Wells Fargo Announcing $125 Billion Effort To Help Hispanics

Methodical Management said:

..... compliance with the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977? 

"Honoring" redlined/underserved communities with profitable (and, too often, predatory) lending should never be misconstrued as philanthropy.  Going out of your way to attract business from a specific demographic group isn't charity; it's marketing.  Are they offering these homebuyers rates below par?  Are they even promising to lend AT par?  Ten years ago, subprime mortgage lending to erstwhile redlined communities was promoted as an act of kindness.  Ultimately, it triggered the largest loss of minority wealth in the nation's history.  


This is like McDonald's announcing a plan to sell $185 billion worth of food in Latino communities and spend $10 million offering "nutrition advice" to consumers.   

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Methodical Management said:

This is like McDonald's announcing a plan to sell $185 billion worth of food in Latino communities and spend $10 million offering "nutrition advice" to consumers.   

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BenDover said:

This is exactly what it sounds like.
Except the burgers take 30 years to pay and come with interest.
I'm Hispanic but I'm also an economics major, I'm not too sold on this Wells Fargo idea just yet.

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LuckyLuchiano said:

No for profit company does anything purely out of the "kindness" of their hearts.

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Tr1ll said:

Dang Meth made it sound like they're playing Hispanics for suckas..

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Methodical Management said:

..... compliance with the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977? 

"Honoring" redlined/underserved communities with profitable (and, too often, predatory) lending should never be misconstrued as philanthropy.  Going out of your way to attract business from a specific demographic group isn't charity; it's marketing.  Are they offering these homebuyers rates below par?  Are they even promising to lend AT par?  Ten years ago, subprime mortgage lending to erstwhile redlined communities was promoted as an act of kindness.  Ultimately, it triggered the largest loss of minority wealth in the nation's history.  


This is like McDonald's announcing a plan to sell $185 billion worth of food in Latino communities and spend $10 million offering "nutrition advice" to consumers.   

Click to expand...

U.S. Supreme Court to hear crucial Dallas low-income housing case

http://dallasmorningviewsblog.dalla...-crucial-dallas-low-income-housing-case.html/

There is probably no more complicated, politically charged, bureaucratically messy deal in local government than the construction of low-income housing.

For starters, we need new, quality places for our low-income residents to live with dignity and an opportunity to pull themselves out of poverty.

But building new, quality homes and apartments for low-income people is a surefire money loser for a developer without significant help from the government.

So how does the government help bridge the money gap?

Here in Texas, we depend very heavily on something called tax credits. Developers apply to the state for credits they can sell on the open market for cash from corporations that need a tax break.

The application to qualify for these credits is about as complicated a thing as you will find. Developers get “points” for all kinds of things. The winner is the guy who gets the most points, and it’s often a margin of 1. At least, that’s how it’s supposed to work.

You won’t be shocked to learn that for a long, long time politics played a big role in who got what.

The reason former Mayor Pro Tem Don Hill is sitting in federal prison today is because he put his hand on the scale for developer Brian Potashnik in exchange for bribes. Well, well.

So stinky did the tax credit program become that Gov. Rick Perry decided to take any discretion out of the process. You either won on points or you lost. No wiggle room.

Let’s complicate this further. Stick with me, though, please. This is important to our city.

In 2008, a low-income housing developer known as the Inclusive Communities Project sued the state housing agency – the one that distributes tax credits.

ICP alleged that the state was violating the U.S. Constitution by shoving a disproportionate amount of low-income housing into minority neighborhoods.

This created what the lawyers call a “disparate impact” on minorities.

ICP was successful in its suit. As a result, the state housing agency had to reconfigure its scoring to try to remove that impact.

Here was the problem. People in richer, white neighborhoods don’t often welcome low-income housing, and the scoring penalizes developers for neighborhood opposition. Under the new rules, though, it was almost impossible to build it in poor, minority areas.

In Dallas, this has created a circumstance where there are precious few places you can put low-income housing. About the only place left was downtown. But now, after a few years, downtown isn’t available for much more low-income housing under the scoring.

This is a problem. Now, enter the U.S. Supreme Court. The court agreed last week to take up this ICP case. It will consider whether “disparate impact” alone constitutes a violation of federal housing law.

The court needs to settle that issue. We need some guiding law to know how and where to build low-income housing. There are very good reasons to try to distribute it. There are very good reasons not to ignore the fact that quality housing is often needed most in the neighborhoods where the poor already live. Many people don’t want to uproot their families and take them across town to a new apartment development. They want housing, but they want it where they are from, where their friends are, where their jobs are.

It’s complicated. The thing we know is that the current rules aren’t working, and we need better ones.

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Supreme Court: Texas Reinforced Segregated Housingby Liz Crampton June 25, 2015
http://www.texastribune.org/2015/06/25/supreme-court-rules-dallas-fair-housing-case/
The biggest federal housing subsidy program in Texas — which awarded $9.7 billion in tax credits from 1990 to 2011 — effectively has been reinforcing segregated housing, the U.S. Supreme Court found Thursday.

The high court ruled 5-4 against the state of Texas, which administers the federally backed subsidy program.

"Much progress remains to be made in our Nation’s continuing struggle against racial isolation," Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the majority opinion. "We must remain wary of policies that reduce homeowners to nothing more than their race."

Kennedy was joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Stephen Breyer.

The ruling, which strengthens the federal Fair Housing Act, is a victory for civil rights groups across the country.

Under the Low-Income Tax Credit program, run by the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs, the state gives federal incentives to private developers to build or rehabilitate low-cost apartments, essentially engineering parts of a city's geography.

The Inclusive Communities Project, a nonprofit devoted to fair housing issues, sued the TDHCA in 2009, arguing that the state doled out tax credits in Dallas in a way that packed minorities into poor neighborhoods and spared white neighborhoods from development of low-income housing. The result is that neighborhoods throughout Dallas remain segregated, the project argued.

A 2012 examination of state data by The Texas Tribune and San Antonio-Express News found that more than three-quarters of credits given out during a two-decade span subsidized the construction of apartments in neighborhoods mostly made up of poor blacks and Hispanics. Few units built with support from the tax credit program were in areas that are predominantly white.

At issue in the case was whether the federal Fair Housing Act directs officials to ensure that their actions do not have an unequal impact on a certain group, even if they didn't intend for it to occur.

The court decided it did not matter if the state housing department did not explicitly set out to discriminate based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin — the effect was enough to violate the law.

"To give families a choice to move to a better place to live when our government chooses where to fund affordable housing is the right thing to do," the Texas Low Income Housing Information Service said in a statement.

The White House released a statement following the decision, saying that it reflects the reality that discrimination exists not just out in the open, but in more hidden forms. "Too many Americans are victims of more subtle forms of discrimination, such as predatory lending, exclusionary zoning and development policies that limit affordable housing," the statement said.

In representing the state, Texas Solicitor General Scott Keller said during oral arguments in January that the FHA only prohibits acts of intentional discrimination because nowhere in the law does it say otherwise.

"Today's decision places an unfair burden on landlords, lenders and developers, and will ironically lead them to make their decisions based upon considerations of race," Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said in a statement. "The administration's interpretation of federal housing law is overreaching and misguided, and I am disappointed with the Supreme Court's ruling."

The long-awaited decision marked an opportunity for the court to finally state its opinion on an issue that has been brought before the justices three separate times in the past two years. Two prior cases involving so-called disparate impact claims were settled just months before the court got to hear arguments.

Now, some in the housing industry worry that they’ll be required to make decisions based on race to avoid liability, a concern that resonated with a court traditionally wary of upholding race-conscious policies.

Kennedy emphasized, however, that disparate impact liability should be imposed cautiously to prevent creating racial quotas.

"Courts should avoid interpreting disparate-impact liability to be so expansive as to inject racial considerations into every housing decision," Kennedy wrote.

The court's conservatives dissented, with Justice Clarence Thomas writing, "We as a Court have constructed a scheme that parcels out legal privileges to individuals on the basis of skin color."

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Methodical Management said:

RustyShackleford said:

Good on them.


In before, but what they doing for ...............

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..... compliance with the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977? 

"Honoring" redlined/underserved communities with profitable (and, too often, predatory) lending should never be misconstrued as philanthropy.  Going out of your way to attract business from a specific demographic group isn't charity; it's marketing.  Are they offering these homebuyers rates below par?  Are they even promising to lend AT par?  Ten years ago, subprime mortgage lending to erstwhile redlined communities was promoted as an act of kindness.  Ultimately, it triggered the largest loss of minority wealth in the nation's history.  


This is like McDonald's announcing a plan to sell $185 billion worth of food in Latino communities and spend $10 million offering "nutrition advice" to consumers.   

Click to expand...

RustyShackleford said:

Methodical Management said:

RustyShackleford said:

Good on them.


In before, but what they doing for ...............

Click to expand...

..... compliance with the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977? 

"Honoring" redlined/underserved communities with profitable (and, too often, predatory) lending should never be misconstrued as philanthropy.  Going out of your way to attract business from a specific demographic group isn't charity; it's marketing.  Are they offering these homebuyers rates below par?  Are they even promising to lend AT par?  Ten years ago, subprime mortgage lending to erstwhile redlined communities was promoted as an act of kindness.  Ultimately, it triggered the largest loss of minority wealth in the nation's history.  


This is like McDonald's announcing a plan to sell $185 billion worth of food in Latino communities and spend $10 million offering "nutrition advice" to consumers.   

Click to expand...

I absolutely agree with everything you said, and I'm not interrupting this as philanthropy

And I don't have the answer to those questions

But I made my comment because I interrupted the article as Well Fargo donating to a Hispanic group trying to help the Hispanic community, rather than Wells Fargo themselves proclaiming they are launching some initiative to help Hispanics. Which I would have interrupted as BS right away

You're right this is marketing clearly. But I at least have the hope that since there is a buffer between people getting these loans and the bank itself that folk won't get taken advantaged of. I will admit that may be naive

While I'm cautious of this, I don't/won't have a problem with this marketing ploy for brownie points if Wells Fargo and follows through and actually does treat the people fairly.

I will admit I speaking from a place of ignorance because I don't have the answers to your questions, nor I'm I familiar NAHREP.

I read the article, interrupted it as a Hispanic organization trying to help the Hispanic community and Wells Fargo supporting it to get some good PR.

That was enough to warrant the "Good on them" comment

-The last line was alluding to this thread running the risk of turning into a back and forth argument about "what is being done for other groups....." given my interruption of the article

But I guess you have warned me about be more clear and not using " " in the past

My bad then

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nawghtyhare said:

What word was u trying to spell
That ur spell check kept turning it into interruption

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RustyShackleford said:

nawghtyhare said:

What word was u trying to spell
That ur spell check kept turning it into interruption

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Thanks brah

If I got the spare change I got you on an amiibo this Xmas

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nawghtyhare said:

RustyShackleford said:

nawghtyhare said:

What word was u trying to spell
That ur spell check kept turning it into interruption

Click to expand...

Thanks brah

If I got the spare change I got you on an amiibo this Xmas

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quoted and screen shot for later

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Tr1ll said:

Dang Meth made it sound like they're playing Hispanics for suckas..

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