Reimagining The Community Reinvestment Act

In May 2022, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC), and the Federal Reserve Board of Governors released a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to strengthen the Community Reinvestment Act, a civil rights era law that ended the discriminatory practice of redlining and obligated banks to reinvest in low-income communities, resulting in trillions of dollars of lending and investment in underserved communities.

The last time the CRA was substantially updated by the three agencies was in 1995. This is a historic and rare opportunity to update the rules to explicitly examine race within the CRA in order to increase reinvestment in communities that were historically redlined and continue to experience economic and climate inequities.

Racialized public policies led to a need for CRA, so explicitly race-based criteria that hold banks accountable to serving communities of color is necessary to genuinely address decades of race-based disinvestment. Greenlining recommends that an updated CRA analyzes lending by race and ethnicity, and not just income. This rulemaking process also offers an opportunity to support the resilience of communities vulnerable to climate change.

[JJ_DaJenius]

I saw this posted in my bank now I’m down the rabbit hole