A Bill to Foil Racist ‘Steering’ in Home Mortgage Lending

When the bottom fell out of the mortgage market in the run-up to the Great Recession, Las Vegas homeowners found themselves at the epicenter of a catastrophe. Nearly one in four who bought new homes at the housing market’s peak in 2007 fell into foreclosure. For buyers of existing homes, whose values plunged even more dramatically, default claimed closer to half. Nevada led the nation in foreclosures for 62 straight months during the Great Recession.

Catherine Cortez Masto was the state’s attorney general at that time, and she remembers how discriminatory lending—predatory loans, shaky financial products—struck communities of color in particular. She and other attorneys general fought for consumer protections that were introduced in 2010 as part of the Dodd-Frank financial reform package, which was designed to prevent another such crisis. Elected to the Senate in 2016, Cortez Masto also witnessed firsthand as Republicans in Congress stripped some of those protections away last year.