factory jobs
and service positions in industrializing cities throughout the nation, ever higher
levels of racial segregation were imposed by whites (Lieberson 1981). By 1940,
the black ghetto had become a standard feature of urban America maintained
through institutionalized discrimination in the real estate and lending industries
and built into public policies at all levels of government (Katznelson 2005).
From 1940 to 1970, black segregation persisted at extremely high levels
across virtually all urban areas. Despite significant changes in the size and
geographic distribution of the urban black population, the ghetto remained a
constant. The residential color line simply moved in space as the ghetto
expanded in size (Massey and Denton 1993). During this period, real estate
agents refused to rent or sell homes to blacks within white neighborhoods and
systematically steered African American home seekers to black or racially
changing neighborhoods. Lenders refused to grant mortgages to black home
buyers and denied credit to anyone living in a black or racially changing
neighborhood—practices that were built into the US Federal Housing
Administration (FHA) and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) lending
programs. Given these structural constraints, segregation and urban decay were
inevitable. Any neighborhood that opened up to black settlement quickly became
all-black, and once it became part of the ghetto, it was cut off from capital
investment, leading to physical deterioration.
Conditions for African Americans began to improve during the civil rights
movement, but the discriminatory supports for housing segregation proved to be