Moving Forward: The Home Mortgage Disclosure Act at Thirty-Five: Past History, Current Issues

Allen Fishbein, Ren Essene

MF10-7: This year marks the thirty-fifth anniversary of the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA), a law designed to discourage redlining in mortgage lending and to encourage reinvestment in the nation’s cities by providing greater transparency, and thus greater public scrutiny of lending activities. Enacted by Congress in 1975, HMDA requires most mortgage lenders to collect information about their home lending activities. Through public disclosure of mortgage data, HMDA implicitly sanctioned a strong role for citizen monitors whose "regulation from below" induced increased enforcement efforts by the traditional regulatory agencies. A subject of controversy for much of its history, HMDA has now become an accepted part of the mortgage industry and regulatory landscape. Today there is general agreement that HMDA has helped to bring greater fairness and efficiency to the residential home loan market...