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Yes, the CRA Is Toxic
...To begin with, the CRA defenders’ claim that CRA lending mostly wasn’t subprime is highly misleading. It would be more accurate to say that 90 percent of CRA lending wasn’t classified as subprime. CRA lenders, along with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—the two government-sponsored entities that bought loans from lenders, enabling them to make more loans—commonly classified CRA loans as “subprime” only if they contained such features as high fees, high rates, or low initial payments with adjustable interest rates. But approximately 50 percent of CRA loans for single-family residences were nevertheless made to borrowers who made down payments of 5 percent or less or had low credit scores—characteristics that indicated high credit risk. Whether or not anyone called these loans “subprime,” in other words, the chances are good that many of them have defaulted or remain at high risk of doing so.

Though the feds, again, haven’t collected figures for CRA loans’ performance as a whole, we do have statistics from a few lenders that are troubling indeed. In Cleveland, Third Federal Savings and Loan has a 35 percent delinquency rate on its CRA-mandated “Home Today” loans, versus a 2 percent delinquency rate on its non–Home Today portfolio. Chicago’s Shorebank—the nation’s first community development bank, with largely CRA-related loans on its books—has a 19 percent delinquency and nonaccrual rate for its portfolio of first-mortgage loans for single-family residences. And Bank of America said in 2008 that while its CRA loans constituted 7 percent of its owned residential-mortgage portfolio, they represented 29 percent of that portfolio’s net losses....

...Taxpayers deserve to know why not one regulator had the common sense to track the performance of CRA loans. They also deserve to know why the Federal Reserve, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Office of Thrift Supervision, and other regulators appear to have no idea how trillions of dollars in CRA loans are performing now. But above all, they deserve to know that the damage done by the CRA won’t happen again. Incredibly, the House Financial Services Committee is considering legislation that would broaden the scope of the CRA. Before it takes any action on HR 1479—which would expand the CRA’s mandates from banks to bank subsidiaries, mortgage bankers, credit unions, insurance companies, and other nonbank financial institutions—the committee should demand that regulators request detailed CRA performance data from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, as well as from the four banks that have announced 94 percent of the nation’s $6 trillion in CRA commitments: Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, Citibank, and Bank of America. These six institutions should be able to provide performance information for an estimated 70 percent of outstanding CRA loans....