The Community Reinvestment Act (or CRA , Pub.L. 95-128, title VIII, 91 Stat. 1147, 12 U.S.C. § 2901 et seq. ) is a United States federal law designed to encourage commercial banks and savings associations to meet the needs of borrowers in all segments of their communities, including low- and moderate-income neighborhoods. Congress passed the Act in 1977 to reduce discriminatory credit practices against low-income neighborhoods, a practice known as redlining. The Act requires the appropriate federal financial supervisory agencies to encourage regulated financial institutions to meet the credit needs of the local communities in which they are chartered, consistent with safe and sound operation (Section 802.). To enforce the statute, federal regulatory agencies examine banking institutions for CRA compliance, and take this information into consideration when approving applications for new bank branches or for mergers or acquisitions (Section 804.).
Enforcement
The Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 seeks to address discrimination in loans made to individuals and businesses from low and moderate-income neighborhoods. The Act mandates that all banking institutions that receive FDIC insurance be evaluated by Federal banking agencies to determine if the bank offers credit (in a manner consistent with safe and sound operation as per Section 802(b) and Section 804(1)) in all communities in which they are chartered to do business in. The law does not list specific criteria for evaluating the performance of financial institutions. Rather, it directs that the evaluation process should accommodate the situation and context of each individual institution. Federal regulations dictate agency conduct in evaluating a bank's compliance in five performance areas, comprising twelve assessment factors. This examination culminates in a rating and a written report that becomes part of the supervisory record for that bank.
The law, however, emphasizes that an institution's CRA activities should be undertaken in a safe and sound manner, and does not require institutions to make high-risk loans that may bring losses to the institution. An institution's CRA compliance record is taken into account by the banking regulatory agencies when the institution seeks to expand through merger, acquisition or branching. The law does not mandate any other penalties for non-compliance with the CRA.
Regulations
The same Federal banking agencies that are responsible for supervising depository institutions are also the agencies that conduct examinations for CRA compliance. These agencies are the Federal Reserve System (FRB), the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), and the Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS). In 1981, to help achieve the goals of the CRA, each of the Federal Reserve banks established a Community Affairs Office to work with banking institutions and the public in identifying credit needs within the community and ways to address those needs.
Implementation of the CRA by these financial supervisory agencies is enacted by Title 12 of the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR); Parts 25, 228, 345, and 563e with the addition of Part 203 as it relates to sections of the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA).
The Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC) coordinates inter-agency information about the CRA. Information about the CRA ratings of individual banking institutions from the four responsible agencies (Federal Reserve, FDIC, OCC and OTS), is publicly available from the website of the FFIEC. These ratings were first made available by the Clinton administration to enable public participation and public comment on CRA performance.
In addition to the regulatory framework in place, each federal financial supervisory agency's Inspector General performs regular audits on any regulatory changes made to see if the intended goals are actually being fulfilled.
History
The original Act was passed by the 95th United States Congress and signed into law by President Jimmy Carter on October 12, 1977 (Pub.L. 95-128, 12 U.S.C. ch.30). Several legislative and regulatory revisions have since been enacted.
Legislative revision history
The hidden table below lists the acts of Congress that affected the Community Reinvestment Act directly. The years in which the legislative revisions were made appear in bold text preceding the Public Laws that enacted them. The links to the codification and section notes may provide additional information about the legislative changes as well.
Original act
The CRA was passed as a result of national pressure to address the deteriorating conditions of American cities—particularly lower-income and minority neighborhoods. Community activists, such as Gale Cincotta of National People's Action in Chicago, had led the national fight to pass, and later to enforce the Act.
The CRA followed similar laws passed to reduce discrimination in the credit and housing markets including the Fair Housing Act of 1968, the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974 and the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act of 1975 (HMDA). The Fair Housing Act and the Equal Credit Opportunity Act prohibit discrimination on the basis of race, sex, or other personal characteristics. The Home Mortgage Disclosure Act requires that financial institutions publicly disclose mortgage lending and application data. In contrast with those acts, the CRA seeks to ensure the provision of credit to all parts of a community, regardless of the relative wealth or poverty of a neighborhood.
Before the Act was passed, there were severe shortages of credit available to low- and moderate-income neighborhoods. In their 1961 report, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights found that African-American borrowers were often required to make higher downpayments and adopt faster repayment schedules. The commission also documented blanket refusals to lend in particular areas (redlining). The "redlining" of certain neighborhoods originated with the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) in the 1930s. The "residential security maps" created by the Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC) for the FHA were used by private and public entities for years afterwards to withhold mortgage capital from neighborhoods that were deemed "unsafe". Contributory factors in the shortage of direct lending in low- and moderate-income communities were a limited secondary market for mortgages, informational problems to do with the lack of credit evaluations for lower-income borrowers, and lack of coordination among credit agencies.
In Congressional debate on the Act, critics charged that the law would create unnecessary regulatory burdens. Partly in response to these concerns, Congress included little prescriptive detail and simply directs the banking regulatory agencies to ensure that banks and savings associations serve the credit needs of their local communities in a safe and sound manner. Community groups only slowly organized to take advantage of their right under the Act to complain about law enforcement of the regulations.
Legislative changes 1989
The Financial Institutions Reform Recovery and Enforcement Act of 1989 (FIRREA) was enacted by the 101st Congress and signed into law by President George H. W. Bush in the wake of the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s. As part of a general reform of the banking industry, it increased public oversight of the process of issuing CRA ratings to banks. It required the agencies to issue CRA ratings publicly and written performance evaluations using facts and data to support the agencies' conclusions. It also required a four-tiered CRA examination rating system with performance levels of 'Outstanding', 'Satisfactory', 'Needs to Improve', or 'Substantial Noncompliance'.
According to Ben Bernanke, this law greatly increased the ability of advocacy groups, researchers, and other analysts to "perform more-sophisticated, quantitative analyses of banks' records," thereby influencing the lending policies of banks. Over time, community groups and nonprofit organizations established "more-formalized and more-productive partnerships with banks."
Legislative changes 1992
Although minor amendments were made directly to the CRA concerning the consideration of minority and female owned institutions & partnerships during evaluations, other portions of the Federal Housing Enterprises Financial Safety and Soundness Act of 1992 required Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two government sponsored enterprises that purchase and securitize mortgages, to devote a percentage of their lending to support affordable housing.
In October 2000, to expand the secondary market for affordable community-based mortgages and to increase liquidity for CRA-eligible loans, Fannie Mae committed to purchase and securitize $2 billion of "MyCommunityMortgage" loans. In November 2000 Fannie Mae announced that the Department of Housing and Urban Development (“HUD”) would soon require it to dedicate 50% of its business to low- and moderate-income families." It stated that since 1997 Fannie Mae had done nearly $7 billion in CRA business with depository institutions, but its goal was $20 billion. In 2001 Fannie Mae announced that it had acquired $10 billion in specially-targeted Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) loans more than one
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