Mark Winston Griffith

An Economic Justice Victory for Us All, Here and Now

To those who think that blogging is only about bitching and muckraking, let me take this opportunity to big-up Housing Here and Now. Housing Here and Now, a broad coalition of community organizing and advocacy organizations, recently staged a coup by pressuring Citigroup and New York Community Bank to agree to use their "leverage as lenders to pressure landlords into repairing dilapidated buildings", as reported by the New York Times.

HH&N effectively threatened to wield a Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) challenge against the New York Community Bank's plans to acquire Atlantic Bank of New York. The CRA mandates that a bank's community track record can be considered when that bank is requesting regulatory approval. New Yorks Community Bank's application to its federal regulators could have been held up, theoretically at least, as a result of HH&N's intervention. Legally, banks are supposed to consider code violations before making mortgages, but records showed that NYCB was consistently turning over ownership of apartment buildings fraught with violations.

This is a very important victory for at least two reasons. One, because is demonstrates that the CRA, which has been severely weakened over the years as a result of deregulation and other changes in the banking system, still has some utility for community groups seeking to hold banks accountable during the process of neighborhood development.

Secondly, Housing Here and Now employed a creative and effective way of connecting banking issues to housing issues. This will not only serve as an inspiration to other community reinvestment, corporate accountability and tenant organizing campaigns, but also hopefully make landlords and bankers think twice before they try to run roughshod over low-income neighborhoods.

Mark Winston Griffith: Author Bio | Other Posts
Posted at 9:46 PM, Apr 09, 2006 in
Permalink | Email to Friend | Comment on this post