Adam Feibelman of Tulane University has written Relocating the Community Reinvestment Act. Here’s the abstract:
The Community Reinvestment Act was enacted in 1977 to address the failure of financial institutions to provide credit and financial services in low-income communities, especially Black neighborhoods. The Act is part of a family of legal regimes, including the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act and the Equal Credit Opportunity Act. Congress transferred authority and responsibility for those regimes and other consumer financial laws to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010, but it did not transfer the CRA. The reasons for this are, thus far, lost to history. It turns out that early versions of what became Dodd-Frank would have transferred the CRA to the Bureau. And a number of consumer and community advocates argued in favor of transferring the CRA at the time. This Essay excavates that legislative history and revisits the question, proposing that U.S. policymakers should seriously consider transferring authority for the CRA to the Bureau. It argues that the Bureau would likely be a better steward of the CRA than the other financial regulators; that authority and responsibility for the CRA, the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, and the Equal Credit Opportunity Act should not be divided among different regulators; and that implementing and enforcing the CRA would beneficially expand the scope of the Bureau’s mission and function.
