Forty years ago Gale Cincotta, affectionately known in the community organizing world as the mother of community reinvestment, led her troops into bank lobbies, effectively shutting them down for the day, held barbeques on the front yards of bank executives, and threatened Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volker that she would...

Foreclosures continue to decimate communities around the nation, with black neighborhoods being the hardest hit. Some pundits and politicians point to federal policies that encouraged homeownership in low- and moderate-income communities, coupled with reckless behavior on the part of greedy homeowners, as the crux of the problem. One example is...

"I made a mistake." ~ Alan Greenspan 2008

Throughout the various policy, scholarly, and media debates over the financial crisis the focus has been on a handful of bad actors. Among the culprits are greedy homeowners, lazy underwriters, asleep-at-the-wheel regulators, irresponsible investors, fraudulent appraisers and credit rating agencies,...

The financial costs of the seemingly endless foreclosure crisis have been widely reported with Credit Suisse estimating that as many as 12 million families will lose their homes before this is all over. The predatory lending that led to the spike in foreclosures, and the robo-signings coupled with the illegal...

The foreclosure mess just will not go away. Neither will incomplete if not misleading explanations for the crisis, or partial if not ineffective policy proposals. More than 10 million families will lose their homes to foreclosure before the housing market "clears" according to Credit Suisse. Meanwhile, as with the...

"Do the kids in the neighborhood play hockey or basketball?"
--Question posed by a major insurance company to a Boston agent

The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act which the President will likely soon sign is a direct, if not immediate, response to a financial crisis that...

ACORN may well have been the most effective anti-poverty organization in the nation's history. To paraphrase Sarah Palin, community organizers such as those who have worked for ACORN are kind of like Alaskan governors, but with commitment and staying power. John Atlas' book, Seeds of Change (Vanderbilt University Press 2010)...

Samantha Friedman and Gregory D. Squires

It helps to be white if you are trying to rent an apartment in Dallas. At least those housing providers who advertise rental units on Craigslist clearly prefer to rent to white rather than African American or Hispanic households.
According to real estate...

Four million instances of housing discrimination occur each year, yet federal, state, and local fair housing law enforcement agencies processed fewer than 11,000 complaints in 2008, according to the National Fair Housing Alliance (NFHA). If the objective of the 1968 federal Fair Housing Act was to replace the ghettos with...