From Foreclosure to Fair Lending (ePub)

chief program officer of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC). He is a responsible for implementing NCRC's policy, private enforcement, National Neighbors, and national housing counseling intermediary initiatives, as well as related fraud, fair lending, and Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing training programs. He has testified before Congress many times on a wide range of issues-most recently on solutions to the current foreclosure crisis. Over the past twenty years, he has attained national recognition for fair housing and related consumer protection advocacy-e.g., NCRC's recent civil rights complaints against Wall Street's rating agencies and the successful challenge of the use of discriminatory credit overlays in the FHA loan program-and has appeared as an expert on numerous national news programs, including Dateline NBC, 48 Hours, The CBS Evening News, Bloomberg TV, CNBC, CNN, and others. His recent work on fair lending compliance issues through mystery shopping has also been extensively covered by the media. Berenbaum previously served as the executive director of Long Island Housing Services in New York and the Equal Rights Center in Washington.

Saqib Bhatti is the senior researcher and campaigner for the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and works closely with unions and community organizations across the country to develop strategic campaigns to hold banks accountable for their role in creating and profiteering off the economic crisis. He plays a critical role in analyzing complex financial issues and then demystifying and translating those issues in order to connect them to grassroots campaigns that are informed by his research. He has written numerous reports calling on banks to do their part to fix the economy, including Riding the Gravy Train: How Wall Street Is Bankrupting Our Public Transit Agencies by Profiteering off of Toxic Swap Deals (2012) and The Win/Win Solution: How Fixing the Housing Crisis Will Create One Million Jobs (2011). His work has been discussed in major publications, such as the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Financial Times. Bhatti graduated from Yale University with a degree in political science.

Janis Bowdler is the director for the Wealth-Building Policy Project at the National Council of La Raza (NCLR), the largest national Latino civil rights and advocacy organization in the United States. In this role, she conducts policy and legislative analysis, research, and advocacy on issues that promote the financial security and advancement of Latino families through asset ownership and wealth creation. Most recently, the Wealth-Building Policy Project has targeted issues such as wrongful foreclosures, neighborhood preservation, financial access, and fair housing for immigrants. Bowdler has authored a number of publications on Hispanic homeownership and abusive mortgage lending practices, among others, and regularly serves as an expert witness before Congress and federal regulators on issues regarding wealth-building challenges facing the Latino community. Bowdler is an active blogger with regular posts on Shelterforce, Mom's Rising, Univision, and Huffington Post and serves on the boards of the Raza Development Fund, Poverty & Race Research Action Council, and Fair Mortgage Collaborative.

James H. Carr is a housing finance, banking, and urban policy consultant and a senior policy advisor with the Opportunity Agenda. Previously, he served as chief business officer for the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, as senior vice president for financial innovation, planning, and research for the Fannie Mae Foundation, as assistant director for tax policy with the US Senate Budget Committee, and a research associate at the Center for Urban Policy Research at Rutgers University. Carr has also held posts as a visiting professor at Columbia University in New York, an executive committee member of Americans for Financial Reform, and a braintruster (blogger) for the Roosevelt Institute's New Deal 2.0 initiative. He has published and lectured extensively and has served on research or policy advisory boards at Harvard University, University of California-Berkeley, and University of Pennsylvania. Carr was an advisor to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Urban Affairs Project Group in Paris, France, and has consulted internationally on financial modernization, housing finance, and economic development to China, Mexico, Turkey, Colombia, South Africa, and Ghana. He has testified on several occasions before Congress and has appeared on CNN, Fox News, CNBC, Bloomberg TV, MSNBC, and PBS. He has also been quoted in various major newspapers including USA Today, Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Associated Press, Reuters, and numerous additional media outlets. Carr holds graduate degrees in urban and regional planning from Columbia University and University of Pennsylvania and an architecture degree, with honors, from Hampton University.

Peter Dreier is the E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics and director of the Urban and Environmental Policy Department at Occidental College. He formerly served as director of housing for the Boston Redevelopment Authority and as senior policy advisor to Boston Mayor Ray Flynn. In 1993, the Clinton administration appointed him to the Advisory Board of the Resolution Trust Corporation, the savings-and-loan clean-up agency. Among his coauthored books are The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century: A Social Justice Hall of Fame (2012), The Next Los Angeles: The Struggle for a Livable City (2006), and Place Matters: Metropolitics for the 21st Century (2001).

Katrina Forrest serves as the special assistant to the chief program officer at the National Community Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC). In this capacity, she is responsible for assisting in implementing NCRC's policy, private enforcement, National Neighbors, and national housing counseling intermediary initiatives, as well as related fraud and fair lending programs. Forrest has helped to coauthor several white papers and assisted in drafting congressional testimony. Further, she is responsible for grant management and preparing reports to the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. Prior to joining NCRC, Forrest worked for the City of Chicago's Department of Law-Collections and Ownership Division. Her professional duties included enforcing violations of the Municipal Code of Chicago that involved the health and safety of Chicago's residents by determining property owners and responsible parties in preparation for litigation and analyzing deeds, trusts, mortgages, and other property information to determine ownership. Her research interests include housing, criminal justice, and inequality. Forrest also copresented original research at the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences entitled "Attitudes Toward the Use of Racial/Ethnic Profiling to Prevent Crime and Terrorism,” which was published in the Criminal Justice Policy Review in 2011. Forrest received her bachelor's degree in administration of justice from George Mason University and her doctor of law degree from the John Marshall Law School-Chicago.

Jose A. Garcia is a policy fellow at the National Council of La Raza (NCLR). He is responsible for developing and executing a project plan and agenda for evaluating and analyzing relevant housing and banking public policies that affect the Latino community, with an emphasis on housing finance and the secondary mortgage market for the Wealth-Building Policy Project. He has over ten years of experience working on household credit and debt, youth economics, voting rights, census advocacy and social-demographic analysis. Prior to working at NCLR, Garcia was the associate director for the Economic Opportunity Program at Demos, where he authored dozens of reports on household debt, and coauthored the book Up to Our Eyeballs: How Shady Lenders and Failed Economic Policies are Drowning Americans in Debt (2008). Garcia has spoken on television and on the radio and has been quoted in national, local, and ethnic newspapers and journals, including the New York Times, Boston Globe, BusinessWeek, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, Fox Business News, Univision, and El Diario.

George Goehl is the executive director of National People's Action and National People's Action Campaign. He has orchestrated successful national campaigns on housing, banking, and immigration issues. Under his leadership, National People's Action moved more people into the streets in support of financial reform in the three years following the financial crisis than any other organization in the country. Goehl has appeared on Bill Moyers, MSNBC, and CNN, and has been quoted in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times, among others. He is also a cofounder of the New Bottom Line, a national alliance of community organizing networks working to advance a vision of a new economy in the United States.

Debby Goldberg is a special project director at the National Fair Housing Alliance (NFHA). In this role, she is the point person for NFHA's public policy work on a variety of housing finance issues, including foreclosure prevention, housing finance reform, access to mortgage credit, and others. She also spearheads much of NFHA's work on affirmatively furthering fair housing. Goldberg came to NFHA in 2005 to direct the Hurricane Relief Project, which was a collaboration with local fair housing groups in the Gulf Coast region to assist homeowners affected by Hurricane Katrina and subsequent storms to rebuild and reoccupy their homes, and advocated for public policies to promote an equitable and inclusive region. The project brought litigation that provided an additional $500 million in rebuilding assistance for low- and moderate-income and minority homeowners in Louisiana. Goldberg has over thirty years of experience working on public policies to promote fair housing, fair lending, access to insurance, and community reinvestment in communities of color and low-income neighborhoods. Her work also includes extensive training and technical assistance for community-based organizations in those neighborhoods. Prior to joining NFHA's staff, she spent a number of years at the Center for Community Change.

Chester Hartman is an urban planner, author, and academic. He is currently the director of research at Poverty & Race Research Action Council. He has served on the faculty (full time or visiting) of the City Planning Departments of Harvard University, Yale University, Cornell University, Columbia University, University of North Carolina, University of California-Berkeley, American University, and George Washington University. He is the founder and former chair of the Planners Network, a national organization of progressive urban and rural planners and community organizers. The most recent of his twenty books include The Integration Debate: Competing Futures for American Cities (with Gregory D. Squires, 2010), Mandate for Change: Policies and Leadership for 2009 and Beyond (2009), There Is No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster: Race, Class, and Hurricane Katrina (coedited with Gregory Squires; 2006), and Poverty & Race in America: The Emerging Agendas (2006); A Right to Housing: Foundation for a New Social Agenda (coedited with Rachel Bratt and Michael Stone, 2006); and City for Sale: The Transformation of San Francisco (2002). He serves and has served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Negro Education, Journal of Urban Affairs, Housing Policy Debate, Urban Affairs Quarterly, and Housing Studies. Among the periodicals his articles have appeared in are The Nation, Social Work, Virginia Law Review, The Village Voice, Utne Reader, The Progressive, The Encyclopedia of Housing, Journal of Social Work, Journal of Public Health Policy, Progressive Architecture, Yale Law Journal, and Public Welfare, as well as op-eds for numerous newspapers. Among the organizations for which he has been a consultant are the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, US Civil Rights Commission, Arthur D. Little, Southern Poverty Law Center, and the California Department of Housing and Community Development.

Sandra Hinson is the chief policy analyst for the Grassroots Policy Project (GPP). Since 1994, she has served GPP in several capacities, including associate trainer and curriculum designer, development director, and, between 1999 and 2003, executive director. In 1994, she contributed to GPP's publication on corporate subsidies, No More Candy Store (1994), by Greg LeRoy and Richard Healey. She edited and contributed to the follow-up publication, Public Subsidies, Public Accountability (1999), with Elliot Negin and Richard Healey. She cowrote, with Richard Healey, a chapter on theories of power for social movements for Rhyming Hope and History: Activists, Academics and Social Movement Scholarship (2005). Her complete curriculum materials include weeklong training programs for the Midwest States Center and Northeast Action, a yearlong program codeveloped with the Environmental and Economic Justice Project called Strategic Training and Education for Power (STEP), and workshops on structural racism and the political economy codeveloped with staff from National People's Action. Hinson has also recently written on the financial crisis for GPP. Prior to joining GPP, Hinson worked on health care issues with the Communications Workers of America's Health and Welfare Trust. While obtaining her master's degree in sociology from Stony Brook University, she was treasurer for one year and vice president for two years at CWA Local 1188.

Donald L. Kahl is the executive director of the Equal Rights Center (ERC), a Washington, DC, based nonprofit civil rights organization. Starting as a local fair housing organization in the District of Columbia thirty years ago, today the ERC is a comprehensive civil rights organization with more than five thousand members across all fifty states and the District. Prior to joining the ERC, Kahl served as senior counsel to the Washington Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs, one of the leading public interest and civil rights law firms in the country. At the Washington Lawyers' Committee, he designed, managed, and advised on a broad spectrum of civil rights matters for the ERC and other clients. In addition to his nonprofit service, Kahl has more than twenty-five years of legal and management experience. Prior to focusing exclusively on civil rights issues, he was a senior litigation partner and director of a large private-practice law firm where he specialized in complex federal litigation for more than twenty years. He received both his bachelor's degree in psychology and his doctor of law degree from the University of Nebraska.

Stephen Lerner has been a union and community organizer for thirty years and is the architect of Service Employees International Union's Justice for Janitors campaign. Lerner is currently working with community and labor coalitions on campaigns to challenge the economic and political dominance of big banks and Wall Street and the role they played in crashing the housing market and economy. He is a fellow at the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor at Georgetown University.

Douglas S. Massey is the Henry G. Bryant Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He is coauthor of American Apartheid (1993), which won the Distinguished Publication Award of the American Sociological Association. More recently, he coauthored The Source of the River (2003), the first analysis of minority achievement in selective colleges and universities based on a representative sample, as well as the follow-up book Taming the River (2009), which examined the determinants of persistence and grade achievement through the first two years of college. Massey has also published extensively on Mexican immigration, including the books Return to Aztlan (1987) and Miracles on the Border (1995), which won a 1996 Southwest Book Award. His latest two books on immigration are Beyond Smoke and Mirrors (2002), which won the 2004 Otis Dudley Duncan Award for the best book in social demography, and Brokered Boundaries: Constructing Immigrant Identity in Anti-Immigrant Times (2010). Massey is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. He is past-president of the Population Association of America and the American Sociological Association and current president of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. He was recently elected to the Council of the National Academy of Science.

Mike Miller is executive director of ORGANIZE Training Center and has more than fifty years experience as a community organizer working in the tradition of Saul Alinsky, for whom he was a project director. For five years, he also worked with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. He has initiated neighborhood, citywide, and statewide organizing projects and has consulted widely with individual memberships coalitions, institution-based community organizations and their sponsor committees, and many other groups. Consultations include the United Church of Christ Board for Homeland Ministries, American Federation of Teachers, Metropolitan Organizations for People (Denver), and Tenderloin Senior Organizing Project (San Francisco). He has led intensive six-day workshops in the field and trained and mentored organizers. He has lectured extensively in the field and taught urban politics, political science, or community organizing at the University of California-Berkeley, Stanford University, University of Notre Dame, San Francisco State University, California State University-East Bay, and Lone Mountain College. His articles have appeared in Christianity & Crisis, Social Policy, New Conversations, Poverty Research & Race Action Reports, Generations, Berkeley Journal of Sociology, Race, Poverty and the Environment, Dissent, Socialist Review, the liberal democrat, CounterPunch, other magazines and journals, and in the newspapers Sun Reporter and San Francisco Examiner. For four years, he edited Social Policy. Miller is the author of A Community Organizer's Tale: People and Power in San Francisco (2009) and has also written book chapters and numerous organizational working papers on community and labor organizing.

john a. powell is an internationally recognized expert in the areas of civil rights and civil liberties and on a wide range of issues including race, structural racism, ethnicity, housing, poverty, and democracy. In addition to being a professor of law and a professor of African American studies and ethnic studies at the University of California-Berkeley, Professor powell holds the Robert D. Haas Chancellor's Chair in Equity and Inclusion. He is also the director of the Haas Diversity Research Center (HDRC), which supports research to generate specific prescriptions for changes in policy and practice that address disparities related to race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, disability, and socioeconomics in California and nationwide. He was recently the executive director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State University and held the Gregory H. Williams Chair in Civil Rights & Civil Liberties at the Moritz College of Law.

John P. Relman is the director of Relman, Dane & Colfax PLLC, a public interest law firm specializing in civil rights litigation. From 1989 to 1999, Relman headed the Fair Housing Project at the Washington Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights. Relman's better-known cases include Timus v. William J. Davis, Inc. ($2.4 million jury verdict for housing discrimination); Dyson v. Denny's Restaurants ($17.725 million race discrimination class settlement); Pugh v. Avis Rent-A-Car ($5.4 million class settlement); Gilliam v. Adam's Mark Hotels ($2.1 million class settlement); and Kennedy v. City of Zanesville ($10.8 million race discrimination jury verdict). Relman is the author of Housing Discrimination Practice Manual (1992) and teaches public interest law at the Georgetown University Law Center.

Lisa Rice is vice president of the National Fair Housing Alliance (NFHA), where she oversees the communications, resource development, public policy, and enforcement initiatives of the agency. She is responsible for helping to achieve the organization's goal of addressing the crisis of segregation in America and the ultimate goal of realizing a truly open society. Under Rice's leadership, NFHA played a major role in helping to establish the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which was formed under the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. Rice joined NFHA after serving as CEO of the Toledo Fair Housing Center and the Northwest Ohio Development Agency (NODA). While serving at these organizations, she developed and implemented the state of Ohio's first predatory lending remediation program. Rice provides consulting on a wide range of fair housing and diversity issues to fair housing organizations, insurance companies, lending institutions, and government agencies.

Robert G. Schwemm is Ashland-Spears Professor at the University of Kentucky College of Law. He began his legal career with Sidley & Austin in Washington, DC, and then was chief trial counsel for the Leadership Council for Metropolitan Open Communities in Chicago. Schwemm has written and lectured extensively on fair housing law. In 1990, he published Housing Discrimination: Law and Litigation, a major treatise in the field. Schwemm has been plaintiffs' counsel in several landmark housing discrimination cases, including three in the US Supreme Court: Meyer v. Holley (2003); Gladstone Realtors v. Village of Bellwood (1979); and Village of Arlington Heights v. Metropolitan Housing Development Corp. (1977). From 1986 to 1990, Professor Schwemm was vice-chair of the Kentucky Commission on Human Rights, and, in 1991, he served as a special attorney and scholar-in-residence with the Civil Rights Division of the US Department of Justice. From 1998 to 2000, he was a member of the Consumer Advisory Council of the Federal Reserve Board.

M William Sermons is research director of the Center for Responsible Lending (CRL), where he is responsible for advancing a policy research agenda into abusive lending practices. In addition to his work at CRL, he teaches cost-benefit analysis to students in the Carnegie Mellon University's Heinz College Master in Public Policy program. Sermons is the former director of the Homelessness Research Institute, where he directed both the research and communications functions of the National Alliance to End Homelessness. He is a graduate of Duke University and holds both a PhD in civil engineering from Northwestern University and a master of social work from Catholic University. Prior to applying his analytical skills to the social advancement of vulnerable populations, he worked in the areas of transportation and land-use planning and helped to found the Center for Smart Growth Research and Education at the University of Maryland.

Shanna L. Smith is the president and CEO of the National Fair Housing Alliance (NFHA) and has been engaged in fair housing and fair lending enforcement, education, and research for thirty-six years. Since 1990, the NFHA has engaged in systemic lending, insurance, real estate sales, rental testing and retail sales investigations involving service to people of color. Prior to joining the NFHA, Smith was the executive director of the Toledo Fair Housing Center for fifteen years, where she developed groundbreaking cases that successfully challenged discriminatory policies and practices, including the denial of loans to African American and white borrowers because of minimum mortgage loan amounts, private mortgage insurance minimum home value amounts, discriminatory appraisal practices, and homes located in racially integrated neighborhoods. Smith has testified frequently before the US Senate and House on discrimination in the use of credit, mortgage lending, private mortgage insurance, and homeowners insurance, as well as on the work of the US Department of Housing and Urban Development's Office of Fair Housing and the Fair Housing Program of the US Department of Justice.

Gregory D. Squires is a professor of sociology, public policy, and public administration at George Washington University. Prior to joining the faculty at George Washington University, Squires taught at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and served as a research analyst with the US Commission on Civil Rights. Currently, he is a member of the Advisory Board of the John Marshall Law School Fair Housing Legal Support Center in Chicago, the District of Columbia Advisory Committee to the US Commission on Civil Rights, and the Social Science Advisory Board of the Poverty & Race Research Action Council in Washington, DC. He has served as a consultant for civil rights organizations around the country and as a member of the Federal Reserve Board's Consumer Advisory Council. He has written for several academic journals and general interest publications including Housing Policy Debate, Urban Studies, Social Science Quarterly, Urban Affairs Review, Journal of Urban Affairs, New York Times, and Washington Post. His recent books include The Integration Debate: Competing Futures for American Cities (with Chester Hartman, 2010), There Is No Such Thing As a Natural Disaster: Race, Class, and Hurricane Katrina (with Chester Hartman, 2006), Privileged Places: Race, Residence and the Structure of Opportunity (with Charis E. Kubrin, 2006), Why the Poor Pay More: How to Stop Predatory Lending (2004), and Organizing Access to Capital (2003).