About the Book

This book informs a renewed movement for fair lending and fair housing. Leading advocates and specialists examine strategic initiatives to realize objectives of the federal Fair Housing Act as well as state and local laws

Well-known fair housing and fair lending activists and organizers examine the implications of the new wave of fair housing activism generated by Occupy Wall Street protests and the many successes achieved in fair housing and fair lending over the years. The book reveals the limitations of advocacy efforts and the challenges that remain. Best directions for future action are brought to light by staff of fair housing organizations, fair housing attorneys, community and labor organizers, and scholars who have researched social justice organizing and advocacy movements. The book is written for general interest and academic audiences.

Contributors address the foreclosure crisis, access to credit in a changing marketplace, and the immoral hazards of big banks. They examine opportunities in collective bargaining available to homeowners and how low-income and minority households were denied access to historically low home prices and interest rates. Authors question the effectiveness of litigation to uphold the Fair Housing Act's promise of nondiscriminatory home loans and ask how the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is assuring fair lending. They also look at where immigrants stand, housing as a human right, and methods for building a movement.

About the Author: David Berenbaum serves as the chief program officer of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC). He is a responsible for implementing NCRC's policy, private enforcement, National Neighbors and national housing counseling intermediary initiatives, as well as related fraud, fair lending, and Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing training programs. He has testified before the US Congress many times on a wide range of issues and has appeared as an expert on numerous national news magazine shows--including "Dateline NBC," "48 Hours," "The CBS Evening News," CNBC, CNN, and others. Berenbaum previously served as the executive director of Long Island Housing Services in New York and the Equal Rights Center in Washington.
Janis Bowdler is the director for the Wealth-Building Policy Project at the National Council of La Raza (NCLR), the largest national Latino civil rights and advocacy organization in the United States. In this role, she conducts policy and legislative analysis, research, and advocacy on issues that promote the financial security and advancement of Latino families through asset ownership and wealth creation. Bowdler has authored a number of publications on Hispanic home ownership and abusive mortgage lending practices, among others, and regularly serves as an expert witness before the US Congress and federal regulators on issues regarding wealth-building challenges facing the Latino community.
Michael D. Calhoun is president of the Center for Responsible Lending, which is the policy affiliate of Self-Help, the nation's largest community development lender that has provided over $6.4 billion in financing for first time homeowner loans and small business loans. The Center for Responsible Lending is a nonpartisan, nonprofit research and policy institute focusing on consumer lending issues. He has authored numerous papers on the subject and has testified before the US Congress and many state legislatures. He is a former member and chair of the Federal Reserve Consumer Advisory Committee.
James H. Carr is the chief business officer for the National Community Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC), an executive committee member of Americans for Financial Reform, and a blogger for the Roosevelt Institute's New Deal 2.0 initiative. Prior to his appointment to NCRC, he was senior vice president for financial innovation, planning, and research for the Fannie Mae Foundation, assistant director for Tax Policy with the US Senate Budget Committee, and research associate at the Center for Urban Policy Research at Rutgers University. Carr was an advisor to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Urban Affairs Project Group in Paris, France, and has consulted internationally on financial modernization, housing finance, and economic development in China, Mexico, Turkey, Colombia, South Africa, and Ghana.
Peter Dreier is the E. P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics and director of the Urban & Environmental Policy Department at Occidental College. He formerly served as director of housing for the Boston Redevelopment Authority and senior policy advisor to Boston Mayor Ray Flynn. In 1993, the Clinton administration appointed him to the advisory board of the Resolution Trust Corp., the savings-and-loan clean-up agency. Among his (coauthored) books are "The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century: A Social Justice Hall of Fame" (2012), "The Next Los Angeles: The Struggle for a Livable City" (2006), and "Place Matters: Metropolitics for the 21st Century" (2001).
Thomas P. Fitzgibbon, Jr. is the managing director and chief operations officer for Talmer Bank and Trust, a $2.8 billion privately held community bank with sixty offices in Southern Wisconsin and Eastern Michigan. He was the executive vice president of the $10 billion Chicago-based MB Financial Bank until 2010. He also served as the president of MB Financial Community Development Corporation (MBCDC), a $4 million equity subsidiary of the bank he started in 1995, and president of the MB Financial Bank Charitable Foundation that he started in 2004. Under his leadership, the bank received an Outstanding CRA rating for nine consecutive years.
George Goehl is the executive director of National People's Action, a network of metropolitan and statewide membership organizations dedicated to advancing economic and racial justice. Goehl has been an organizer and strategist for seventeen years, crafting city, state, and federal campaigns on issues ranging from preventing foreclosures, outlawing predatory lending, and advancing immigration reform. He is a cofounder of the New Bottom Line, a national alignment designed to restructure our relationship with Wall Street and the financial sector and advance a vision of a more equitable and sustainable economy.
Chester Hartman is an urban planner, author, and academic. He has served on the faculty (full time or visiting) of the city planning departments of Harvard, Yale, Cornell, Columbia, University of North Carolina, University of California at Berkeley, American University, and George Washington University. He is founder and former chair of the Planners Network, a national organization of progressive urban and rural planners and community organizers. The most recent of his twenty books include "The Integration Debate: Competing Futures for American Cities" (with Gregory D. Squires, 2010), "Mandate for Change: Policies and Leadership for 2009 and Beyond" (2009), "There Is No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster: Race, Class & Hurricane Katrina" (coedited with Gregory Squires; 2006), and "Poverty & Race in America: The Emerging Agendas" (2006).
Stephen Lerner has been a union and community organizer for thirty years. He is the architect of SEIU's Justice for Janitors campaign. He currently works with community and labor coalitions on campaigns to challenge the economic and political dominance of big banks and Wall Street. He is a fellow at the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor at Georgetown University.
Mike Miller is executive director of ORGANIZE training center. He is also a fifty-plus year veteran community organizer working in the tradition of Saul Alinsky, for whom he was a project director. He has been organizing the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee for five years. He has initiated neighborhood, city- and state-wide organizing projects, and consulted widely with individual membership, coalition and institution-based community organizations and their sponsor committees, and with labor, women's rights, minority, senior, and other groups. He edited "Social Policy" for four years. He has also authored book chapters and numerous organizational working papers on community and labor organizing. His most recent book is "A Community Organizer's Tale: People and Power in San Francisco" (2009).
john a. powell is director of the Haas Diversity Research Center and Robert D. Haas Chancellor's Chair in Equity and Inclusion at the University of California at Berkeley. From 2003 to the end of 2011, he was executive director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State University and a Gregory H. Williams Chair in Civil Rights and Civil Liberties at Ohio State's Moritz College of Law. He has written extensively on a host of topics related to race, including structural racism, social justice, corporate power, implicit bias, regionalism, concentrated poverty and urban sprawl, opportunity based housing, integration, racial identity, the needs of citizens in a democratic society, and affirmative action in the United States, South Africa, and Brazil.
Max Rameau is a cofounder of the Take Back the Land Movement and played a lead role in developing the strategies and tactics currently employed by organizations across the country engaged in eviction defense and other types of Occupy campaigns. Rameau works with grassroots organizations to design and implement positive action campaigns, including land liberation and eviction defense. As director of Movement Catalyst, Rameau is attempting to answer the question "what happens if we win?"
Dory Rand is president of Woodstock Institute, a leading nonprofit research and policy organization in the areas of fair lending, wealth creation, and financial systems reform. She has worked for thirty years in the Chicago legal and nonprofit community, including work with the Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law, Legal Assistance Foundation of Chicago (LAF), and the ACLU of Illinois. Rand was the founder and coordinator of a statewide
financial education and asset-building coalition and a founding member of the Illinois Asset Building Group. She has authored numerous papers, administered asset-building demonstration programs, testified at Congressional hearings, and presented at many national and local conferences.
John P. Relman is the director of Relman, Dane & Colfax PLLC, a public interest law firm specializing in civil rights litigation. From 1989 to 1999, Relman headed the Fair Housing Project at the Washington Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights. Relman's better-known cases include "Timus v. William J. Davis, Inc. " ($2.4 million jury verdict for housing discrimination); "Dyson v. Denny's Restaurants "($17.725 million race discrimination class settlement); "Pugh v. Avis Rent-A-Car "($5.4 million class settlement); "Gilliam v. Adam's Mark Hotels "($2.1 million class settlement); and "Kennedy v. City of Zanesville "($10.8 million race discrimination jury verdict). Relman is the author of "Housing Discrimination Practice Manual" (1992) and teaches public interest law at Georgetown University Law Center.
Lisa Rice is the vice president of the National Fair Housing Alliance (NFHA), where she oversees the communications, resource development, public policy, and enforcement initiatives of the agency. Under Rice's leadership, NFHA played a major role in helping to establish the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which was established under the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. Rice provides consulting on a wide range of fair housing and diversity issues to fair housing organizations, insurance companies, lending institutions, and government agencies.
Robert G. Schwemm is Ashland-Spears Professor at the University of Kentucky College of Law. He began his legal career with Sidley & Austin in Washington, DC, and then was chief trial counsel for the Leadership Council for Metropolitan Open Communities in Chicago. Schwemm has written and lectured extensively on fair housing law. In 1990, he published "Housing Discrimination: Law and Litigation," a major treatise in the field. Schwemm has been plaintiffs' counsel in several landmark housing discrimination cases, including three in the US Supreme Court: "Meyer v. Holley "(2003); "Gladstone Realtors v. Village of Bellwood "(1979); and "Village of Arlington Heights v. Metropolitan Housing Development Corp." (1977).
M William Sermons is research director of the Center for Responsible Lending (CRL), where he is responsible for advancing a policy research agenda into abusive lending practices. In addition to his work at CRL, he teaches cost-benefit analysis to public policy students in Carnegie Mellon University's DC MPP program. Sermons is the former director of the Homelessness Research Institute, where he directed both the research and communications functions of the National Alliance to End Homelessness.
Shanna L. Smith is president and CEO of the National Fair Housing Alliance (NFHA) and has been engaged in fair housing and fair lending enforcement, education, and research for thirty-six years. Smith has testified frequently before the US Senate and House on discrimination in the use of credit, mortgage lending, private mortgage insurance, and homeowners insurance, as well as on the work of the US Department of Housing and Urban Development's Office of Fair Housing and the fair housing program of the US Department of Justice.
Gregory D. Squires is a professor of sociology, public policy, and public administration at George Washington University. He serves on the advisory board of the John Marshall Law School's Fair Housing Legal Support Center in Chicago, the District of Columbia Advisory Committee to the US Commission on Civil Rights, and the Social Science Advisory Board of the Poverty & Race Research Action Council in Washington, DC. He is a also consultant for civil rights organizations around the country and a member of the Federal Reserve Board's Consumer Advisory Council. He has written or edited thirteen books and numerous articles for publications such as "Housing Policy Debate," "Urban Studies," "Social Science Quarterly," and more. He edited "Warfare Welfare: The Not-So-Hidden Costs of America's Permanent War Economy" (with Marcus Raskin; 2012), "The Integration Debate: Competing Futures for American Cities" (with Chester Hartman; 2010), "Urban Sprawl: Causes, Consequences, and Policy Responses" (2002), and "Privileged Places: Race, Residence, and the Structure of Opportunity" (with Charis E. Kubrin; 2006).