Community organizations lack the resources to establish a new credit union,
while credit unions have difficulty penetrating underserved markets. In these
four cases, a strategic partnership helped bridge the gap.
For many Chicago region households, affordable housing is rental housing. With 35 percent of the foreclosures filed in 2007 affecting multi-family rental units, what can be done to keep these units on the market?
Getting a payday loan in Illinois means choosing
between one with strong consumer protections and one without. Read why that
choice isn’t nearly as easy as it sounds.
With over 20 million households unbanked and
many more under-banked or expensively banked, providing access to basic, affordable
financial services is a high priority for bringing lower-income
families into the financial mainstream.
Woodstock Institute staff provides regular technical assistance to community organizations, media outlets, policy makers, and financial institutions. This assistance includes developing lending analyses, new data sources, program evaluations, and product development.
“Bait and switch clauses, double-cycle billing, and cut-off times
designed to rack up late fees––these are the practices that are
specifically prohibited by H.R. 5244,” said Woodstock President Dory
Rand.
Without a doubt, a new financial services disclosure act, enacted by Congress and incorporating what has worked in the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, is sorely needed. Most nonmortgage lending data is still collected by myriad state agencies. Tracking foreclosures, certainly a national concern, is still a strictly local affair.
Loans at as much as 2,500 percent will still be business as usual for
nearly every major financial institution, with most bank customers
automatically, and often unknowingly, enrolled.
Building Community Assets: Growing Lower-Income Credit Union Membership through Community and Credit Union Partnerships
Comment letter to Federal Reserve requesting that proposed rule set a maximum permissible default or penalty rate for credit cards and include additional borrower protections
