The Reinvestment Fund

For most of the 20th century, lending discrimination occurred primarily through the denial of credit to minority group members and to the neighborhoods in which they lived. Redlining is a place-based practice in which lenders denied mortgage credit to neighborhoods with substantial numbers of minorities – typically, African Americans and Latinos. Together with the differential treatment of minority and White applicants, a people-based practice, mortgage credit discrimination accelerated segregation and neighborhood decline. For many years, the private market and federal government (e.g., through the explicit practices of the Federal Housing Administration) operated under laws and policies that permitted (and many argue, promoted) redlining and racial segregation.1 After the passage of a number of historically significant federal laws in the 1960s and 1970s, especially the Fair Housing Act (Title VIII of the Civil Rights Act of 1968) and the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974 (ECOA), federal law and policy outlawed lending discrimination, and started to require data collection among federally-regulated lending institutions. However, early enforcement of federal fair lending laws was anemic as evidenced by the limited number of legal actions filed, most of which were by private actors.2 Data collection on lending institutions did not begin in earnest amongst regulators until petitions were made to the financial regulatory agencies b