Data drives the movement: embedded experts in home lending advocacy

Abstract

Technical rhetoric has become a central feature of political debates in recent decades. As such advocacy organizations have needed to develop facility with quantitative data to signal their competence to participate in political discussions. Since they often lack the resources to engage in research directly, they must use existing research and interact with already-established research communities. Less examined have been cases where advocacy groups themselves have brought technical discourse into political discussions. This article studies how advocates in one field combined local and technical knowledge to press their claims. I contrast debates in the 1970s aimed at confronting ‘redlining’ in the home lending market to more recent and less successful efforts to limit ‘predatory’ home lending. I argue that advocates in this policy community became embedded experts: embedded because they linked local knowledge to quantitative data, and because their use of data remained embedded within and constrained by the dominant political rhetoric of that community.

Keywords:

• expertise
• quantification
• redlining
• predatory lending

Notes

1. The Federal Home Loan Bank system was created by the US Congress to provide low-cost funding on demand to assist private financial institutions engage in lending. There are 12 of these regionally based government-sponsored enterprises, owned and operated by their member institutions.

2. HUD also contracted with the US Conference of Mayors, the National Community Development Association (a nonprofit representing municipalities administering HUD funding) and the Center for Community Change (an organization mobilizing on behalf of lower income and minority communities) to write three guidebooks on assessing community credit needs and the use of the Community Reinvestment Act (United States 1980, p. 459).

3. For example, in 1999 Citibank bought The Associates, in 2000 HSBC bought Household International and in 2004 Bank of America bought Fleet.

4. HUD first produced the list in 1993. ‘Subprime’ lenders self-reported that more than 50% of their loans were subprime. This made the list a rough proxy: as one could not identify subprime loans made by prime lenders or prime loans made by subprime lenders.

5. Credit scores became increasingly central to loan decisions by the 2000s (Poon 2007) and lenders argued were necessary to factor into analyses of possible discrimination (Paletta 2004, Lively 2005). Groups calling for credit score release in the 2000 House Testimony were Gail Cincotta of National People's Action (United States 2000, p. 62), NCRC (p. 449) and the Coalition for Responsible Lending (p. 657), a North Carolina (and later national) group instrumental in crafting and advocating for that state's first-in-the nation 1999 antipredatory lending law.