Our members include community reinvestment organizations, community development corporations; local and state government agencies; faith-based institutions; community organizing and civil rights groups; minority and women-owned business associations as well as local and social service providers from across the nation.

NCRC pursues its work through a variety of partnerships and programs. Our National Homeownership Sustainability Fund leverages the expertise of a national network of mortgage finance advisors. They work with servicers and lenders, on behalf of homeowners, to keep working families from losing their homes to foreclosure.

NCRC’s National Training Academy provides training and technical assistance on topics such as understanding how to use the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), fair lending laws, Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA), Truth in Lending Act (TILA), Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act (RESPA), Homeownership and Equity Protection Act (HOEPA), fair housing and foreclosure prevention. Our Economic Justice Campaign sites pilot innovative community partnerships to enhance the delivery of financial, technical, and social services to individual consumers, homeowners, and small business.

NCRC’s work is enhanced by two financial service advisory councils consisting of the nation’s largest banks and mortgage finance companies. Quarterly roundtables examine issues involving responsible financial service-related policies, regulations and legislation, as well as innovative products, services and best practices.

NCRC represents its members before Congress, federal regulatory agencies and the press. NCRC routinely testifies before the U.S. Congress, and meets with the leadership of banking and lending regulatory agencies. NCRC frequently provides expert commentary on national television, and our research and policy papers have been cited in hundreds of newspapers in the US.

Voluntary nature, rising unemployment and underwater homeowners impede progress of foreclosure prevention program

The report addresses the concerns surrounding foreclosure prevention rescue scams. The research study was conducted for a period of three months in mid-2009 using “fair lending matched pair testing” or mystery shopping” to assess the extent of the problem. Findings of the study demonstrate that an aggressive legislative solution and added public and private oversights and enforcement are necessary to prevent consumers from being harmed.

NCRC's Housing Counseling Network Offers Loan Modification and Financial Assistance to Homeowners

• Are you struggling to make your mortgage payments?
• Are you unable to refinance?
• Are you upside on your mortgage?
• Are you late paying your mortgage?

If you answer "YES" to any of the following above, you may be in danger of facing foreclosure. Do not wait and contact us now for a FREE LOAN MODIFICATION COUNSELING. You're not alone. Millions of people across the United States are currently having trouble with their mortgage. Don't wait any longer!

We Can Help!

Live in DC? Unemployed, facing foreclosure? HCN can help.

If you or someone you know lives in DC, is unemployed and at risk of foreclosure, please contact NCRC's Housing Counseling Network today at 202-383-7702.

Learn how to apply for up to 15 months of mortgage assistance for DC residents. Call today to learn if you are eligible.

The foreclosure crisis still divides us into two camps. There are those who believe that foreclosing rapidly on homes subject to defaulted mortgages is vital to clearing the market. Others believe we should do everything we can to keep people in their homes, urging loan modifications to forestall foreclosures.

John Taylor, President and CEO of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, falls solidly in the latter camp. Taylor would like to see widespread mortgage modifications that would allow homeowners in danger of defaulting to keep their homes. Taylor is on the board of directors of the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition and the Leadership Conference for Civil Rights. He has also served on the Consumer Advisory Council of the Federal Reserve Bank Board, The Fannie Mae Housing Impact Division as well as The Freddie Mac Housing Advisory Board. He is extremely passionate on why his idea is the right choice to help turn around the real estate market.

LL: There has been so much overleveraging in the real estate industry and lower interest rates can only help so much, what needs to get done with this new Congress looking at Financial Reform with Fannie and Freddie because they have not been address yet.

JT: You are absolutely right. It's kind of like pumping plasma into a patient while the patient is still bleeding. We need to stanch the foreclosure crisis first. So the government has to get serious about this problem. The Administration's voluntary approach to foreclosure prevention has probably done as much as it can possibly do, and even by their standards has not done enough.

They have to step up the pressure now to achieve better results. The Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and Fannie and Freddie are the only securitizers in town now until the private market comes back; , they ought to be able to get banks and servicers willing to cooperate and modify these loans heading to foreclosure.

It must be done. Because it is absolutely going to slow down any type of economic recovery if we have the eleven million more foreclosures projected by Wall Street analysts; if they go through, it's going to triple the number of foreclosures we've experienced. How is that going to help the economy? So you have to put on the table the idea of taking as many of these troubled loans as possible and putting the homeowners in sustainable, modified loans, that are based on their ability to pay. Banks should have made these kinds of loans, which the homeowner could actually pay back, in the first place.

LL: But what about the millions of people who purchased homes they could afford? Why should people be allowed to stay in homes they had no business buying in the first place, because they were way out of their price tag?

JT: Was it a massive, malfeasant, greedy, lending industry that caused the problem or was it stupid consumers who should have known better? I think the evidence overwhelmingly supports the former conclusion. But that doesn't matter anymore; we don't have time for that debate. The question now is what do we do to stop the foreclosures that are killing our economy by a thousand cuts, a hundred fold, every month.

Foreclosures are the mortal enemy to economic recovery. We can keep on pumping money into the system to create liquidity for banks and in the market, but it's simply not going to succeed until they plug the hole at the bottom of the well!

So what has the Administration done to stem foreclosures? They have put in place a voluntary program, which has done roughly half a million permanent modifications since the program began, but there's been three and a half million foreclosures during the same time period and seven million foreclosure filings.

That kind of performance earns merits a failing grade by any one's standards.

So what do federal officials need to do? They need to stop carrying their hat in hand when dealing with Wall Street; The government can pound these guys, and they have all the leverage they need by merit of the fact that the banks can't do business without them. I hear people critical about the government's role in the private lending sector; but without the government we don't have a housing market right now. Without the government there is no Fed window and bond issuance and the liquidity they create. Without the government there is no securitization. Wall Street isn't doing these things; there is almost no private label securitization happening.

You know, all these banks are sitting on loans heading into foreclosure because the banks that hold the second liens are refusing to modify; the banks that hold the second liens are expecting the first lien holders will take the entire hit, and they'll get paid out at 100%. Well these banks holding the second liens need to be taken to task, because they are holding up a lot of modifications.

Also, what are Fannie and Freddie waiting for? The government holds tremendous regulatory authority over them; but government officials says they can't tell them what to do, even though the government says no not really, Fannie and Freddie that they are just in conservatorship. and we can't tell them what to do. That's just not true. The government is in the position to tell Fannie and Freddie to refinance hundreds of thousands of loans tomorrow, but Fannie and Freddie and the administration are looking at their bottom line so they are charging extra fees above the private market on anything that has any type of risk in it. Fannie and Freddie have not reduced the principal on one single mortgage.

They have done half of what the banks are doing.We said from the beginning, to Secretary Paulson and then Geithner, that the foreclosure crisis can't be resolved by the voluntary participation of the banks.

You can't keep on sweetening the pie and expect them to do the right thing. The truth of the matter is that when push comes to shove the banks have no choice because the government has the ability to say to banks that if they want to do business with the government, including the Federal Reserve, FHA and the GSEs, they must cooperate and restructure these loans. If that had been done, some investors would have had to take some losses; but they are losing now at a very slow rate, prolonging the problem.

The government should use the money they earned from TARP and purchase hundreds of thousands of loans at a discount—at a discount because they are not worth what they once were—and then recycle them into good, permanent, sustainable loans. Where people lost their jobs and can't afford their homes, other solutions are necessary. And abandoned properties should be foreclosed on and the properties should be put back on the market.

But we're not seeing practical solutions to the foreclosure crisis pursued. It seems to me people are just throwing up their arms, letting everything go down and saying if we don't get through all these foreclosures we will never see a bottom. I think its a terrible way to get through all this, and it will undermine our economy for years to come.

LL: What you are proposing is extremely unpopular. How do you convince Americans this is the way to go to help the industry heal?

JT: People have a right to be mad, but they shouldn't be mad at 17 million plus homeowners that have either gone into foreclosure or are heading there. Seventeen million homeowners can't all be stupid and greedy and wrong. The behavior of the industry is what changed; the financial services sector tricked and trapped these people, without the proper oversight to rein in their irresponsible lending practices.

Should people have known better? Yes. But the industry was rigged to push through these loans and convince people they could afford to do it. But again, it's too late to rehash these tired debates. If we do not respond to the foreclosure crisis now, we can guarantee the pain that will be felt by most of the people in this country. Families facing foreclosure don't want a handout, they just want reasonable help. In fact, most of the people that got bad loans, perhaps 90 percent of them, are still paying on that sub-prime loan. Some of them have just simply fallen behind.

If we don't do restructure their loans and keep people in their homes, property values will drop and everyone will be impacted who owns a home. We need to share the pain now, because otherwise it will affect us more broadly. Many people might think well, gee, if these homeowners had been smart they should have gotten the loan I got. Well that loan was not available to them because the system was rigged to push people into higher cost loans. Why? Because brokers and lenders got their fees and earnings that were connected to convincing people to take out more expensive mortgages with predatory terms and conditions. That's what was wrong.

You can sit there and say the people should have known better, and call that the moral hazard. Or, you can recognize the real moral hazard here was allowing an industry to prepay upon a substantial portion of the home-owning public, to give them loans with terms and conditions the lenders knew were not sustainable.

The moral dilemma then is do you put the burden on the people affected, while the banks are allowed to continue with their business? With the exception of investment products, when other other consumer product goes bad, the burden is put on the manufacturer, not the consumer.

LL: Do you think the new congress will create good regulation laws?

JT: The conservatives basically want to get rid of Fannie and Freddie, they don't want the competition for the private market. The Democrats are acting too timid.

Congress has not shown that they are willing to push for all lenders to make responsible, sustainable loans to working-class people, and I'm not hopeful that this will change in the next Congress. People need loans for businesses, housing, other purposes, but they must be fair and sustainable loans, otherwise we get into trouble again. Expanding the Community Reinvestment Act would accomplish this goal, but too many members of Congress are too may be beholden to Wall Street to make that happen.

LL: Do you think these two far extremely will be able to meet in the middle?

JT: I think in the end, Fannie and Freddie will be different then they are today.

They'll have considerably less market share. We ought to preserve their role in as a securitizer of affordable housing loans, but that remains to be seen. Hopefully that core aspect of Fannie and Freddie's purpose will remain intact.

LL: Where are we in the Fannie and Freddie put-back Tsunami?

JT: This is a very astute question, and I'm really surprised more reporters are not focusing on this. This is the real issue that will force everyone to come to the table and I think that's a good thing. Fannie and Freddie are sending back bad loans; where they believe there was widespread fraud and abuse in the origination process. The GSEs have reps and warrants to be able to force the lenders to verify if they followed underwriting guidelines. If you acted fraudulently, then you ought to be responsible for any mortgage that is going bad.

That's the way it's supposed to work. That's also a protection for the taxpayers and investors.

This is the same process that private label securitizers use. The private labels can also turn around and do the same thing, and there the problems are even more severe, because the private labels encouraged and purchased massive amounts of the no-document, low-document, verbally guarantee loans. These were the standards they created and accepted. So it's difficult for them to go back to the lenders and say "you're responsible for this now."

And there are other complicit parties. When things started to go sour, I went to one of the credit agencies, S&P, and they showed me one of the forms they used in their rating process. The lenders had to describe the nature of these loans, and on this particular document showed the y loans with low-documentation, no-documentation, piggyback second loans, Yield Spread Premiums, long prepayment penalties, balloon payments; in short, they had all those things that got everybody into trouble. It was all codified by the investment banks and the rating agencies. The problem was that the investors didn't know about this.

LL: What inning are we in in this put-back tsunami?

JT: To use your baseball metaphor, we are in the second inning of a nine-inning game, where all the pitchers are striking people out and no one is getting any hits. We can play this game out for another six to seven years with millions of foreclosures piling up and watch property values continue to deteriorate and unemployment go up, or we can grab the bull by the horn and get serious about this.

The federal government must mandate that the private sector modify certain loans such that they match the borrowers ability-to-pay. Voluntary compliance simply has not and will not work. These new loans should match the incomes of the borrowers so that a responsible borrower has a sustainable loan. Those who have lost their jobs should be given a reasonable period to find suitable employment, and if unsuccessful, have the time to pursue other housing options.

As part of NCRC's mission to end discrimination and to increase fair and equal access to credit and capital for underserved communities, NCRC's National Neighbors program conducts fair housing testing and investigation for government agencies, municipalities and other interested organizations.

Fair Housing Organization Initiative

Through the Fair Housing Initiative Program under a Fair Housing Organization Initiative grant awarded by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the National Community Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC) will conduct fair lending investigative activities to identify and combat abusive foreclosure prevention scams in major metropolitan areas throughout the United States.  This 12-month project aims to support local enforcement of fair housing and fair lending laws, build the capacity and effectiveness of non-profit fair housing organizations, and aid consumers who have been victimized by foreclosure prevention provider scams.

Though the project is national in scope, it will include targeted outreach in Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) that

(1) are largely, historically segregated;

(2) have been hard-hit by the foreclosure crisis; and

(3) have minority populations that have experienced disparate levels of subprime lending

NCRC will work with local partners to review consumer documents, and identify problematic foreclosure prevention providers. Additionally, through training and collaboration, NCRC will increase the capacity of participating organizations so that they may better address systemic discrimination and consumer protections violations beyond the grant term.

Private Enforcement Initiative

Through a FHIP Private Enforcement Initiative grant awarded by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the National Community Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC) will address systemic discrimination in mortgage lending and loan servicing. This is a 12-month project that aims to assist with the enforcement of fair housing and fair lending laws and aid distressed consumers who are facing problematic loans due to the illegal actions of lenders and servicers.

Though the project is national in scope, it will include targeted outreach in Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) that

(1) are largely, historically segregated;  

(2) have been hard-hit by the foreclosure crisis; and  

(3) have minority populations that have experienced disparate levels of subprime lending

NCRC will work with local partners in MSAs to assist in loan document review, and to identify problematic loans, servicers, and loan originators. Additionally, through training and collaboration, NCRC will increase the capacity of local fair lending and housing counseling agencies so that they can better address the issue of systemic discrimination in mortgage lending and loan servicing beyond the grant term.

If you have any questions or would like to contact our National Neighbors' team, you can contact NCRC via Contact Us or at 800-475-NCRC (6272).

DC Bar Complaint Against Adrian Cronauer (2.5mb)

NCRC's Housing Counseling Network Offers Emergency Financial Assistance to Homeowners

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and NeighborWorks America recently announced the recipients of Emergency Homeowners' Loan Program (EHLP) grant funding. NCRC and its Housing Counseling Network (HCN) affiliates will receive funding to provide support to over 1400 households in approximately 13 states.

HUD anticipates a high amount of demand for the Emergency Homeowners' Loan Program (EHLP). In order to ensure that program funds are made available in a fair and impartial manner, homeowners interested in applying must first complete a Pre-Applicant Screening Worksheet. If there are more potentially eligible homeowners than there are funds available to assist them, these worksheets will be entered into a randomized selection process. EHLP counseling agencies will evaluate completed screening worksheets to make an initial, informal pre-determination of household eligibility. Homeowners whose completed worksheets meet this standard will be randomly selected, and these homeowners will be invited to apply for an EHLP loan in the order they are selected.

Unfortunately, due to the limited amount of resources available through the EHLP, some qualified homeowners will not be selected to complete an application. Furthermore, some homeowners will complete an application but not will not ultimately be approved to receive assistance if their applications are incomplete or if they do not otherwise meet all of the program's eligibility criteria.

Homeowners who are randomly selected will be called by their local EHLP housing counseling agency to schedule an appointment to complete the EHLP application packet. NOTE: There is no charge for this service. During the appointment, homeowners will be required to submit the specified documentation to support eligibility. It is very important for all homeowners to be familiar with all of the EHLP documentation requirements and have all specified documents prepared to submit at the time of their application appointment. Click on this link to review the document checklist.

How to Apply for EHLP

The Pre-Applicant eligibility screening period will run from between June 20, 2011 through July 22, 2011. The homeowner application period will not begin until late July 2011. The Pre-Applicant screening procedures are described below, and include a link to a downloadable and printable screening worksheet. Click here for the contact information of the EHLP housing counseling agency serving your community, county or state.

• Step 1. Complete the Screening Documents: Worksheet and Third-Party Authorization

• Step 2. Submit both documents to an Housing Counseling Network affiliate or an EHLP Agency
• Note: Pre-applications are being accepted Monday, June 20, through Friday, July 22

  PRE-APPLICANT SCREENING DOCUMENT

States Participating in EHLP

EHLP will be available in the following states:
Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Hawaii, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Mexico, New York, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming. EHLP is also offered in Puerto Rico.

Substantially similar EHLP states:

On April 1, 2011, HUD identified five states operating their own respective mortgage asssistance programs that met HUD's criteria as "substantially similar" to the EHLP. These include Connecticut, Delaware, Idaho, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. Each of these states have received direct allocations of EHLP funds to directly administer and assist homeowners in need. For information about how to apply for EHLP assistance in these substantially similar states, please contact the NCRC Housing Counseling Network at 1-800-475-NCRC (6272).

Connecticut, Delaware, Idaho, Maryland, Pennsylvania

States that are not participating in EHLP:
Those states that are not identified above (non-EHLP states) receive direct assistance through the U.S. Treasury's Innovation Fund for Hardest Hit Housing Market Program. The list of Hardest Hit Fund states is provided below. If you live in one of these states, click on that state's name to find out more about Hardest Hit Housing Market Program that is available where you live.
Alabama, Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Mississippi, Nevada, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Washington DC

We Can Help!

HCN can help. Please contact NCRC's Housing Counseling Network today at 202-383-7702.

Call today to learn if you are eligible.

NCRC's Housing Counseling Network joins DC program to provide foreclosure prevention counseling to the unemployed

Washington, DC— the National Community Reinvestment Coalition's Housing Counseling Network (NCRC HCN), a Housing and Urban Development (HUD) certified housing counseling organization, announced that it will provide housing counseling under the District of Columbia Housing Finance Agency's (DCHFA) HomeSaver program. The DCHFA program will provide foreclosure prevention to an estimated 1,000 unemployed DC homeowners, and is funded by the $1.5 billion dollar Hardest Hit Fund Initiative created by the Obama administration last year.