Press Releases

Today's Department of Justice fair lending settlement with Wells Fargo Bank is welcome news, and highlights the benefits of new mortgage rules to combat predatory lending. The DOJ settlement of $175 million settles charges that Wells Fargo steered about 4,000 African-American and Hispanic families into higher-cost subprime mortgages while white borrowers with similar qualifications received safer, cheaper prime loans. DOJ...

Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law the California Foreclosure Reduction Act today inLos Angeles. The bills, AB 278 and SB 900, are designed to reduce unnecessary foreclosures in the state and were critical pieces of Attorney General Kamala Harris' Homeowner Bill of Rights. "These common-sense protections have had an uphill battle to the governor's desk," said Paul Leonard, California Director...

Both houses of the California Legislature today approved the Foreclosure Reduction Act, a bill designed to reduce unnecessary foreclosures in the state. The bill is the centerpiece legislation of Attorney General Kamala Harris' Homeowner Bill of Rights. "This is monumental," said CRL California Director Paul Leonard. "For the past three years, the legislature has said 'no' to making the foreclosure...

Legislation Will Level the Playing Field for Borrowers Across California, and Ensure That All Borrowers Get Full and Fair Consideration for Loan Modifications Six weeks of negotiations between banks, the bipartisan legislative conference committee, the Attorney General and consumer groups have produced a Homeowner Bill of Rights that deserves to pass both floors of the Legislature and be signed by...

A housing bill introduced in the Senate could more than double the number of homeowners who refinance under a federal mortgage program and also more than double their potential savings, according to an estimate by researchers at Columbia University. To be eligible, homeowners must have a mortgage backed by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac and be current on the payments...

More than 80 percent of California homeowners who received modifications in 2010 stayed current and avoided re-default despite the continued recession, according to a new Center for Responsible Lending analysis. These new data indicate that the Homeowner Bill of Rights is critical for large numbers of borrowers, their communities and the overall California housing market. The legislation, which has undergone...

The remedies are deeply inadequate in fundamental ways. The money will too often be too little too late, particularly for borrowers who were wrongfully denied loan modifications. The federal bank regulators continue to withhold too many details from the public, when transparency would be to everyone's benefit. Further, the Sept. 31 st deadline to apply for compensation for borrowers who...

Californians need Attorney General Harris' Homeowner Bill of Rights to fix mortgage lending abuses and speed economic recovery. But lobbyists fighting it in Sacramento have now enlisted mortgage bankers from around the country to help them defeat it. (Read the e-mail sent by the Mortgage Action Alliance, the Mortgage Bankers Association's national e-advocacy division.) The MBA urged members nationwide to...

California's dire budget situation claimed a new casualty in the governor's May Revise yesterday: $410 million in bank penalty funds from the National Mortgage Settlement intended to assist California homeowners.The governor instead proposed to use the funds to reduce the state's deficit rather than to help borrowers access settlement programs. Attorney General Kamala Harris worked for well over a year...

Credit card losses in the current downturn mounted faster at banks using unfair, deceptive card practices, new CRL research finds. That's because high-cost penalty fees and interest rates were not used to mitigate risk—as credit card issuers claimed—but instead were the risk that led to higher default rates. Read the report, " Predatory Credit Card Lending: Unsafe, Unsound for Consumers...