The National Fair Housing Alliance, joined by fair housing, civil rights, and consumer protection organizations, filed an amicus brief last Friday in Consumer Financial Protection Bureau v. Townstone, an enforcement action that the bureau previously had successfully settled but that it now seeks to reverse in favor of the corporate defendant.
In the original case, the bureau charged that Townstone Financial Inc., a mortgage lender, violated the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, by engaging in discriminatory lending and redlining in the Chicago area. In a settlement reached in Nov. 2024, the lender agreed to pay a $105,000 penalty to the CFPB’s victims relief fund and to refrain from further ECOA violations. In a startling reversal, the bureau and Townstone last month submitted a joint motion to vacate the final judgment and order in this case.
In response, the organizations in their amicus brief stepped in, stating their concern that the bureau’s action “poses risks both to the orderly conduct of litigation and to the consumer-protection and anti-discrimination interests of the organizations and people on whose behalf they work. Given the lack of adversarial argument on the parties’ joint motion, amici believe that this memorandum will be helpful to the Court in considering the motion.”
Among other things, the amicus brief asserts that the federal procedural rule (Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, Rule 60(b)), which the bureau is relying on to vacate the judgment “is not a magic eraser that they [the bureau and Townstone] can invoke to undo final judgments from earlier civil litigation with which they disagree on the basis of policy, not new information about the law or facts.”
The groups submitting the amicus brief: National Fair Housing Alliance, Public Citizen, The American Civil Liberties Union, ACLU of Illinois, Better Markets, Chicago Lawyers’ Committee For Civil Rights, Consumer Federation of America, Fair Housing Center of Central Indiana, Hope Fair Housing Center, Metropolitan Milwaukee Fair Housing Council, National Association of Consumer Advocates, National Consumer Law Center, Open Communities, And South Suburban Housing Center.
