In response to a request for comment, Woodstock Institute Senior Research Fellow Calvin Bradford wrote to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) imploring the Agency to provide public users of Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) data with greater technical assistance and support.
HMDA passed in 1975 thanks to a grassroots movement dedicated to improving access to credit. The core purpose of the law is to provide lending data to the public so that community stakeholders can:
- Help determine whether financial institutions are serving the housing needs of their communities;
- Assist public officials in distributing public-sector investment so as to attract private investment to areas where it is needed; and
- Assist in identifying possible discriminatory lending patterns and enforcing antidiscrimination statutes.
While HMDA reporters from the banking and lending industries benefit from considerable resources to assist with reporting the data, the intended public end users of this data, which include community organizations, affordable housing agencies and developers, state and local governments, civil rights and fair housing organizations, and researchers of all kinds, receive nowhere near the corresponding support.
In our letter, we provide numerous examples of a wide range of resources that would facilitate public use of the disclosure data.
